Who this is for
We work with owner-led manufacturers, fabricators, importers and distributors who sell configured or made-to-order products to other businesses. That includes equipment, building products, furniture and fixtures, food and beverage packaging, industrial and safety supplies and more. You have a sales team or a few account managers, a purchaser and a production or warehouse lead. The bookkeeper runs QuickBooks or an ERP that only accounting opens.
Some companies run thousands of SKUs with lot tracking, multi-warehouse inventory and bills of materials costed to the cent. For them, an ERP or MRP keeps the stock and the ledger, and monday.com is the layer above it, running everything the ERP shows nobody.
The problem, as owners describe it
Each quote starts in Word, copied from the last one that looked similar. A won quote gets retyped into QuickBooks as an order, then again onto the production whiteboard. Sales does not know what is in production, and production does not know what sales promised. The customer calls the owner to ask where the order is. New products start as an email thread, and nobody can say which gate the new line is at or who is holding it.
The information sits in six places, and the owner is the only link between them. The system we build puts it all in one place.
What gets built
The deals-to-production CRM
Each deal is a row moving through Lead, Quoted, Won, In production, Shipped and Invoiced. Columns hold the customer, account manager, quote value, promised date and what it's waiting on. Line items are subitems, rows nested under the deal, with quantity, unit price and line total, so the deal carries its own order. A web form brings dealer and customer inquiries in at Lead. Sales sees the pipeline, production sees won orders by due date and the owner sees both.
Quote and order documents from the row
A button on the deal produces the quote, order confirmation, pro forma invoice or packing list. Each comes out as a PDF on your letterhead, with your terms and the deal's line items. Generating documents takes a small app on monday.com's own app platform, priced into the fixed quote we send after the free review. It's the piece that ends the Word quotes.
Production
Each order gets a row, or each line item gets one if different items go through different work centers. The stages follow the shop's own sequence: Materials, Cut, Assembly, Finish, QC and Packed. Each row has a timeline and a status that production updates from a tablet on the floor. A workload view shows each work center's load. When an order reaches the last stage, its deal moves to Shipped on its own.
New-product development as stage gates
Each new product is a row, and the board's sections, called groups, are the gates: Concept, Feasibility, Design, Sampling, Pre-production and Launch. At each gate, its owner fills in a form with an approval column and a date. A product moves to the next group only once the current gate is approved. The board shows every product in development by gate and who is holding each one.
Purchasing and suppliers
Purchase orders are rows linked to the orders that need them, with the supplier, the ETA and the received date. A won order with a line item not in stock creates a purchase request, and production starts only once the materials are marked Received. Suppliers are contacts with lead times, not users.
QuickBooks and the dashboard
QuickBooks Online connects through a small app or the integration tool Make, since monday.com has no native connector for it. The link matches the customer, pushes the invoice from the order's subitems and pulls paid status back. Sales sees what's paid without opening the books. One dashboard shows pipeline by stage, orders in production by due date, late orders, products by gate and revenue invoiced this month by account manager.
A typical build
Two of our builds sit behind this page. One was for a manufacturer with about a dozen product lines selling into commercial construction. It runs the deals-to-production CRM above, with four generated document types and a feed that keeps its ordering data in step with the factory.
The other, for a distributor's five-person product-development team, put ten approval gates across eight boards, with a form at each gate. It replaced an email chain, so product development runs in the system rather than in a new thread every week. A verification script checks every automation, one by one, before anyone relies on it.
How an engagement runs
The work runs in five steps. We record the free 30-minute review. Next we read the quote folder, the whiteboard, the spreadsheet and QuickBooks, then write up what to keep. You approve a written map of boards, stages and who sees what: the one sign-off we ask for.
We build the structure in your account, in your vocabulary, and you test it with real orders before anything is automated. Then come the automations and document buttons, then the migration of your open deals and orders. We check the migration both ways: every old record has a new row, and every new row has an old record.
A script then checks every board, column, label and row count in your account. The handover is a recorded demo and short videos per task. You run real work through the system and tell us what's off. We adjust until it fits, usually within the two weeks the full build takes.
Pricing
Every price is on the pricing page. Build prices are starting prices. After the free 30-minute review, we send a fixed quote before anything is built.
Foundation, from $3,000, takes one week: the deals-to-production board with stages, an inquiry form, three automations, one dashboard and a recorded training. Full System starts at $7,000 and takes two weeks. It adds the production board, purchase orders and suppliers, the stage-gate product board, permissions and dashboards.
Full System also moves your open deals and orders from a spreadsheet or another CRM. Custom work that runs in your account, such as the document generator or the QuickBooks link, is priced into the fixed quote. The 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 seats are extra, at $19 per seat per month billed annually, as shown on monday.com/pricing on October 7, 2026.
If your company already tracks its orders 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 order boards and automations 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.
monday.com versus an ERP or MRP
An ERP such as NetSuite or Acumatica owns inventory, bills of materials, costing, purchasing and the ledger in one place. So does a manufacturing product such as Katana or Fishbowl. If your problem is stock accuracy, costed BOMs or multi-warehouse inventory, the ERP handles it, and monday.com sits on top.
monday.com is the better choice when the problem is the work between the ledger and the customer. That means where the deal and the order are, what sales promised, what's in development and who is holding it. Many companies keep the books in QuickBooks or their ERP, and monday.com runs everything the owner used to carry in their head. Those companies move to a bigger ERP only when inventory itself is the problem.
| Need | ERP or MRP | monday.com, built as above |
|---|---|---|
| Inventory, lots, warehouses | Built in | Stays in the ERP, linked from the order |
| Bills of materials and costing | Built in | Subitems with prices; costing stays in the ERP |
| Pipeline and account management | A module, often unused by sales | The board your sales team opens every morning |
| Order status visible to sales and the customer | Possible, rarely configured | One row from lead to invoiced |
| New-product stage gates | Not a function | Groups as gates with approvals |
| Quote and order PDFs | Built in | A small app on the row |
| Cost | Quote, usually per user plus implementation | $19 per seat per month on Pro, plus the build |
What stays in other tools on a shop floor
Limits, as of October 12, 2026
Stock on the shelf stays in an inventory system; monday.com tracks what was bought for each order. Costing stays in your ERP or MRP, and monday.com holds a bill of materials only as subitems with prices. Barcode scanning takes a marketplace app.
Boards run best under about 10,000 rows, so order history is archived by year. QuickBooks Online and EDI both connect through app work, since neither is native. And it all depends on the production lead updating the board from a tablet. That's a management decision, not a configuration one.
Key takeaways
- One board from lead to invoiced, with the line items as subitems, so a deal carries its own order.
- Quote and order PDFs come from the deal through a small app, with nothing retyped.
- Production is a second board in the shop's own stages, updated from the floor.
- New products move through stage gates, built as groups, with an approval at each.
- QuickBooks or the ERP keeps the ledger and the stock; monday.com keeps the work.
Limitations of this page
Both builds behind this page, for a building-products manufacturer and an industrial distributor in the United States, ran on QuickBooks Online with no ERP. A company already on NetSuite or Acumatica gets these boards connected to that system instead, priced into the fixed quote. The only client we name on this site is an architecture studio, and we describe every other build by industry only.
monday.com's features are as its support site described them on October 7, 2026. We describe the ERP and MRP products from their own home pages, without quoting prices. We sell monday.com builds, so weigh the comparison with that in mind. Before you decide, read our page on when you do not need a consultant.