The short answer
An architecture firm's CRM on monday.com is a Leads group, one section of rows on the Projects Overview board. An inquiry form creates each lead's row, and a stage column carries it through eight stages from Inquiry to Won or Lost. The fee proposal lives on a private Contracts board linked to the row. On Won, the row is numbered, moved to the active group and given its own project board.
The form, stages, views and follow-up rule use monday.com's own features. Numbering, the proposal PDF and the button that builds each project's board are custom app work. A studio can do all three jobs by hand until the volume justifies the custom work.
What an architecture CRM has to do, and what it does not
A sales CRM is built for a team that sends two hundred emails a day and needs sequences, scoring and a dialer. A studio's new work arrives as a phone call from a past client, a contractor or an agent. It runs from first call to site visit to proposal to signed contract over weeks or months, with rarely more than 20 leads open.
So the CRM has four jobs. It holds every inquiry and shows the principal what's out and for how long. It keeps the proposal's fee away from staff and turns a won proposal into a project without retyping a word.
The fourth job is why it lives on the projects board, not in a CRM product. A proposal is a project without a number yet. When the lead and the project are the same row, the inquiry, site visit notes, proposal and first design task share one history. Two systems with a handoff between them lose that history the day the handoff is late.
The inquiry form
A monday form replaces the website's contact form, writes into the Leads group and has nine fields. Name, email and phone are required; the other six are property address, project type (multi-select), budget range, how they found the studio, description and attachment. Keep reCAPTCHA on. monday's forms share by link or embed in a web page, and each question writes into a column of the board. A rule on submission stamps the date (support.monday.com, October 7, 2026), so every inquiry becomes a dated row nobody retypes.
A second form is internal. After the first call, whoever took it fills in the intake form: project type confirmed, jurisdiction, estimated construction value, evaluation notes and owner. The public form asks for little; the internal one asks for what the studio needs to decide whether to take the job. Studio Yona, the studio in our case study, grew its intake form this way in its second month.
Forward email inquiries to the board's own email address, and each one becomes a row (support.monday.com, October 7, 2026). That address carries an account key and stays inside the office.
Leads, stages and the columns
The eight stages sit in one status column: Inquiry, First Call, Site Visit, Proposal Sent, Negotiating, Won, Lost and Declined. Lost means the client said no; Declined means the studio said no. These are the columns on a lead row:
| Column | Type | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|
| Stage | Status, the eight above | The pipeline |
| Source | Status: Past client, Contractor, Agent, Website, Other | Win rate by source decides where the principal has lunch |
| Project type | Dropdown, from the form | What the studio wins and loses |
| Jurisdiction | Status | Sets the project board's submittal groups |
| Address | Text or location | The property identifies the job |
| Client | Link to Contacts | The person who called; the property owner gets a second link |
| Owner | Person | One person chases it, and the follow-up task lands on them |
| Estimated value | Numbers | Construction cost, not the fee |
| Last contact | Date | Set after every call or email |
| Next action | Text | What happens next and when |
| Proposal sent | Date | Starts the follow-up clock |
| Lost reason | Status: Price, Timing, Chose another firm, No reply, Scope | Changes what the principal says yes to |
Set up three views. Pipeline groups the leads by stage, with the estimated value and last contact on each row; it's the principal's Monday-morning view. Waiting on client shows every row at Proposal Sent or Negotiating, grouped by owner. Stale shows every open lead with no contact in 14 days, and each one gets a phone call. The fee appears in none of the three views.
Proposals with estimates
The estimated construction value sits on the lead row, because staff need it to scope the job. The fee stays off it, because monday.com Pro sets permissions per board, not per column. Anyone who can open the Projects Overview board can read everything on it. So the proposal is a row on the private Contracts board, linked to the lead.
The proposal row holds the fee and its basis: fixed, hourly or a percentage of construction cost. It also holds the retainer, the exclusions and the fee phases. Each fee phase names the event that triggers its payment. The lead row links to the proposal, showing its name and never the amount. The billing by phase page has the Contracts board in full.
A Generate Proposal button on the Contracts row produces the PDF from the record, on the studio's own letterhead. The button is custom app work, since sending a web request or building a document takes an app, not an automation. Pressing it sets a status, and a small hosted service checks for that status and builds the PDF. A studio sending four proposals a month can write them in Word from the row and let the button wait.
The follow-up rule should not wait. When a row has sat at Proposal Sent for ten days, a task to call the client lands on the owner's list. A task, not a notification: a notification is read on a phone and forgotten.
The win-to-project automation
When the stage changes to Won, five things happen, and the first two are native. A rule moves the row out of Leads and into the active projects group. "When a status changes to something, move item to group" is one of monday.com's ready-made automations (support.monday.com, October 7, 2026). A second rule sets the design phase to Pre-Design and notifies the PM who will lead the project.
The third is numbering: the next number in the office's convention, with a guard against reissuing one that exists. Studio Yona's Asana had two projects numbered 2634 when we read it, and the numbering service reported the duplicate and rewrote nothing. The fourth is the project board. A button duplicates the project template, deletes the jurisdiction groups that do not apply and links the new board back to the row. The fifth is the contract, generated from the same Contracts row that held the proposal.
Numbering, the project board button and the documents are custom app work, and we price them into the build's fixed quote before work starts. Without the custom work, a checklist on the won row does the job: type the number, duplicate the template and write the contract in Word. The structure is the same either way, and the custom pieces slot in later.
The alternative is a separate Leads board, with a cross-board rule that moves the won lead onto the Projects Overview. It's right when someone who is not an architect runs business development, or when more than 30 leads are open at once. monday's "move item to board" automation carries the subitems across, and an integration column needs reconnecting afterward (support.monday.com, October 7, 2026). So the Contracts link is remade on arrival. For most studios, one board is simpler and keeps the history whole.
What to track, and what not to
Track nine things: source, project type, jurisdiction, estimated construction value, owner, last contact, next action, proposal date and lost reason. They answer every question a principal asks about new work, and they take under a minute per lead per week.
Skip email opens, call recordings and lead scores; there's no volume to score. Keep to eight stages: a second revision of a proposal is still at Proposal Sent, with the revision in the notes. Log a call by setting the last contact date and writing one line, not by creating a task. Keep the fee, the rate and the margin off every shared board. And skip a separate deals board; that second board is the handoff that loses the history.
The pipeline dashboard
One dashboard holds six widgets, all counts. They show open leads by stage, inquiries by source this quarter and proposals out with their age in days. They also show won and lost this quarter with the reasons, win rate by source and leads with no contact in 14 days. The one money widget, estimated construction value by stage, sits on the principal's private dashboard. The CRM is only as good as the Contacts board under it; Studio Yona's old tool held no client data at all.
Compared with the alternatives
Prices and wording are as shown on each vendor's page on October 7, 2026: monday.com/pricing, monday.com/crm/pricing, hubspot.com/products/crm and monograph.com/pricing.
| Route | Price (October 7, 2026) | Built for | Where it stops for a studio |
|---|---|---|---|
| A spreadsheet and the inbox | Free | A list of names | No form or follow-up rule, and the won job is retyped into the project list |
| monday.com work management, Pro, built as above | $19 per seat per month billed annually; inside Full System, from $7,000, or built yourself | Leads on the same board as the projects, one history from inquiry to closeout | Nothing exists until built; numbering, the project board button and the proposal PDF are custom |
| monday CRM, the separate product | $12, $17 or $28 per seat per month billed annually, three seats minimum | Sales teams with sequences and a deals pipeline | A second product for 20 open leads, and the won deal still has to become a project somewhere else |
| HubSpot's free CRM | "100% free with no expiration date", "up to two users, 1,000 contacts" | Email-driven sales with contact records | Two users; the won deal is not a project, so the handoff is manual |
| Monograph's Pipeline add-on | "Pipeline is offered separately as an add-on" to plans of $45 to $490 a month | A studio already on Monograph for time and money | Right if you are on Monograph; the project tracking that follows is Monograph's model |
A studio happy on Monograph for time and money can add Monograph's Pipeline and stay in one product. A studio that wants one history from the first call to the closeout letter builds the Leads group. The guide's CRM section shows where it sits among the other boards.
Limitations
What stays outside the CRM
The inbox stays outside the CRM. monday's help article on board email addresses also names Gmail and Outlook integrations, and we leave both out of the CRM we build. A lead record needs one line for each call or email, not the emails themselves. The CRM also leaves out lead scoring and sequences.
The fee is private by structure, so the principal types it on a second board; that's the price of staff not seeing it. Numbering, the project board button and the proposal generator are custom code. A studio that would rather skip the code does those jobs by hand. Studio Yona, our one named client, is a seven-person residential studio in Los Angeles. The stages above are the ones it uses, and your studio can name its stages its own way.
Key takeaways
- The CRM is a Leads group on the projects board plus the Contacts and Companies boards, not a separate product.
- An inquiry form creates the lead's row, and an internal intake form completes it after the first call. Emails forwarded to the board catch the rest.
- Eight stages, nine columns worth tracking, three views and no money on the shared row.
- The fee proposal lives on the private Contracts board, linked to the lead. Ten days at Proposal Sent puts a follow-up task on the owner's list.
- On Won, a native rule moves the row to the active projects group. Numbering, the project board and the contract are custom app work or a checklist done by hand.
- monday CRM, HubSpot and Monograph's Pipeline each solve a different firm's problem; the studio's problem is keeping one history from inquiry to closeout.