Project management in monday.com: how to set up projects, schedules and reports for the board

monday.com is a platform for planning and tracking teams’ work. In projects, it usually replaces three things at once: the schedule spreadsheet, status emails and meeting notes. All the information about a task – the person, the deadline, files, comments – is in one place.

The tool does not impose a way of working. You can run a project in the traditional way, stage by stage according to a schedule. You can also work in short cycles with a priority list, as in the Scrum method, or on a board with “to do – in progress – done” columns, known as Kanban.

There are also things monday.com does not do. It is not an accounting system, so project costs have to be entered manually or pulled from the ERP. Nor is it a project management method: if the company has no rules for opening and closing projects, the tool will not invent them.

The first decision concerns structure. You can run each project on a separate board or all projects on a single shared board. The choice depends on how large the projects are and how many tasks they have.

With separate boards, a shared template is essential. Then every project has the same columns and statuses, and the board’s dashboard can add them up. On the Pro plan, project boards also come with a ready-made project summary and health assessment.

Whichever model you choose, it is worth setting up two supporting boards. The first is a project register: one row per project with the client, manager, budget and status. The second is a risk register, a list of things that could delay the project, with a person responsible for each one.

The schedule in monday.com is built from the same tasks the team sees on the board. A date column is all you need, and the Gantt chart and timeline draw themselves. Changing a date in the table immediately moves the bar on the chart.

Dependencies, available from the Pro plan, let you link tasks, for example “assembly cannot start before the materials are delivered”. If the delivery is delayed, the following tasks move with it. Milestones, the key points in a project such as the client signing off a stage, are marked separately on the chart.

A typical mistake is making the schedule too detailed at the start. It is better to plan the next few weeks in detail and leave later stages as larger blocks, refining them as work progresses.

In a company running many projects at once, the most common cause of delays is not a bad plan, but the same people being assigned to several projects at the same time. The workload view in monday.com shows how much work each person has in a given week, across all boards combined.

Time tracking lets you compare planned time with actual time. This is particularly useful in client projects billed by the hour or with a budget in hours. Both features require the Pro plan.

Resource planning across many projects at once, with people allocated at company level, is only available on the Enterprise plan. We cover workload planning in more detail in a separate article.

The project budget is kept in number columns: planned budget, costs incurred, remaining. A formula column calculates the percentage used and highlights projects above a threshold. Costs can be entered manually or pulled automatically from the finance system if you build a connection.

The board does not need visibility of every task. It needs a short answer to the three questions in the list below. It is worth building a dashboard from them – a screen with charts and figures pulled together from many boards.

The dashboard only works if the data is up to date. So agree that the project manager updates the status and risks by a set time on the day before the board meeting.

The prices in the table below come from the monday.com price list for Europe, as of October 2026, with annual payment. Monthly payment is more expensive.

An example calculation: a company gives monday.com to 30 people working on projects. On the Standard plan, that is 30 × EUR 12 × 12 months = EUR 4,320 a year. On the Pro plan, the same group costs 30 × 19 × 12 = EUR 6,840 a year.

Not everyone needs a licence. Clients and subcontractors can have access as guests, and from the Standard plan you can invite them to selected boards.

Take a hypothetical engineering company with 70 employees running about 25 client projects at the same time. Today, schedules are in separate spreadsheets, and every Monday each project manager emails the board a status update.

The company creates one project template with phases: preparation, design, delivery, handover. Each new project is created from the template in one click, and the project register pulls in their status, budget and next milestone.

Automations take over the reminders. When a task approaches its deadline, the person responsible gets a notification in Microsoft Teams. When a manager changes a project’s status to “at risk”, the CEO is informed immediately, not in the Monday email.

After a few weeks, the board stops collecting statuses by email, because it has them in the dashboard. That is a good initial measure of success – easy to check and important to everyone.

The most common way to spoil a rollout is trying to move everything at once. It is safer to start with a few projects and one team, and add the rest once you have checked that the template works.

The sequence of steps below works regardless of company size. Only the number of projects and people at each stage changes.

In fairness, monday.com does not suit every company. The situations below are a signal to consider a different tool or to hold off on implementation.

If the last point in the list below sounds familiar, start by checking the tools you already have in your Microsoft 365 licence, and come back to the subject when you have more projects.