I have only ever been a tech hobbyist, but I have leveraged my Python skills in a similar way. I run a home cleaning service with my wife, and I started using Airtable to track clients, jobs, expenditures, employee hours, etc. The data entry became tedious due to having to make entries in multiple tables for each job, so I wrote a Python script to use a simple command line read-eval-print loop to collect job information and make entries in the appropriate Airtable tables through the Airtable API.
I also use Python to produce paycheck stubs, do simple business data analysis, and email me leads from our website.
A small tangent: I have recently become frustrated with the limitations of a command line interface (primarily the inability to display charts and graphs), but there is a dearth of solid alternatives. Both web frameworks and GUI frameworks add far too much complexity for a solo amateur developer to quickly iterate to meet a small business' needs.
I would love to have a product that let me produce ugly but practical GUIs in Python without having to learn a big framework like PyQT or Django. EasyGUI comes close, but isn't quite good enough.
For now, I update an HTML file to display graphical output in Python and use a Firefox extension to auto-refresh the page on changes.
I've looked at it, but I would be writing hundreds of lines of code just for the interface, which would really slow me down. I really want to be able to focus on business logic and slap together a minimal interface in an hour or so. And unfortunately, I'm not able to code every day, so the more interface cruft I have to wade through, the longer it will take me to dig back into it in the future when I need to make changes. EasyGUI is built on top of TkInter but takes care of all the details to give you a handful of super-easy-to-use basic widgets. It would be perfect if it was just a little more finished.
I have the exact same problem, I've tried many things over the last 10 years and the solution you're using is (imo) by far the easiest, most flexible and robust. It feels hacky but it just works. If you want some interactivity (different graphs in tabs for example) you can just add some jquery or bootstrap - basically a serverless SPA (real serverless, not the 'cloud hosted' thing they call 'serverless' nowadays). I have 'apps' for recipe management, investing, and food forest design that work this way (the food forest one even incorporates Sketchup 3d models and generates a clickmap that lets you click on 2d renders of 3d models to let you interactively select areas using the canvas api - so yes you can make it as complicated as you want, but the easy things remain easy).
I had a similar use case as you for making apps to run on a Rasberry Pi for my staff to use in my business (Chocolab.com.au) I discovered appjar.info which has been so simple to use for quick ugly interfaces. It is built on top of tkinter
I also use Python to produce paycheck stubs, do simple business data analysis, and email me leads from our website.
A small tangent: I have recently become frustrated with the limitations of a command line interface (primarily the inability to display charts and graphs), but there is a dearth of solid alternatives. Both web frameworks and GUI frameworks add far too much complexity for a solo amateur developer to quickly iterate to meet a small business' needs.
I would love to have a product that let me produce ugly but practical GUIs in Python without having to learn a big framework like PyQT or Django. EasyGUI comes close, but isn't quite good enough.
For now, I update an HTML file to display graphical output in Python and use a Firefox extension to auto-refresh the page on changes.