The shape of the system
An architecture studio runs on seven things: projects, tasks, fees, what's out with the city or the contractor, consultants, open proposals and the office itself. Leave one out and you're back in email within a quarter, because someone needs the missing piece in an ordinary week.
In monday.com those seven things live on eight boards, each a shared table where every row is an item. The Projects Overview has a row per project plus the leads, so the CRM sits where the office already looks. Each project gets its own project board of tasks, made from a template. Contracts and Payments are private boards for the money, and Submissions tracks everything out with an agency or a contractor. Companies and Contacts hold clients, owners, consultants and city departments, and Studio Ops holds work outside any project.
The key choice is one board per project, not one task board for the studio. Two hundred projects at 49 to 64 tasks each is 10,000 to 13,000 rows on one board, slow to open and hard to filter. A board per project also leaves room for subitems, smaller rows nested under a task. A plan-check correction is a task, and each point the plan checker raised is a subitem under it.
How architects track project phases in monday.com: SD, DD, CD, CA
Phases are groups of tasks on the project board: 1 Pre-Design, 2 Schematic Design, 3 Design Development, the submittal path, 4 Construction Administration and 5 Closeout. The submittal path depends on the jurisdiction, which is where architecture departs from generic project management. A City of Los Angeles job has a Planning group (if required), a Building and Safety submittal group and a Clearances group. A Ventura County or Santa Clarita job has HOA, planning and permit submittal groups instead. The template carries every jurisdiction's groups, and a new project board keeps only the groups for that project's jurisdiction.
Studio Yona, a Los Angeles residential studio and the one client named on this site, has a 99-task template in 14 groups. A new project board keeps 54 tasks for a City of LA job, 64 for LA County and 49 elsewhere in California. The studio's old 40-task Asana templates were applied to none of its 70 projects. People skip a template that's much longer than the job, so keep yours short. Give the status column an N/A label, since a quarter of any architecture template is "if applicable" and would otherwise sit incomplete forever.
Milestones are gate tasks inside the groups, not a separate board: "Clearance Summary Worksheet received" opens the clearances work and "All clearances cleared, permit ready" closes it. Each task has a status, an owner, a timeline, time tracking and notes but no priority column, since the dates on the timeline set the priority. The timeline feeds a Gantt chart grouped by phase and colored by status. A principal reads it to answer "why has this project gone from two months to six." Leave finished tasks visible, because hiding them hides the slippage.
On the overview row, keep a separate design phase status (Pre-Design, Schematic, Design Development, Plan Check and CD, Construction Admin, Closeout), set by a person. It answers "where is this project" rather than "what is done." The phases template page has the setup and a link to request the template board.
Fees and billing by phase, with QuickBooks
Every first attempt at billing by phase ties invoices to design phases, and that's the mistake: real contracts bill on events. The contract we built the system around has five work stages and three payments. It bills a 20% retainer on signing and 50% when the plans go to Building and Safety. The last 30% comes at ready to issue. Fee phases and design phases are two lists, and the system has to let them differ per project.
Fees live on a private Contracts board, with a row per fee agreement holding the contract total, retainer, number of fee phases and fee type. The invoice schedule comes from the contract: the retainer plus one invoice per fee phase, each with its trigger in the contract's own words. Each invoice is a row on a private Payments board, numbered the office's way, and its line items are subitems: Fee, Reimbursable, Additional Service, Discount. These map one to one onto QuickBooks line items. A discount always subtracts: an invoice that read $1,000, with an $800 fee line and a $100 discount, recalculates from its lines to $700.
monday.com has no native QuickBooks Online integration, so a small custom app on monday's own platform pushes invoices to QuickBooks. It matches or creates the customer, then sends the invoice, line items and net-14 terms under monday's invoice number. Every five minutes it pulls paid status back. First, decide which system owns what: QuickBooks owns invoice content and paid status, and monday owns the invoice schedule.
monday.com Pro has no column-level permissions, so the structure keeps fees away from staff. Every dollar lives only on the two private boards, subitems included. The overview shows contract total, retainer, total fee and paid to date through mirror columns, which display values from another board. Members of the private boards see the values and everyone else sees a blank. Portfolio totals go on a dashboard, where widgets sum mirror columns, rather than in a board footer.
The CA log: RFIs, submittals and change orders
Everything waiting on an answer from a city department, a contractor or an HOA goes on one Submissions board. Each submission is a row with the project and the agency or party: Building and Safety, Planning, Fire, HOA or the contractor. It also holds the type (submittal, RFI, change order, resubmittal), the date out and the owner. Its status follows the real lifecycle: Awaiting, Received, Corrections, Resubmitted, Approved, Ready to Issue, Follow Up, Closed.
The automation that earns its keep is the seven-day follow-up. After seven days in Awaiting, the submission's owner gets a real task on that project's board, not a notification. The principal we built for ignores notifications and told us so. The CA log page has the nine columns and the weekly review.
Los Angeles adds a layer most setups miss. At the first round of plan-check corrections, the city issues a Clearance Summary Worksheet: three to twelve small departmental approvals beyond the main permit. These become agency headings on the project board, with a subitem per worksheet line and a waiting-on column. A button reads the worksheet PDF and creates the subitems, and it got 6 of 6 right on a real City of LA worksheet. A roll-up flips the heading to Blocked when any line goes to Corrections.
Consultant coordination
Consultants are contacts, not users. Structural, MEP, civil, soils, Title 24, landscape and survey consultants are rows on the Contacts board, marked as consultants and linked to their projects. A consultant who looks in twice a quarter needs no paid seat.
Coordination runs on one column: waiting on. It sits on project tasks and clearance subitems, with four values: Us, City or Agency, Client and Consultant. A structural letter holding up a resubmittal is the project manager's task, waiting on Consultant, with the engineer's contact linked as the party. "What are we waiting on the engineers for, across every job" becomes one filter instead of an afternoon reading email.
The architecture CRM: inquiries, proposals and won projects
A proposal is a project with no number yet, so the CRM is a Leads group at the top of the Projects Overview, not a separate product. A client inquiry form on the studio's website creates each lead's row. It asks for contact details, the property address, project type, how they found you, a description and an attachment, with reCAPTCHA on. After the first call, an internal intake form adds the estimated construction value and evaluation notes. Shared by link or embedded in a web page, a monday form fills board columns directly (support.monday.com, October 7, 2026), so nobody retypes an inquiry.
The stage column carries the pipeline: Inquiry, First Call, Site Visit, Proposal Sent, Negotiating, Won, Lost, Declined. The fee proposal is a row on the private Contracts board, linked to the lead, with fee, basis, retainer and fee phases. Staff see that a proposal is out but never the fee. A pipeline view shows leads by stage with the estimate and last contact date. After ten days without contact, a rule gives the owner a task.
When the stage changes to Won, the row is numbered the office's way, with a check against duplicates. Studio Yona's Asana had two projects numbered 2634, which is what numbering by habit produces. The row then moves to the active group. One button creates the project board from the template, and a second makes the proposal PDF on the office's letterhead.
Nothing is retyped: the inquiry, the proposal and the project are one row with one history. Each of the buttons above sets a status that a small hosted service acts on. The numbering, board creation and PDF are custom app work, priced below; the group, stage, forms and follow-up rule are native. The architecture CRM page has the columns, stages, dashboard and what not to track.
Time tracking and team workload
Every task carries monday's time tracking column, on the Pro plan and above. It has a play and pause timer, sessions added by hand and an editable log. Its Excel export lists who tracked the time, with totals per item and per board (support.monday.com, October 7, 2026). On Pro, a dashboard combines up to 20 boards, and a widget sums tracked time across them, per person and for the team. A small export turns it into a payroll CSV of person, project, month and hours, which answers "how many hours went to that job."
The Workload widget, on Pro and above, answers "who is on what next month." It plots each person's tasks on a calendar against their weekly capacity. Effort comes from a numbers column of estimated hours, and anyone over capacity shows red (support.monday.com, October 7, 2026). On a dashboard it combines up to 20 project boards. For the whole studio, a master rollup board copies every dated task from every project board onto one calendar, with a person filter.
A firm-management product reports utilization and phase profitability natively: hours against fee by phase, and the realized rate. On monday.com they're a dashboard built for the studio. Most of a studio's questions are where a project is and who it's waiting on, and the time column answers the ones about hours.
If timesheets are the whole problem, we tell you so and point you to Monograph or BQE Core. Monograph's site lists time tracking, phase budgets and billing, capacity planning and profit reporting. BQE Core's site lists time and expense tracking, billing, project accounting and resource planning, and you book a demo to buy it (both read October 7, 2026).
Client approvals and client portals
A client approval is a row with a date, not an email. Every deliverable that needs a sign-off (a phase set, a selection, a change order, an additional service) is a task on the project board. The task has an approval column (Pending, Approved, Revise, Rejected), an approved date and the version it refers to.
The sign-off itself lives in the task's update thread. Forward the client's email to the task's own email address and it posts as an update, attachments included (support.monday.com, October 7, 2026). Or a form with a signature question files the signed sheet into a files column. Updates are timestamped and attributed, so they serve as your audit trail eighteen months later.
The client needs no login for any of that. A client who wants live status gets guest access to a shareable board. Shareable boards come with Standard and above, with unlimited guests on Pro, and a guest sees only the boards shared with them. Set the board permission to view and comment so they can read and post updates without editing (shareable boards and board permissions, support.monday.com, October 7, 2026). Share only that client's approvals and milestones, never a board with staff notes or a fee.
Add a client portal app once more than a dozen clients at a time expect a branded page with drawings, milestones and feedback in one place. We'd trial Gorilla's client portal for architects first. It's a monday.com marketplace app that, in its own words, lets clients "follow project progress, access drawings and documents, and provide feedback without exposing your internal boards". Clients need no monday account, and Gorilla's site shows no price (read October 7, 2026). The client approvals page has the eight steps and the Asana and Notion versions.
Files: Dropbox links at project level, drawings in the file system
The drawing set lives outside monday.com: Revit models, CAD files, PDF sets and markups stay in Dropbox, Google Drive or Autodesk Construction Cloud. The project row has two link columns, design folder and billing folder, because different people open those two folders. Both go in once, on the intake form, when the job opens. File columns on monday hold the small things that belong to a row. The signed proposal sits on the contract, the stamped clearance on its subitem and the client's approval email on the task.
Folder creation stays manual. A marketplace app can create the Dropbox folders with each new project board, but we dropped it from the Studio Yona build. It would have given a third-party app access to the client's Dropbox to save thirty seconds a project. Dropbox is linked, not synced, which is the right amount of integration for Studio Yona's seven-person team.
What to migrate and what to leave
Migrate every active project in full, completed tasks included and marked complete, so no project looks as if work went missing. Leave archived projects where they are. Skip template projects, test projects and the buckets of tasks that belonged to people who left. Never delete the old tool.
Check what structure the old tool really has. Before the migration, all 88 active projects in Studio Yona's Asana had exactly one section, "Untitled section", so nothing mapped onto the phase groups. The run moved 77 projects and 2,109 tasks, reconciled one to one against the source with zero mismatches. The 60 archived projects stayed in Asana, which held no client data, so the client database came afterward from the principal's contract sheet. The full method, which tracks every record by its Asana id so a half-finished run restarts safely, is on the Asana to monday.com migration page.
monday.com vs Monograph vs Asana for an architecture firm
Prices are from each vendor's pricing page on October 7, 2026: monday.com, Monograph, Asana.
| monday.com (Pro) | Monograph | Asana (Starter / Advanced) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | A general work platform you shape to the studio | Firm-management software for architecture and engineering firms | A general task manager |
| Price | $19 per seat per month, billed annually | $45 to $490 a month per firm; pipeline is an add-on | $10.99 or $24.99 per user per month, billed annually |
| Phases | Groups on a per-project board, from your template | Built in, with budgets by phase | Sections, no phase budget |
| Fee by phase and invoicing | Contracts and Payments boards, built for your studio | Native invoicing and project accounting | Not a function of the product |
| Timesheets and utilization | Time tracking per task; utilization on a dashboard we build | Native time, capacity and profit reporting | Time tracking on Advanced only |
| QuickBooks | Through a custom app | Native integration | None for invoicing |
| CA log, submittals, clearances | A Submissions board built for your studio, with an LA worksheet importer | Not its purpose | A list, if you build one |
| Consultants and waiting-on | Contacts linked to projects, a waiting-on column on tasks and subitems | Consultant costs in the budget; not coordination | Collaborators with a seat |
| Proposals and pipeline | Inquiry form, pipeline view, proposal PDF (custom app) | Pipeline and proposal builder as a paid add-on | Forms and a board, no documents |
| Fees hidden from staff | Private boards and mirrors | Role-based, native | Private projects only |
| Who sets it up | You (with or without Workflow Design Co.'s $499 DIY course) or a consultant; one to two weeks | Works on day one with onboarding | You, in an afternoon |
If your problem is hours and money by phase, Monograph answers it out of the box, and on monday.com the answer is a dashboard we build. If your projects, submittals, consultants, proposals and office tasks live in six places, monday.com answers that once the build is done. The monday.com vs Monograph page walks through the choice, including how studios run Monograph beside it.
What stays in other tools for architects
Platform limits, as of October 7, 2026
No column-level permissions on Pro, so decide the private-board-and-mirror design at the start. Portfolio totals go on a dashboard, because mirror columns sum there rather than in a board footer. Automations send notices and webhooks, and anything that needs code runs in a hosted app. That covers generating documents, reading PDFs and syncing QuickBooks Online, which has no native monday.com integration. Gantt, Calendar and Kanban views come from the template or get added by hand, rather than through the API.
What stays elsewhere
Drawings stay in the file system with a link on the row, and the ledger stays in QuickBooks. Utilization and phase profitability are a dashboard we build, not a built-in report. The mobile app handles statuses and site photos, and drawings open on a laptop. Discipline still comes from people: a Gantt shows slippage only if someone sets timelines, and a template helps only if it's short enough to use.
What it costs
You pay two bills: seats to monday.com, and a one-time build. Every studio that bills by phase needs the Pro plan. It's the lowest tier with private boards, time tracking, 25,000 automation actions a month and dashboards that combine up to 20 boards. Standard caps automations at 250 actions a month and has no private boards. Pro is $19 per seat per month billed annually (monday.com/pricing, October 7, 2026), so a 10-person studio pays $2,280 a year.
| Hawkpoint package | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free review, 30 minutes | Free | A recorded call, a written list of what to build first and a straight answer on whether monday.com is right for your studio. Then a fixed quote for the build |
| Foundation, one week | From $3,000 | One master project board with phases and milestones, a project intake form, three automations, one dashboard, a recorded one-hour training |
| Overhaul, one to two weeks | From $5,000 | For a studio already on monday.com, Asana, Smartsheet, Airtable or ClickUp: an audit of the account; a rebuild of the boards and automations nobody trusts; a clean-up of duplicate boards and dead automations; permissions, dashboards and a recorded training. Your data stays where it is |
| Full System, two weeks | From $7,000 | Foundation plus fee and billing by phase, the CA log (RFIs and submittals), consultant coordination, the proposal pipeline, client approvals, permissions and dashboards. Includes the move from Asana, Trello, Monograph or spreadsheets, reconciled row by row |
| Care plan | $600 or $1,100 a month | 4 or 8 hours a month: changes, new automations, a quarterly review |
The Foundation, Overhaul and Full System prices are starting prices, and the free review sets a fixed quote before anything is built. The pieces that need code hosted in your account (the QuickBooks push, generated PDFs, project board creation, the clearance importer) are priced into that quote. A 10-person studio doing Full System spends from $9,280 in year one, seats and the move from its old tool included. The pricing page has the arithmetic and compares the cost with hiring an operations person. If you work in one jurisdiction with a short project list, first read our page on when you do not need a monday.com consultant.
Key takeaways
- Eight boards, not one: overview (with the leads), a board per project, contracts, payments, submissions, companies, contacts, studio ops.
- Phases are groups on each project's board, made from a template that trims itself to the jurisdiction. Keep it short and give the status column an N/A label.
- Fee phases are not design phases. Bill on contract events and keep every dollar on private boards, hidden from staff.
- monday.com has no native QuickBooks integration, so a small hosted app sends invoices to QuickBooks and pulls paid status back.
- The CA log is one Submissions board with a seven-day follow-up that creates a real task for the owner.
- The CRM is a Leads group on the overview. A won lead becomes a numbered project with its own board.
- Time tracking and the Workload widget answer questions about hours and capacity. Utilization and phase profit are a dashboard we build, and if timesheets are the whole problem, we point you to Monograph or BQE Core.
- A client approval is a row with a date and the client's written sign-off. Give a shared board to the client who wants status, and add a portal app only above a dozen active clients.
- Drawings stay in Dropbox with a link on the project row. Migrate active projects in full and never delete the old tool.
- Pro is $19 a seat a month. A one-week build starts at $3,000 and a two-week build at $7,000. Fixing an account you already have starts at $5,000. A fixed quote after the free review covers the move from your old tool and any custom apps.
The guides that go with this one
Eleven more pages, each answering one question for a studio.
- AI agents for architecture firms: five chores an agent takes on, how one is built and tested, its cost and what stays with a person.
- An architecture firm CRM on monday.com: the inquiry form, the stages, the won-to-project automation and what not to track.
- Client approvals and sign-offs for architecture and interior design firms: a row per approval, the audit trail, shared views and when a portal app is worth it.
- How to improve office management at an architecture firm: the eight parts of studio operations and the order to fix them.
- Project management for small architecture firms: one row per project, who owns what, the Monday-morning review.
- The architecture firm workflow from proposal to closeout: eleven stages and where studios lose time.
- Best project management software for architecture firms in 2026: nine tools compared, with a decision table by firm size.
- Billing by phase for architecture firms: fee phases versus design phases, the invoice schedule and QuickBooks.
- The CA log for small architecture firms: RFIs, submittals and change orders in nine columns with one follow-up rule.
- monday.com for interior design firms: concept to installation, procurement, approvals, vendors and markups.
- Asana vs monday.com for architecture firms: for a studio already on Asana, including when to stay.
Limitations of this guide
Everything above comes from our builds for California studios that go through Los Angeles City and County plan check, so the clearance detail is Californian. Your jurisdiction's path will differ, but the structure still holds. The one named example is a seven-person residential studio, and the method works for larger studios too; a firm with several offices gets its own fixed quote. monday.com's features are quoted from its support site on October 7, 2026. We sell monday.com builds, so weigh the Monograph comparison with that in mind and read the page about when not to hire us first.