How do you set up monday.com for an interior design firm?

The short answer

Start with an overview board that has one row per project, and give each project a board with the phases as groups. Then add a procurement board with a row per item, because a project can run to 200 line items between the approved concept and the installed room. Each has a vendor, a lead time, a client approval and a delivery that can go wrong. Fees and markups sit on private boards that only the principal and the bookkeeper can open.

Concept to installation

The five phase groups on each project board follow the work: 1 Concept, 2 Design Development, 3 Documentation, 4 Procurement and 5 Installation. Concept holds the brief, budget conversation, site measure, concept boards and presentation; Design Development holds space plans, selections by room, sample rounds and client presentations. Documentation holds the drawings and specifications the contractor and vendors build from: furniture plan, lighting plan, finish schedule and millwork details. Procurement covers ordering, tracking and receiving everything specified, and that work runs on its own board (next section), which rolls up into this group. Installation holds the delivery schedule, install days, walk-through and punch list.

Each milestone is a task that closes its phase, kept inside that phase rather than on a separate list. Examples: "Concept approved by client", "DD presentation approved", "Documentation issued", "All items ordered" and "Installation complete, punch list closed". Each task has an owner, a timeline, time tracking and a five-state status: Not Started, In Progress, Done, Blocked and N/A. N/A lets a project with no millwork dismiss the millwork tasks instead of carrying them unfinished forever. The phases template page covers the template, the Gantt and creating each project board; only the group names change for interior design.

Procurement and client approvals

The procurement board is where monday.com pays for itself: one row per item, across every project. Its columns are project, room, item, vendor, quantity, status, approval, approval date, lead time, expected date, purchase order number and a spec sheet link. The item column holds the specification name, notes hold the vendor's SKU and the link opens the spec or tear sheet in the file system. Status follows the lifecycle: Specified, Presented, Approved, Ordered, In Production, Shipped, Received, Inspected and Installed. Damaged and Returned are side states a row can drop into and come back from.

Approval gets its own column because a client approves an item once, and the approval must survive six more status changes. Its values are Pending, Approved, Rejected and Revised, with a date set the day the client says yes in writing. The yes comes by email or through a client-facing form that logs the approval, and nine months later the date settles who chose the sofa. The rule that earns its keep: after seven days at Presented with approval still Pending, a follow-up task lands on the designer's list. It's a task, not a notification.

Four views carry the daily work: by project, by room, late and waiting on client. Waiting on client (approval Pending, grouped by project) is the Monday-morning view, and the late view lists items past their expected date, not yet Received. The installation plan is this board filtered to Received and grouped by room: the installer's list. A dashboard built from this board shows items by status per project, approvals waiting per client and expected deliveries this month.

Vendor tracking

Vendors are rows on a Companies board, not users with seats. Each holds the name, rep, account number and standard lead time; trade discount terms go on a private board instead, as with the prices in the next section. Each vendor row also links to every procurement row that names the vendor. So "what is open with this vendor, across every project" is one filter instead of an afternoon of email. Open the vendor row when a vendor calls about a backorder.

Lead time on the vendor row is the default; on the item row it's the quote for that order. The expected date comes from the order date plus the quoted lead time. Damage claims, returns and reselections are statuses on the item row, with the date and reason in notes. The claim is about the item, not the vendor.

Markups and fees on private boards

monday.com Pro sets permissions per board, not per column, so the procurement board above carries no prices at all. A private Item Pricing board, with the principal and the bookkeeper as its only members, holds one row per item linked to its procurement row. Each row has net cost, markup percentage, client price, freight and a formula that works out the margin. Project totals reach the overview through mirror columns, which pull values from the linked board and show blank to anyone outside it. Portfolio numbers (specified, approved and ordered totals, plus margin to date) live on a private dashboard, whose widgets sum the mirror columns.

A private Contracts board holds the design fee, retainer, fee type (flat, hourly, percentage of purchases or a mix) and fee phases with their triggers. Each row on a private Payments board is an invoice, with line items as subitems underneath: fee, reimbursable, additional service, discount and, for interior design, product. The contract generates the invoice schedule. Where QuickBooks Online is the ledger, a custom app pushes invoices into it from monday.com. The billing by phase page has the full structure, and it works as written for interior design.

What monday.com does for an interior designer, and what stays in the procurement system

Compared with the interior design products

Prices as shown on each vendor's page on October 7, 2026: studiodesigner.com/pricing, designmanager.com/pricing, workflowdesign.com, monday.com/pricing.

Many studios run both, with Studio Designer or Design Manager for purchase orders, vendor invoices, client invoices and the books. monday.com takes the project, the approvals, the vendors' open items and the install, and two rules keep the two systems in step. One tool owns the project list, so create the project there first and type its number once into the other. And type the purchase order number onto the monday.com item row the day the PO is raised, so both systems agree on what's been ordered. If procurement and billing are the whole problem, buy one of the two products; see our page on when not to hire a consultant.

The packages, for an interior design studio

Foundation starts at $3,000 and takes one week. It's a master project board with the five phases and milestones, a project intake form, three automations, a dashboard and a recorded one-hour training. Full System starts at $7,000 and takes two weeks. It adds the procurement board with approvals and the seven-day follow-up, plus vendors as linked contacts. It also adds the private Item Pricing, Contracts and Payments boards with the invoice schedule, permissions and dashboards.

Full System includes the move from Asana, Trello, a spreadsheet or another tool, reconciled row by row. After a free 30-minute review, we send a fixed quote for the build. We price custom apps into that quote: sending invoices to QuickBooks, one-click project setup and proposal PDFs with product images.

If your studio already runs on monday.com, Asana, Smartsheet, Airtable or ClickUp and the setup has grown messy, Overhaul fixes it, from $5,000. We audit the account, rebuild the project and procurement boards nobody trusts and clear out the duplicates. The price includes permissions, dashboards and a recorded training, and your data stays where it is. Most overhauls take one week, and a large account takes two.

The optional care plan covers changes, new automations and a quarterly review, at $600 a month for 4 hours or $1,100 for 8. monday.com Pro is $19 per seat per month billed annually, paid to monday.com, so a six-person studio pays $1,368 a year for seats. Everything is itemized on the pricing page.

Questions designers ask

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