Calculation engine and output storage solution

Need help
1

Hi bubble community,

I’m creating an app that helps people build financial operating models via prompting users about historical results, growth expectations, cost structure, etc.

As an example, to project sales I’ll prompt a user for the following drivers:

  • Next month units sales
  • Expected future monthly sales growth (units or %)
  • Sales price per unit

I’ll run these drivers through an engine I’ll create and will ultimately want to store the next 12 (or however many) months engine results, create new data from the results (e.g. sales minus cost = gross margin), display the results in a table/graph, let users refine drivers, etc.

Based on the research I’ve done I think the best way to do this is via Blockspring. I have some PHP knowledge and can write the engine myself, although this is the type of thing spreadsheets were created for so I’d imagine that may be a better option.

I wanted to see if anyone has any suggestions on how to go about doing this?
If I use Blockspring Google Sheets - would I just pass my variables to sheets, let the engine run, and then load the results into a Bubble DB? Could that handle multiple users creating models at once?
If I do a custom block, how would I store an array of results in a Bubble DB?
Any alternatives to Blockspring anyone would recommend?

Thanks for the help!!
Geoff

2

Blockspring or Zapier would be the ones to look at.

Whilst I love the idea of “Google Sheet as Database” … I worry about the scalability. It works, but it can be a little flaky trying to read individual rows.

Could you look at something like Airtable ?

In terms of round tripping, you could get the data back into bubble using Zapier, which could trigger the bubble webhook to run a workflow that adds the data.

In fact you should be able to pull new bubble data via a GET in Zapier, process it (not sure I can help you with how to do this !!) and then have a trigger when new data is added there to push back to Zapier.

Lots of plumbing, and would be interested in how you solve it :slight_smile:

3

Thanks for the response, I’ll let you know where I get to!

4

Interested in this workflow @geoff.byron , did you end up implementing GSheets + Zapier? Trying to set something like this up now