I think you're making too many assumptions about the user. If it's an "in house" type of "admin tool", it could be some kind of reporting tool so that a manager doesn't have to know how to make MySQL queries. For example, maybe they only need the information on demand about every other month, so it would be wasteful to have a cron job doing an hour of processing every day. You might think just run a command, but some people don't have any idea what that really means, and developers get tired of being command-line (and MySQL :) monkeys.