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Why We Built Landit

blog_01Like most good ideas, Landit was born out of frustration. 

I've spent years helping businesses make sense of their data—and often dealing with the same recurring problems. Most business teams rely on a mix of cloud-based software to manage operations: inventory, sales, accounting, CRM, and more. 

Every business has their own reporting needs. Even when the data is available, it’s siloed within each app. Stitching it together into something usable often feels like a full-time job. 

It should not be so hard for a smart person to get the right answer from their own systems. 

That conviction became the inspiration to build Landit. Rather than another dashboard tool - there are enough of those already - the goal was to deliver a whole-of-business reporting capability: 

  • A single, semantic data model that unifies different systems (CIN7, Shopify, etc.) into a format that makes sense to end-users, not just developers. 
  • An interface that works inside Excel—because that’s still where most real work gets done. 
  • A way to ask real questions, even complex ones, without needing to understand SQL, table joins, or data warehouse schemas. 

Achieving this required more than just an add-in or a connector. Landit is a framework that handles identity, access control, data extraction, schema mapping, and query generation—and delivers results exactly where the user needs them. 

Guiding Principles 

Based on experience, I knew a few key principles would make the difference between a helpful idea and a truly indispensable solution. They’ve shaped every decision since: 

  • Data is most powerful when it’s structured. Landit transforms raw API data into a clean, star-schema model. 
  • Users should never need to know SQL. But if you do know SQL, everything we generate is transparent and debuggable. 
  • Security and identity should be baked in, not bolted on. MSAL, tenant-aware schemas, and scoped access are first-class citizens. 
  • APIs should reflect the model, not the database. Endpoints are driven by metadata, not by hand-written SQL. 
  • Excel is the interface. No one should have to leave the tool they already know and trust to explore and act on their data. 

Where We’re Going 

Landit’s initial integration focused on CIN7, giving small but complex businesses a way to pull data from multiple systems into a shared model, write flexible queries through a UI, and build meaningful reports in Excel—capabilities that previously required a full BI team. 

New integrations are on the way, including Shopify and additional platforms. 

Landit also continues to evolve, with upcoming features including: 

  • Enhanced AI-powered query assistance to make asking questions even easier 
  • Support for planning and write-back, not just reporting 
  • The ability for users to deploy their own models, not just use ours 

Landit is becoming the connective tissue between systems, people, and decisions. 

I didn’t build Landit to show off tech. I built it because too many teams spend their days exporting CSVs, waiting on developers, and trying to reconcile reports from incompatible tools. I knew we could do better.