The ultimate guide to no-code for architecture firms

There’s no one-size-fits-all architecture project. 

Building a healthcare facility has a different scope from a historic restoration project. Landscaping and public spaces projects look nothing like transit and infrastructure design.

Yet the tools architecture firms use to run many parts of the business operate on a one-size-fits-all model. These off-the-shelf tools are slow, expensive, clunky, and poorly matched to how the business really works. Firms often stick with them anyway because they feel safe and reliable. 

Then there are spreadsheets. Architecture firms use them to run large parts of the business, tracking fees, logging hours, planning staffing, monitoring cash flow, and pulling together internal reports. 

They turn into sprawling files with too many tabs and broken formulas. Different people edit different versions, none of which are easy to use on a mobile device. The file technically “works,” but no one is fully sure which one is “the real” source of truth, and they keep updating their own copy anyway.

Custom software gives you a better option. Using a no-code platform like Glide allows you to build apps that are customized to fit your workflows, without needing engineering resources or long development timelines.

Your team can replace broken spreadsheets and rigid off-the-shelf tools with connected apps that share data and work at both a project site and in the office.

How to know your architecture firm needs custom software 

When your architecture firm has access to plenty of software, do you really need to build your own? Here are some signs it’s time for custom apps.

• Your current tools don’t talk to each other: Design files live in one tool, project timelines in another, and financials in a third. When the client asks for a project status update, someone spends hours pulling information from different sources to build a report and copy it into an email. This manual data transfer leaves room for errors and eats up hours every week.
• Off-the-shelf software requires too many workarounds: Shadow systems, notes scribbled on paper, personal task lists, endless email threads, and photos lost in camera rolls are a sign that something isn’t working. Either the tool isn’t up to the task, or it’s too complicated to figure out. Over time, these workarounds become just “how we do things here.” But they represent expensive inefficiencies that compound across every project your firm takes on.
• Your firm has outgrown spreadsheets and manual processes: Tracking three projects in a spreadsheet could work. Tracking 30 projects across multiple teams with different phases, budgets, deliverables, and deadlines gets complicated fast. If your firm has added staff, taken on larger projects, or expanded into new service areas, the tools that worked at a smaller scale may now be holding you back.
• Clients expect a better digital experience: Clients today want to log in to a portal, see real-time progress, review documents, and communicate with your team without waiting days for a response to their email. If you’re still sharing project updates through PDF attachments and phone calls, you may be falling behind what clients now consider standard.
• Your team finds it hard to capture work at the project site: Relying on memory or scribbled notes to log project status and create reports increases the risk of missed details and rework. Your team needs tools that make it easy to capture, document, and organize the important information while they’re on-site.

Here are some custom apps that can help architecture firms efficiently manage complex, years-long projects and give clients a high-quality experience.

1. AI Contract Management app

An AI Contract Manager gives authorized team members instant answers about contracts without digging through PDFs or interrupting each other with questions.

Architecture contracts contain details that teams constantly reference: milestone dates, payment schedules tied to deliverables, and scope boundaries. An AI Contract Manager stores all your firm’s contracts in one system where your team can search specific terms, dates, or clauses and get answers immediately.

Your team can add contracts to the system as PDFs or by forwarding them by email. The AI extracts key details such as dates, deliverables, payment triggers, and scope terms, then summarizes them directly inside the app as structured fields your team can reference. 

If someone needs to confirm whether a change qualifies as a scope adjustment or check which milestone triggers the next payment, they can ask the built-in chat interface and get an answer based on the contract in seconds.

2. Project database app

People don’t always know which projects exist outside their immediate team, and project status lives in different systems depending on who last updated it. Finding accurate information about a project means interrupting colleagues or digging through email threads and files.

A project database app acts as a master record for every project, active or completed, with up-to-date status, team members, and key details in one place. Each project record includes data such as:

• Job Number: A stable identifier used across drawings, invoices, contracts, and other internal apps
• Project type: Whether it’s commercial, residential, city planning, city park design, adaptive re-use, cultural buildings, healthcare, etc.
• Project location: Complete address, coordinates, or lot numbers
• Overall status: In progress, on hold, suspended, completed
• Current stage for active projects: Is it currently in schematic design, design development, construction documents, bidding and negotiation, or construction administration?
• Internal team members: Who at the firm is involved in the project, and in what capacity
• External contacts: Clients, engineers, and other external consultants involved in the project

You can add contact information for stakeholders so your team can call or email the right people directly from the app.

Each project record also includes dashboards for information like its resource allocation and fee tracking relative to actual labor costs. Leadership can see where the project and the firm stand without having to piece together reports or reconcile numbers across systems.

Just like with the contract manager app, you can add an AI chat feature, so your team can ask general questions (“Which projects is Sarah working on?”) or specific details (“What stage is the downtown office building in?”) and get instant answers from the database.

This gives your firm instant clarity on active and past projects, fewer interruptions from questions, and better cross-team awareness even as staff leave.

3. Project management app

A custom project management app gives you one place to manage every stage of a project and automatically syncs updates across your other tools.

The project lead assigns tasks to specific team members and moves them through different stages until they’re marked complete. When project milestones, such as finalizing schematic designs or obtaining client approval for design development drawings, are complete, the project advances to the next phase.

Tasks, timelines, deliverables, and communication all live here instead of being scattered across email, spreadsheets, and disconnected tools. Users can attach documents, upload photos, and leave comments directly on a task. 

When someone adds a document or a project moves to the next phase, these updates flow to the relevant connected tools, such as your master database, document management app, or accounting app. Your team enters information once, and it appears in every system that needs it, without duplicate work or version-control issues.

You can build workflows to generate AI-driven updates that keep clients updated on progress. The AI pulls data from the project record and drafts a status summary report. The project lead reviews it, makes edits if needed, and hits send. 

Commercial construction company Build 360 incorporated this workflow into its Glide app. They reduced their client update process from over 30 minutes to 2–3 minutes, saving their team hours every week. They even added an API integration that pulls the next day’s weather forecast and includes how the weather will impact work on site, giving clients more complete information without extra manual work for the team.

4. Customer portal app

A customer portal gives clients a single place to check on their projects without needing to email, call, or wait for updates. Instead of relying on someone inside your firm to pull reports, clients can log in and see vetted project updates for themselves.

Architecture firms can manage hundreds of projects at a time that span years. Some clients have multiple projects going at once. Keeping everyone informed across all that work takes time. Someone at the firm has to check the status, see what’s pending, document deliverable progress, and manually put a report together. When that doesn’t happen quickly, clients follow up. 

The back-and-forth slows teams down and creates a poor client experience. That’s a problem when, according to Monograph, client satisfaction is one of the main ways nearly 57% of architecture firms measure success.

Building a dedicated customer portal solves this by giving clients a way to log in and see the status of their projects anytime. Because it connects to your main database, clients see exactly where each project stands once the project manager releases the latest data. 

Each project gets its own record that shows information like its current phase, upcoming deadlines, payment status, and recent activity. The portal displays this data through structured layouts, milestone schedules, and media like photos from the project site. 

This level of transparency and accessibility sets your firm apart and delivers the professional experience clients expect.

5. Customer relationship management (CRM) app

A custom CRM app gives your firm one shared system to manage every lead, client, and external partner. This helps your team retain client preferences and contact information, so principals and project managers don’t depend on individual knowledge or scattered notes and spreadsheets.

Business development often sits with a few key people and doesn’t get tracked centrally. No one outside those people knows what interviews took place, what pre-bid meetings happened, or what the next steps are with prospects. That setup makes it hard to deliver a consistent customer experience. Large firms especially struggle with this because different teams interact with the same clients in different ways.

A CRM is table stakes today. The American Institute of Architects reports that two out of every three firms using CRM or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are highly capable of providing a strong customer experience, even when clients work with different teams inside the firm. A custom CRM app takes this further.

Where off-the-shelf CRMs are rigid and cause frustration, a custom CRM is flexible and built to suit how your firm works. Instead of relying on memory or scattered personal notes, your team can use voice-to-text features to add notes to a contact’s record right after site meetings or client presentations. Email integrations let them send messages directly from the app without hunting through inboxes for old threads or contact details.

You can configure the CRM to add external partners like landscape consultants and engineers, and track every interaction with them the same way you track client communication. When your team understands the full context of every conversation and project with these partners, they build stronger, longer-lasting relationships. Those stronger partnerships lead to better project collaboration, which improves the experience you deliver to clients.

6. Expense tracker app

An expense tracker app gives your firm a faster, cleaner way to handle project expenses without chasing receipts or fixing errors at month-end.

When expenses are handled manually, team members often end up submitting stacks of paper receipts with project names scrawled by hand or forwarding screenshots over email. The finance team has to decipher their handwriting and sort out confusion over projects with similar names, then manually enter this data into the project accounting software.

With a custom expense-tracking app, team members snap a photo of their credit card receipt on their phones. The app uses AI to automatically pull out the vendor name, receipt amount, and date. That information is ready to use right away without manual data entry.

Because the app connects to your accounting system, it already knows which projects the user is working on at the time. When an expense comes in, users simply tag it with the correct Job Number and category, indicating whether it is a reimbursable expense to be billed back to the client. Your team gets a real-time view of expenses to help keep project costs accurate as work happens, not weeks later.

“One of my beta testers told me that this app saves him probably two to three hours a month over Expensify. When you multiply that by the approximately 50 credit cards in our company, that’s a hundred and fifty hours a month. Looking at employees’ billable rate, financially, those savings add up very quickly.”

Ron Heims

Director of Practice Innovation, RDG Planning & Design

RDG Planning & Design took this further and connected their app to a reconciliation system that makes it easier to match receipts with credit card statements each month. 

Company credit card statements are imported directly into the connected app. The system checks each charge against submitted receipts and automatically marks verified matches. When something doesn't match, like a receipt without a corresponding charge, or a charge without a receipt, the system flags the discrepancy. It automatically emails the person who made the purchase so they can submit missing details.

Your team spends less time on manual expense entry and reconciliation, and your project accounting stays current without chasing people down for receipts at month-end.

7. Client programming app

A client programming app gives your firm a structured way to collect project requirements, ensuring data is complete, consistent, and usable from day one.

Today, gathering this initial programming data usually happens in spreadsheets. This often looks like dozens or even up to a hundred spreadsheets per project. Someone on your team has to manually merge the data into one master project brief, and there’s a risk of rows or columns getting deleted or formulas breaking. Your team can’t fully begin space planning and site analysis until they’ve spent days doing this manual work.

A custom programming app eliminates this by providing clients with a structured form rather than relying on editable spreadsheets. Once a project is initiated, the system generates a new brief record in the app and the client receives a form you’ve pre-designed for their project type: a residential project might ask for number of floors, bedrooms, bathroom count, and square footage per unit, while a retail project would ask for selling floor area, loading dock requirements, and parking space calculations.

The app’s interface is easier for everyone to use. Clients don’t have to wrestle with messy spreadsheets, and your team reviews clean, clearly structured submissions instead of hunting through cells and tabs.

Every project collects data in the same standardized format. Required fields stop clients from submitting incomplete information. Your project lead reviews what comes in, flags anything missing or unclear, and the client can edit and correct their submission. Once the lead marks the program as approved, the data is complete and ready for use. 

The data is automatically shared with your firm’s connected apps through the Job Number. The project database app, for example, shows whether programming is complete and summarizes key information. Design and analysis tools read directly from the app’s data to generate reports without anyone needing to re-enter the data or manually prep the files for analysis.

8. Site assessment app

A site assessment app gives your team a mobile-first tool to capture notes, photos, and observations on location so conditions are documented accurately without reconstructing site visits from memory later.

Site assessments today are an incredibly manual process. Your team is jotting down observations in a notebook or typing them into their phone’s notes app. Photos end up crowding the camera roll. All of this gets pieced together later back in the office, which means doing the work twice and relying on memory to fill in gaps or figure out which photo corresponds to which site.

A mobile site assessment app replaces scattered notes with a tool built for the field. Because it’s designed to work on a phone or tablet, your team has full functionality while standing at the site. They open the app at the project site, take photos directly inside the app, and use voice-to-text to dictate observations that get transcribed automatically. Every note and photo stays attached to that specific site’s record, so there’s no confusion about what belongs where.

This makes any assessment more efficient, and the value multiplies when someone is visiting multiple sites in one day. Instead of returning to the office with dozens of photos and fragments of notes that need to be matched to the right location, everything is already organized. Your team knows exactly which site each piece of information belongs to because it was recorded there.

RDG Planning & Design built a custom site-assessment app for a city parks master-planning project. The app imports public park data from ArcGIS, so baseline information is already loaded. Team members add custom notes during their visit, such as noting that a park has a baseball field or rating the condition of existing infrastructure. Once the assessment is complete, the project manager can generate a draft report automatically based on the data in the profile. They review the draft, make edits if needed, and approve it for delivery.

“When you factor in the AI we can use in our apps now, we have a whole new world where we can create and write reports using information that was a lot harder to get to without using the tools that are in Glide.”

Ron Heims

Director of Practice Innovation, RDG Planning & Design

9. Document management app

A document management app gives your firm a single system of record for project documents. It tracks every version and Purpose of Issue (such as Issued for Permit or Issued for Construction), so your team always knows what documents have been issued, when they were added, and which versions are current.

Right now, project documents get emailed around, saved in personal folders on hard drives, or left on someone’s phone. Delays and mistakes happen when the wrong version gets shared. A custom app replaces that chaos with a structured repository for drawings, specifications, and transmittals.

Documents enter the app in three different ways: 

• Internal links: Documents are linked from your design platforms or attached to specific tasks and milestones in the project management app.
• Email: Smaller PDFs, meeting notes, and approvals are forwarded to the app with the Job Number in the subject line.
• CDE integration: Metadata and links to large BIM models and drawing sets are synced from your Common Data Environment (CDE), like BIM 360 or Procore, via API connections.

The app logs who added each file and when, preserving a complete history over time. AI extracts key Title Block data, such as the drawing number, revision dates, and project details, and summarizes the contents of text-heavy documents like specifications or site reports. You can also add an AI chat feature that allows users to ask specific questions about the document history or contents.

The document management app connects directly to your project database app, which pulls the current version and AI-generated summaries. Users viewing a project record in the database see the latest document information without switching tools.

10. Quality control app

A quality control app replaces paper checklists with a standardized inspection framework your team uses on their phones, making reviews consistent across all projects and sites.

Quality checks often fall apart because they rely on personal checklists or loosely documented site visits. Getting that information into a usable format later means retyping notes and matching photos to the right projects and issues. Different people use different criteria, which means quality standards vary depending on who’s conducting the review. 

A custom quality control app moves the entire inspection process onto your team’s phone or tablet and gives everyone the same assessment framework. Your team captures what they need to assess by taking photos and recording voice notes directly in the app. Everything stays attached to that Site Observation record and Job Number.

AI helps organize and tag the photos and notes according to your firm’s quality standards, drafting an inspection report in seconds. Each completed draft shows:

• What was reviewed
• Who reviewed it
• The specific milestone (such as Substantial Completion)
• What issues were found
• What actions are required

A project architect or construction administrator reviews the draft and officially issues the final report. Quality control becomes standardized, traceable, and easier to act on across every site.

11. Sustainability compliance tracker app

A sustainability compliance tracker gives your team a clear, project-level view of what’s required to meet certification goals and where each project stands.

On projects pursuing certifications like WELL or LEED, sustainability work often lives across reports, spreadsheets, shared folders, and email threads. Different team members and external specialist consultants might be responsible for different requirements, but there’s no clear view of who owns what or which items still need attention. That makes it difficult to stay submission-ready without constant manual checking.

A custom compliance tracker brings this workflow and data into one place. Based on the target certification, the app loads the predefined requirements and checklist. Each requirement is shown in a structured view that makes progress easy to understand. 

The app automatically pulls in the project’s latest reports, data, and supporting documents. Items can be marked as pending, in process, or complete, and ownership is clearly assigned to a team member or consultant who can update its status as work progresses. 

Your firm gets a clear record of how the project is progressing against its sustainability goals, making it easy to prepare for a preliminary or final review by the certifying body.

12. Project profitability tracking app

A project profitability-tracking app automates reconciling actual labor and expenses against project fees, so teams can see whether a design remains financially on track as it progresses.

Architecture projects often run for months or years, with costs accumulating steadily across multiple design phases. Each project team typically maintains its own records to track staff timesheets, consultant fees, and reimbursable expenses. Someone usually has to pull all this financial data every month from different sources, then consolidate it by project to see exactly how much of the fee has been used. 

Then they compare actual staff hours to the original project fee allocation, assess the progress of design deliverables, and reconcile the resources spent against the fee earned for that phase. This manual process takes hours and creates mistakes that make it easy to miss where the firm is losing money.

A custom project profitability app automates the process by pulling financial data, like consultant invoices, staff timesheets, and expense receipts, which have already been captured in your other connected apps. Each project record stays current, which removes the need for project managers to repeatedly rebuild complex spreadsheets from scratch. 

You can schedule an analysis to run every month on a specific date, setting formulas to calculate actual labor spend against the original fee allocated for each phase. AI reviews the full dataset together, highlighting where a project has used more staff time than expected for the amount of work finished. The results appear as visual charts instead of dense spreadsheets, making it easy to see whether projects are over or under their allocated fee at a glance. 

Your team can then investigate issues like scope creep, take corrective action with the client, or decide how to reallocate staff resources to maximize the firm's earnings.

13. Marketing and communications app

A marketing and communications app gives your marketing team a reliable way to gather project details without chasing busy architects or design teams.

Getting good project information for marketing can be a challenge. Architects and project teams are focused on delivery and don’t always have time to sit down for interviews or fill out long requests. The usual workaround is sending templated documents and hoping someone gets to them. Responses come back late, incomplete, or not at all, which slows down case studies and other marketing work.

A custom marketing and communications app replaces that back-and-forth with a simple request flow. RDG Planning & Design built such an app with Glide that pulls basic project details like Job Number and shows which team members worked on the project. 

When marketing needs information, they send the form with their questions to the right team members directly from the app. Recipients can type their responses or use voice-to-text to record answers instead of writing everything out. Once the information is collected, AI generates a draft project profile that marketing can review and refine.

You can extend this approach to capture the client’s perspective. Workplace design firm BW: Workplace Experts sends a short questionnaire to clients through a Glide app after each project. The responses capture the client’s perspective, gather quotes for testimonials, and create ready-to-use marketing material without adding extra work for the project team.

The app gives marketing a structured, repeatable way to gather complete project stories from both internal teams and clients.

Benefits of using Glide to build custom software for architecture firms

Architecture projects are complex. They can span years and involve architects, clients, finance teams, engineers, and other stakeholders who all need access to accurate, up-to-date information. Creating custom apps with Glide give you a centralized place to manage these complex projects and communication.

When you build software specific to your firm, you’re not forcing your workflows into a one-size-fits-all system that was built for someone else’s process. Glide apps replace generic systems, disconnected platforms, and spreadsheets with tools that match how your team works.

• Single source of truth: Custom apps pull data from one shared database, so an update made in one app instantly reflects across all your tools. Your team can see the most current project timelines, design revisions, and client feedback without hunting through emails or dozens of spreadsheets.
• Mobile accessibility: Apps built with Glide are automatically mobile adaptive and work on smartphones, tablets, and desktops with full functionality. Your team can access all apps anywhere work happens, whether that’s at a construction site, in a client meeting, or in the office.
• AI and automated workflows: You can integrate AI and automation into your custom apps to handle repetitive work that slows down your operations. Glide’s managed AI makes it easy to build intelligent automations that handle complex workflows. Your apps can generate and email meeting summaries, send deadline reminders, or surface schedule conflicts on their own, without needing someone to physically trigger these tasks. This keeps your projects moving while your team focuses on design, coordination, and client relationships.
• Role-based access: Custom apps let you control who sees and edits project data based on their role. You can set it up so principals review everything, consultants access projects they’re contracted for, and junior staff can add updates or view documents without accessing financial information or contracts. This protects sensitive client and financial data while giving each person the right level of access for their responsibilities.
• Integrations: Custom apps connect with the tools your team already uses, so data flows between systems without manual entry. When someone updates a project milestone in your Glide app, that information syncs to your accounting software, project database, and client portal automatically. Your team enters information once, and it appears everywhere it needs to be, eliminating duplicate work and reducing errors.
• Fast, iterative solutions: Building apps with a no-code platform like Glide means your team can build and update apps without needing developers or waiting months for changes. Someone with basic technical skills can launch an app, test it with your team, and refine it based on how people actually use it. This lets you adapt your tools as your firm grows without getting stuck in lengthy, expensive development cycles.

Learn how RDG Planning & Design builds more efficient processes for architecture and design projects

Read their story

Build custom software around how your architecture firm works

Custom software works best when it stays focused. Start by picking one area where manual work eats up time and causes bottlenecks, and build your first app to support that process.

Once you’ve narrowed it down, decide how to build these apps. Your IT or operations teams can use Glide’s drag-and-drop interface to create these apps without writing any code. If you’d like to have your first app ready in just days or weeks, you can work with a professional Glide Expert or no-code agency to scope, build, and launch the app. For complex projects, Glide Solutions provides direct support from Glide’s team for the full build.

Once your team is using the first app regularly, you can expand into other parts of your operations. Build apps for different business areas and connect them to the same data so your team is working from a single, accurate data source. What starts as a solution to one bottleneck grows into a set of connected tools that match your firm’s actual workflows instead of forcing you into generic software.