Who this is for
Cities and counties of any size, special districts (water, sanitation, parks, fire, harbor), municipal utilities, joint powers authorities and the firms that contract to them. The buyer is a department head, the city manager's office or a district general manager. The public counter uses a permitting or asset system, and finance uses a financial system. Much of the work in between lives in Outlook, Excel and shared drives.
Federal agencies are out of scope: monday.com's public sector page lists no FedRAMP authorization, as read on October 6, 2026. This page covers state and local government. Investor-owned utilities with enterprise procurement are out of scope too; municipal utilities and districts are in.
The problem, in your words
The permit application is in the permitting system, but the planning condition, fire clearance and engineering comment sit in three inboxes. The applicant calls the counter to ask who has it. The records request arrived nine days ago, and the ten-day response is due tomorrow. The agenda item's staff report is due to the clerk on Thursday, and legal has not seen it. The capital project's status for the quarterly report is rebuilt from memory.
The contractor's insurance certificate expired in June, and the district's work orders are text messages to the field supervisor. None of that is a people problem. The systems of record hold the documents; nobody holds the status. The build puts that status in one place the whole department can see.
What gets built
Permit and plan-check tracking
Each application is a row on a board, a shared table in monday.com. The row links to the permitting system by permit number and holds the applicant, project address and review cycle. Every department that must clear it gets a subitem, a smaller row underneath. Each has its own status and a waiting-on column: applicant, department or outside agency. The counter answers "who has it" with one filter.
Public records requests
A request form on the agency's site creates the row, with the received date and the statutory due date calculated from it. The row also carries the assigned department, any extension with its reason, the records located and the status from Received to Closed. Automations give the assignee a task at day five and flag the request at day eight. Every status change is timestamped, so the row becomes the record of the response.
Under California's Public Records Act, the determination is due within ten days, and the board is built around that clock. For another state, we change the deadline in the due-date column.
Agenda items and approvals
Each council or board item is a row with the department, staff report due date, attachments, clerk's deadline and meeting date. Legal and finance review are approval columns with dates. A timeline grouped by meeting shows what's on track for each agenda. The clerk builds the packet from rows that reached Approved, not from email.
Capital projects and grants
Each capital project is a row moving through Planning, Design, Bid, Award, Construction and Closeout. It holds the funding source, budget, spend to date, milestones and what the project is waiting on. The consultant and contractor are linked contacts. Grants follow the shape of the nonprofit grants board: deadlines that create tasks and report dates that surprise nobody. The quarterly report to the council becomes a filter and an export.
Contracts, vendors and work orders
Each contract is a row with its term, renewal date, insurance certificate and expiry date, plus the not-to-exceed amount against spend. A rule flags a certificate 30 days before it lapses. Districts without a maintenance management system get work orders from a field form with a photo and a location. Each order goes to a crew with a priority and a due date, and a dashboard shows open orders by type and age. A district with a maintenance system keeps it and uses monday.com for the office.
Dashboards
Each department gets its own dashboard, and the manager gets one too. Together they show permits by stage and age, records requests due this week and agenda items not yet approved for the next meeting. They also show capital projects by phase with spend against budget, expiring certificates and open work orders by age.
Security, records and procurement, answered first
The IT security review comes before any build, not after. monday.com lists ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA and TX-RAMP among its attestations on its public sector page, as read on October 6, 2026. We answer the agency's questionnaire from monday's own trust documentation, with your data classification in hand.
Boards hold status, dates, owners and links to the document in the system of record. They never hold the document itself when the document is the record. The permitting system stays the permit record. The records system stays the records repository, and the financial system stays the ledger. Retention is the records system's job; monday.com holds the working status, which is exported when a matter closes.
On procurement, a Foundation build (a pilot of one department and one workflow) sits under many departments' small-purchase thresholds. It comes with a fixed quote and a written map of the boards. We complete vendor registration and provide a W-9 and an insurance certificate on request, and your standard professional services agreement is the contract. The agency buys seats directly from monday.com, which has its own public sector sales team.
A typical build, and an honest note
We have not yet built for a city or a district. Our public-sector work to date is permit and plan-check tracking from the applicant's side, built for an architecture studio on live Los Angeles jobs. It turned a city's clearance worksheet into clearance items, tracked departmental clearances by agency and permit number and chased outside agencies with a waiting-on column. So the first agency build is a pilot: one department and one workflow at the Foundation price. Records requests and permit tracking are the two that pay back fastest.
How an engagement runs
The work runs in five steps. We record the free 30-minute review call. Then we read what the department uses today (spreadsheets, the shared drive, how staff use the system of record) and write up what to keep. You approve a written map of boards, stages and who sees what: the one sign-off we ask for, and the document your IT review reads. We build the structure in your account, in your vocabulary, and staff test it with real applications or requests before anything is automated.
Next come the automations, then the migration of open items. We check the migration both ways: every old record has a new row, and every new row has an old record.
A script reads your live account to check every board, column, label and row count the system depends on. The handover is a recorded demo plus a short how-to recording for each common task, so the next hire learns the system without a trainer. Then you put real work through it and tell us what needs changing. We adjust and you check again until it fits the way your department works, usually within the two weeks the full build takes.
Pricing
Every price is published 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 starts at $3,000 and takes one week: one department's board with stages, an intake form, three automations, one dashboard and a recorded training. That board can be the records request board, with its deadlines and form. Full System starts at $7,000 and takes two weeks: Foundation plus a second and third workflow, permissions by department and the manager's dashboard. The extra workflows can be permits, agenda items, capital projects, contracts or work orders.
Full System also moves your open items from spreadsheets. A feed from the permitting or financial system is priced into the fixed quote. After the build, an optional care plan gives you 4 hours of changes a month for $600, or 8 hours for $1,100. The agency buys seats from monday.com directly; Pro is $19 per seat per month billed annually, as shown on monday.com/pricing on October 7, 2026. monday's public sector team quotes agency agreements separately.
If your department 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 department 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 the systems of record
A permitting system such as Accela or a Tyler Technologies product is the permit record. A maintenance system such as Cityworks is the asset and work-order record. A records-request product such as NextRequest or GovQA publishes the public portal, and an agenda product such as Granicus publishes the agenda and minutes. If you have them and use them, keep them.
monday.com is the better choice for the work those systems do not cover or show. That means the clearances behind a permit, staff-side request tracking, the approval chain behind an agenda item, capital projects, grants, contracts and certificates. It's also the better choice for a small district that has none of those systems and runs on a spreadsheet today.
| Need | System of record | monday.com, built as above |
|---|---|---|
| The permit record and fees | Permitting system | Status and clearances linked by permit number |
| Public portal for records requests | Records product | Staff tracking against the statutory clock |
| Published agenda and minutes | Agenda product | Approval chain and deadlines before publication |
| Asset hierarchy and GIS | Maintenance system | Work orders by form for a district without one |
| Ledger, encumbrances, payroll | Financial system | Budget and spend as columns, by feed or by hand |
| Retention and disclosure | Records system | Exported when a matter closes |
| Cost | Quote, usually annual | $19 per seat per month on Pro, plus the build |
What stays in other systems for a government
Limits, as of October 12, 2026
Your systems of record and retention stay in charge: records live where the retention schedule says they live. monday's public sector page lists no FedRAMP authorization as of October 6, 2026, so federal work and federally restricted data stay out. monday.com hosts its forms, even when they're embedded on the agency's site, so they need the agency's accessibility review before they face the public.
GIS, asset hierarchy and meter data stay in their own systems. Seats are per user, so a department that gives every field employee a login should price that first. Feeds from the permitting or financial system are custom work, and the start date depends on your procurement process.
Key takeaways
- monday.com runs the work between your systems of record and never replaces the permit record, the records repository or the ledger.
- Records requests tracked against the statutory clock, with tasks at day five and a flag at day eight.
- Permits with every department's clearance on one row; agenda items with the approval chain on one timeline.
- Security questionnaire first, then a pilot of one department and one workflow at the Foundation price.
- State and local only: ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA and TX-RAMP on monday's public sector page, not FedRAMP.
Limitations of this page
We have not yet delivered a public-agency build. The experience behind this page is the applicant's side of permitting and plan check in Los Angeles. The engagement runs in the five steps above. We read monday.com's attestations on its public sector page on October 6, 2026, and its features on its support site on October 7, 2026. We describe the systems of record from their own home pages, without quoting prices.
The board's ten-day clock for California follows the Public Records Act as generally understood. This is not legal advice; your city attorney has the final word. We sell monday.com builds, so read the comparison knowing that.