25 No-Code Automation Tools (Every Accounting Firm Must Know)

Hey, this is Isaac from Opsodo.co, and in this video, we'll be breaking down the tools that power the automation under the hood of today's most modern accounting and tax firms. We'll be talking anything from simple forms to AI-generated apps and even tools that automate desktop software. See this as your blueprint to build a complete scalable automation tech stack, one that allows your team to work on the highest value work and your firm to grow revenue without added labor. With that, let's get into it. So we'll be discussing several categories of apps. But for each category, I want to talk about briefly what that category is, what are some of the apps that we might recommend to explore within them. Some of them might be easy to use, others might be for really hardcore technical teams, and some other apps might be somewhere in between. Starting with form builders. These are effectively tools that allow you to create online forms, think surveys, contact forms, registration forms, questionnaires. So that other people can fill it out online. And this can really replace— if you're still using like fillable PDFs or going back and forth via email or via some other form to collect information for people, this could be a great starting point for you to start to explore some of the no-code tools and automation tools in the space. Some of the most popular are in the space. You might have heard of Typeform, is one of the easiest to start with. I do feel like it kind of breaks when you start to want to put like multi-document uploads and a lot of calculations, a lot of conditional logic. It has a workflow builder to manage that functionality, but it can be hard to manage. And I also feel like after they were acquired, they stopped innovating as quickly. So from our perspective, there are better options. Paperform is one that we use a lot. It's probably a good sweet spot between Typeform and some other more advanced or complex form builders. It's been our tool of choice for many years, and we've built tech questionnaires, pricing tools, onboarding surveys, and much more with it. Another thing too, overall, form builder is such a generic all-purpose tool that's really an underrated way that you can use to capture information both internally, externally, and then send that information anywhere you want. On the more complex side, there's Jotform. There's a little bit of a learning curve. It's a much more powerful tool. It has many integrations with like follow-up systems and other apps. And they've even dabbled into the app development world where you can build apps with it. Although those features are still pretty young and immature. It has a bunch of templates that you can start from similar to what Paperform has. So that can give you, get you started to see what others have done. And get started with it. A notable mention on the form builders category, it's also Cook Needle Forms. It gives you question-level encryption if you're asking for sensitive information, which is very common in the accounting and tax space, whether that's Social Security numbers, bank information, EIN. They allow you for that question-level encryption. They also allow for password-protected forms. They can allow you to customize the data retention policy. So there's a couple of additional features that they have and some things they have in more affordable plans compared to other tools that we've seen some firms explore or consider that for Milder as well. The next category is automation platforms. These are the tools that connect other tools, fundamentally allow you to perform tasks, whether that's sending emails, updating spreadsheets, updating records, etc., without any manual input. In essence, it allows you to create an automated checklist so that when X happens on app A, What happens on App B? The most popular app in that particular space, it's Zapier. It's the easiest to get started with. It can become a little bit expensive if you're having high volumes of data running through it. I do think that it's still a leader in innovating quickly in the space and introducing, incorporating a lot of new AI and interesting features. And this is probably still today in 2025, the best starting point for most firms. There's also Make. This is the automation professional's preferred tool. For the most part, it has more actions and more triggers than Zapier has, even though it might have fewer apps that are supported by it. But now it has enough apps compared to the other tools that you probably— most of the tools in your stack will probably support it in some way, shape, or form. So these are typically the 2 tools we are recommending for the most part. Make does have features that allow it to handle a lot more data with fewer costs. So that can make it a little more affordable, especially if you start working with QuickBooks and Xero and reports and a lot of the processing that sometimes needs to happen to work sometimes with that kind of volume of data. On the more technical side, there's N8n or Pipedream. These are tools that are really built for developers and technical teams. One of their benefits and their value propositions is that they charge per run, not per task. So you do imagine if you have a checklist of 100 steps, those 100 steps would be charged for typically in Make or Zapier. But here you just one time that it runs, even if it has 100 steps within it. So it can make the cost almost laughable compared to Make or Zapier. But again, it has that, that learning curve upfront. You can even introduce code when you need to, which it's technically something you can do with like Zapier or Zapier functions, or even Make has some functions on the enterprise plan. But for these tools, code is more embedded into their products and much more mature as well. And as I mentioned earlier, one of the challenges we see with these tools, we've considered exploring them for the automation projects we do for firms, but sometimes they have less support from apps. For example, I was looking at Carbon within NAN, it was not available. I was looking at Xero in NAN and it was like just contacts and invoices versus the vast amount of actions you have in something like Make, for example. So it can be challenging. to work with because they might not have modules available for you to automate certain steps within an app, and you might have to custom make those, which adds further complexity to— and time and cost fundamentally to you running with those tools for your farm. Still worth keeping an eye on, but in 2025, those are not our first go-tos. We're sticking with Zapier and Make 90% of the time. The next category is databases, a way to store, organize, and get information in a structured and searchable way. This can be very useful for the operations of a firm where they want to keep information in one place. They want to make things easy to track and report on later on when you want to see key business metrics and KPIs for your operations. On the more simpler side, so people are going to kill me for this, but spreadsheets. Honestly, I feel like spreadsheets are a great starting point for you to start silly immature processes that you know, are still young and evolving. It's very easy to get started with. Everyone knows how to use a spreadsheet. You can use it for quick lists, for, you know, trackers, for dashboards, for KPI reports. But it can break down though when you start wanting to like manage complex relationships between clients and projects and entities. And there's just some limited structure that it has because it's so flexible. And it can also get very manual if you're not leveraging scripts and other automation tools. A good in-between a spreadsheet and database, it's Airtable. It's super intuitive, but it's much more structured than Sheets. So it's almost like a great, it's great for managing relational data because you have different tables. You can have clients, you can have projects, you can have tasks, and very easily link them together. So you know how many projects this client has or how many returns we've done for them. And you can start to like link the different objects or the different things you're tracking in a database, which you can't really do as easily in a spreadsheet environment. It also allows for easily creating views, filters, and dashboards for your internal operations with its Airtable interface product. And it has a couple of, even though lightweight to some degree, some automation and extension. So it can be a tool that you can use to build almost full-blown internal applications and solutions for your firm. It can get pricey at scale because you have a per-user seat. And I think on the higher end, that's $45, $20 on the low end, $45, even $65 on the enterprise plan per user. So depending on how many people you want to be there and then working with the apps and the data you have available, it can get a little pricey. On the more technical side, you have something like Supabase. I'm not going to dive super deep into it, but it uses SQL under the hood. It's effectively what most apps in the world run on, and it can be great for you to create custom apps, have a lot of control over the structure, the permissions, and it can work very well when you want to like have your backend, quote unquote, and your data separate from your frontend or what you're presenting, whether that is, as I mentioned, internal portals, dashboards, and apps, etc. But it's going to require some development help or engineering knowledge to set up. It's not as complicated. They have a lot of features that make the process a little bit more easy and intuitive, but it can really be overkill from some basic use cases, and you're probably better off exploring data solutions like the ones I mentioned above. The next category, it's internal tool builders. This is effectively a that allows you to custom build tools, dashboards, and portals. And it's very good when spreadsheets start to break and you need structured apps to run your operations, track work, and serve clients. This is like separating database from internal tools, although sometimes database tools have introduced tool builders and internal tool builders have introduced databases. So I'm separating them for the purpose of this video, but there's a little bit of overlap. The first one I want to talk about is Softr, and it's really the easiest way to turn Airtable or Google Sheets into an polished internal tool or even external portal. It was really born as an option to externalize Airtable data because the per-user seat made Airtable really not a good fit to have external users, right? If you have 10 team members, but you have 500 clients, paying per seat per client was going to not going to be feasible at all. So it's a great way for you to launch quickly. It's very no-code friendly and you can get the gist of it very quickly, but it has limited flexibility when it comes to managing maybe a little bit more complex logic or more custom design internet interfaces as well. Something that's a little bit more robust is something like Bubble. It's much more flexible. It has a steep learning curve. It's a very mature product, although pricing is like usage-based. So that can kind of scare people off, not really understanding exactly how much they'll be charged. So it takes a little bit of due diligence to better understand that, but it's very popular, not only for internal tools, but also external apps and even SaaS applications. I would put Noloco in the same category as Bubble. It's a little bit more user-friendly and similar to Softr, integrates with the more business business-friendly and beginner-friendly data sources like Airtable or Google Sheets, but it can also get fancier with SQL databases and other applications. It's a good option when you're outgrowing Softr. Either Bubble or No-Longcode would be a good option for you. The next tool I want to talk about, it's Retool. It's really our go-to for internal applications and dashboards. It's kind of like a mix of no-code and low-code because you have drag-and-drop UI components where you want to Drag a table, drag a, you know, date range selector or drag a button. But then on the backend, you are really able to use logic, code, JavaScript, SQL, which really gives you effectively unlimited flexibility for data and data transformations without having to spend, you know, a bunch of money, you know, using Zapier to try to like move data around or make calculations or make like complex formulas within a spreadsheet. You can also connect with pretty much any API, SQL database, and allows you to manage user authentication. And another tool I would put in the same category as Retool, it's Tooljet. It's like an open source cousin. It's a little bit more affordable, more developer friendly. But again, if I'm talking to a more non-technical team, this can be overkill. But some of these tools are really the best in class for you to build fast internal tools and dashboards if you have a development resource. The next category I want to talk about is mobile app builders. As the name suggests, allows you to build apps that work on phones seamlessly. This can be useful if you want to create like a branded experience for your clients, maybe some offline functionality, or just some access to some native device features, like for example, mobile notifications. Glide is the easiest one to start with. It can help you build simple mobile apps with some of the data sources we've already talked about, like Airtable, Google Sheets. It has its own Glide tables as well. Again, great for internal tools, client portals, directories, beautiful out of the box, right? It was pretty clearly put together by someone with design experience, and you have a lot of the built-in things you'll need for an app in terms of like building user login, filters, and actions. It's ideal for MVPs and maybe like lightweight mobile workflows. And actually, I have an accounting firm friend who built the app all of their clients, all of his clients use to engage with the firm in terms of having a section for putting receipts in, a section for, you know, putting their text questionnaires and having access to the various things that they're going to need to engage with the firm. I actually interviewed that person in the channel, so feel free to check that in the description below. It can be like many things, the easier it is to start, typically the harder it is to scale. So the other tool I want to talk about, it's called FlutterFlow. It's built on top of Google's Flutter framework. It's a much more powerful, much more customizable It supports custom APIs. You can do much more animations, so much component logics, and you can even deploy your apps into the app store, whether it's iOS or Android. Even though it's a visual builder, I would still consider this technical in nature, right? It's closer to a development environment. It's ideal for product or technical people. So it will be more of a learning curve. But I'd say that one of the things it's great at is its price point. It makes it very, very appealing. To people that just want to scale a mobile product and have many, many users because they charge just a monthly fee. You'll still need to integrate it with sort of like a backend to be able to scale it, but backends are much more cost effective at scale. So really you have, I think, like $30 or $70 a month just for the frontend builder and it just makes it really a no-brainer. Next in the list is talk about RPA platforms. These are tools that mimic clicks, keystrokes, and screen actions of a human so you can automate tasks that you wouldn't be able to do because those apps don't have APIs. It's very common in the tax and accounting world where we're working with desktop applications. So this is almost like you're hiring a digital assistant to do boring stuff for you that you normally have to do manually in a computer. The first part I want to talk about is Power Automate by Microsoft. It's the easiest starting point for most of us that are already using Microsoft 365. You can automate desktop apps, legacy systems, browser tasks using some of their built-in like RPA flows. It has a lot of integrations with the Microsoft ecosystem. Recently so, right? SharePoint, Excel, other Microsoft tools. Licensing can get complex, but for some Microsoft 365 packages, it might already be included, so you might not even have to pay for it. And it's best when you're already in the Microsoft ecosystem because it's— that's low friction to getting started. If you're on the Google ecosystem, there's a tool called Action that we recommend. And even if you're in the Microsoft, it can be helpful too when it's specifically browser-based. That you want to do. In other words, you want to automate something on the browser. So Action is a Chrome extension. It works like a macro recorder for Chrome. Fundamentally, it's great for you to create repetitive tasks when you have to scrape data in certain tools. You have to, in the case of accounting firms, sometimes they have to log into this like archaic billing platforms for like medical clients or like manufacturing clients that have these custom portals that have really no way for you to access it via API at all. It can be helpful for that. And honestly, it's really no-code and friendly, so it's impressively easy for you to get up and running with it. There are some limited use cases outside of browsers that you're not really going to be using it for that. Technically, it has a desktop app to do a couple of things, but it's not as robust as Power Automate. And again, it's just ideal when APIs are just missing or potentially the API actions you want are not available. On the more technical side of RPA, there's semafor.ai, formerly Robocorp. If you look for Robocorp, you should be able to find it. It's really built for developers. Because it's almost like a Python-based framework that runs in the cloud. So you have to code to make it happen. So when you're working with more complex stuff, maybe workflows that will run for very long and have to do many actions, it can be the more the better option. They have quite a generous plan as well, where I think it starts like $100 a month and you pay per usage, like per minute of runtime. That's That's typically how most RPA tools charge. And I would say it's also very enterprise-friendly. So it supports like vaults where you can store credentials because typically when you're working with RPA, you might want to log into specific tools. So they've built a lot of security features around logging and keeping credentials safe, which is something that's not as easily or needs some workaround for the Action and Microsoft Power Automate tools that we've talked about. The next in the category is agent builders. These are tools that create AI-powered agents. Think about it like that. Automated teammates that can think, reason, and act on your behalf. It's kind of like growing beyond just a single Zap or a Prompt, almost like combining automation with AI. And some of the tools in this category are like custom GPTs or assistants by OpenAI, right? You can build lightweight AI GPTs that you'll have custom instructions for some tools. And if you know how to work with the custom actions within GPTs, you can actually connect it with a variety of APIs so it can do actions on your behalf. This is a very fast For you to spin it up and kind of makes it very easy to test. Even as a non-technical user, you can create very helpful firm-specific agents. I was just on a chat yesterday with a community that's on automation for accounting firms, and they were talking about creating GPTs for specific clients that have all access to like, you know, their monthly financials and can kind of advise the client fundamentally on their particular situation. It can also be helpful like internally for you to create something that can answer frequently asked questions from your team or your policies and just point them to documentation that's going to help them solve a problem. So rather than like pinging you as the owner, and I'll say that because it's on the OpenAI ecosystem, you can really graduate or convert those into assistants very easily afterwards and scale in multiple ways. So integrating into automated workflows later on. The other tool I want to talk about is actually Zapier Agents. It's still like in early stages, but it's evolving quickly and they're iterating on that product. Product a lot. We've used it for multiple use cases and it uses GPT fundamentally to make decisions, summarize inputs, and to just kind of like lay out the logic in natural language. The more you try to have it do, the more it can hallucinate or like do something it was not supposed to. So it's still limited in what it can do. Just as an example, I think what we built a couple of weeks back was someone fill out a form, they populate it in a CRM, but I want to search or research that individual and that company online. Then bring that in. That's something that would be very difficult with a traditional SAP that doesn't have AI. But with AI, you can have that web search functionality to find that information and help you prepare in advance. So if you already use Zapier, it's a good way to add a layer of thinking or reasoning into your existing automations. Because it's a Zapier product, you can use an agent within SAP itself and you can start to say, hey, in this process, there's a step that typically required human involvement because it required a little bit more judgment. How can we start to install AI and agent steps within it to start automating more and more of what we do. The final and last category, it's by coding or AI-generated app builders. Okay, these are tools that help you create a full application using AI, often by describing what you want in plain language, and it helps you go from idea to working prototypes in literally minutes, sometimes seconds. And this is the category that's honestly disrupting literally everything else on this list, because if you think about it, everything we've talked about up until this point, it's fundamentally an But when you can build the app, do you need it anymore? Right? It's like, I'm— I still think there's room for those things, but could you try to— like, if you can build forms with a bite coding tool, do you still need a form builder? If you can use code to maybe automate certain processes, do you still need Zapier? Right? And this is still an area that's evolving. And certainly I'll say this, those tools are not perfect and you might hit some bugs that the AI can't figure out for the life of it. And most people won't be really equipped to go in and see the code to see what needs So I think still there's room for others. But let me talk to you about our experience with these tools and the ones we have locked into. The first one, it's actually Cite. That's C-I-T-E. It's the easiest entry point for teams already using Google Sheets or Airtable. It's one of the most user-friendly vibe coding tools. You describe what you want, it is going to go ahead and spin up a UI, a logic, a backend. And again, because it integrates with Google Sheets and Airtable, it's really user-friendly for people that are not as technical. So if you're an operator or ops-minded team member, you can start to build apps for the team without ever having to deal with code. I also like that they are working on kind of merging the concept of AI and low-code. So it's that once the interface is there, if you want to click one of the components and change it, you can do that without having to re-prompt the AI. Because I mean, it can be inconvenient for you to want to just change the headline and have to like tell the AI to do that and have it take like 3 minutes to do it. So I like that combination of prompt for starting, but then clicks and the interface itself to edit. The other tools I want to talk about are Lovable and Replit. I will put it in the same category, very similar in nature, close competitors. Lovable helps you like co-create beautiful polished apps with AI. You just tell it what you want, it's going to spin that up, very similar to what Replit is at the moment. Some of the pros and cons just based on our experience, is we like Replit a little bit better. It has an iOS and Android app, so you can make tweaks on the go, and it makes it very easy. At this moment in time, Replit also supports more programming languages. That probably won't matter for a lot of people, but it helps us get that flexibility if we want it. I'll also say that Replit feels like it's targeting more enterprise customers as opposed to Lovable, which is targeting more like consumer or SMB type of customers. As such, Replit has been a lot more diligent and conscious and transparent about security. They had a beta scanner right now where if you build your app, it can help you detect, fix, and face vulnerabilities. They actually partnered with Microsoft recently. And if you look at some of their content or YouTube channel, you'll see they have several videos on how to buy code safely. So I think security is something they are really thinking about. They also have a feature for internal tools. So it's, you can kind of easily deploy this if you have a Teams plan with one click so that you don't build, you're not building apps that are public, but just for your team. So this is a tool that we're really evaluating as a replacement on some of the internal tool builders that we talked about earlier as well. And again, on the more technical side, you have something like Cursor, which is effectively a code editor, is what a typical coder or developer would have used, and is like a, you know, black background text way of building applications. You still write the code, AI is going to help you edit it or come up with it or debug it, and integrates with some of the coder's tools like GitHub. I wouldn't recommend If you are not technical, unless you want to like just bang your head against the wall for a little bit and figure it out. I have a friend and accounting firm owner called Brian Cleary who developed an app for— it's called Cardboard. It's a Chrome extension for Carbon users to save time using shortcuts. And he just failed his way to doing that. So even if you're not as technical, not— don't be intimidated by the fact that it's just pure code if you have the time on your hands. To experiment with it. And despite all these incredible tools, I'll say this, you're still better off nailing just one tool in your firm. One, because if you don't lock that in first, none of this is really going to work for you long-term. And that one tool is your practice management system. And that's what I talk about in this next video. I rank 25 accounting practice management tools from best to worst. So check that out next. I'll see you on the next one. And until then, stay efficient.