Costs of Running Data Reporting
Building and maintaining data reporting from business applications like NetSuite and ServiceTitan requires people, tools, and cloud infrastructure. The annual cost to keep reporting running can easily exceed $50,000 when you factor in all three components.
What Does a Typical Reporting Requirement Look Like?
Consider a field services business that needs to identify revenue generated per branch. Financial data lives in NetSuite and operations data lives in ServiceTitan. To build this report, you need to:
- Fetch revenue data (Invoices) from NetSuite and identify the relevant APIs
- Fetch operations data (Jobs) per branch from ServiceTitan
- Find the common link between NetSuite Invoices and ServiceTitan Jobs to connect revenue to branch operations
- Define "revenue" clearly — which invoices to include, which branches to exclude
- Decide reporting frequency — daily, weekly, or multiple times a day
- Design the report layout and define access controls (executives see all branches, managers see only their own)
Which Teams Are Involved?
| Role | Responsibility |
|---|---|
| Business User | Drives reporting requirements and defines KPIs |
| Product Manager | Bridges technology and business needs |
| Data Engineers | Fetches data from NetSuite and ServiceTitan, joins datasets |
| BI Developer | Builds reports and manages access for the correct audience |
You may also need to involve NetSuite and ServiceTitan subject-matter experts to map the correct APIs and data entities.
What Tools Do Data Engineers Need?
- ETL/ELT tools for data ingestion: Airbyte, Fivetran, DataStori, ADF, AWS Glue
- Transformation tools to join and model data: dbt, Spark, ADF Dataflows
- Orchestration tools to schedule and coordinate pipelines: Airflow, Prefect, Dagster
What Is the Total Annual Cost?
The total cost includes people, technology licenses, and cloud infrastructure. For even a straightforward reporting requirement like revenue per branch, the annual cost to build and maintain reporting can easily exceed $50,000. This includes partial allocations of data engineer and BI developer time, ETL tool subscriptions, cloud compute and storage, and BI platform licenses.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can DataStori reduce the cost of data reporting?
Yes. DataStori automates data ingestion at a flat $250/month per application with unlimited pipelines and data volume. By removing the need for custom ETL development and reducing data engineering time, it significantly lowers the people and tooling costs of reporting.
Why does data reporting cost so much?
The cost comes from three areas: people (data engineers, BI developers, product managers), technology (ETL tools, transformation platforms, BI licenses), and cloud infrastructure (compute, storage, networking). Even a single reporting use case touches all three.
How long does it take to set up a reporting pipeline?
A typical reporting pipeline from two applications (e.g., NetSuite + ServiceTitan) can take 4-8 weeks to set up with custom engineering. With DataStori, the data ingestion portion can be completed in under 30 minutes per application, accelerating the overall timeline.