Most teams run on a spreadsheet, Airtable or a set of Zapier automations for a long time, and that's usually the right call early on. They are cheap, fast to change and anyone can edit them. The trouble starts when the business depends on them and nobody owns them.
A few signs show up again and again. People keep a second copy of the sheet because they don't trust the main one. A Zap fails quietly and someone finds out a week later from a customer. You hit row or task limits and the monthly bill keeps climbing. Permissions are all or nothing, so either everyone can edit the pricing table or nobody can. New hires need a long walkthrough before they can do basic work.
None of these on their own mean you need custom software. Three or four of them together usually do.
If you decide to build, start small. Pick the one workflow that causes the most errors or eats the most hours, and build a tool for that only. Keep the existing data where it is for now and sync it, so the team can switch over without a big migration day. Add roles and an audit log from the start, since those are the things no-code tools handle worst.
Ask whoever builds it to show you a working version within the first couple of weeks, with your real data. If the first demo is a slide deck, that tells you something.
I wrote a longer checklist of the warning signs here: https://sitefusion.dev/blog/signs-you-have-outgrown-airtable-and-zapier
And if you're comparing teams to build it, this guide covers what to ask: https://sitefusion.dev/blog/how-to-choose-an-internal-tools-development-company
We build internal tools and web apps at SiteFusion: https://sitefusion.dev/