When you do not need a monday.com consultant.

Set it up yourself if your studio looks like this

• A small team.
• One jurisdiction, so one submittal path.
• Fees and invoices staying in QuickBooks and a spreadsheet for now.
• Nobody on the team who hates the tool on sight.

If all four are true, an afternoon does it. If you'd rather have a hand, book the free 30-minute review and leave with a written list of what to build first.

Here's what the afternoon looks like.

1. Open a monday.com Pro account at $19 a seat a month billed annually (monday.com/pricing, October 7, 2026).
2. Make one board called Projects, with one row per live project.
3. Give it these columns: project number, stage, design phase, lead, client, next action, next-action date and waiting on.
4. Set the stages to pipeline, active, plan check, construction administration and closeout.
5. Set the six design phases: Pre-Design, Schematic Design, Design Development, Construction Documents and Plan Check, Construction Administration, Closeout.
6. Add a form view so new projects arrive through a form.
7. Add two automations: when the next-action date arrives, notify the lead; when the stage changes, notify the principal.
8. Put a dashboard on it with projects by stage.

Until you have more than 20 live projects, skip per-project boards and use subitems under each project instead. When you get there, the group structure for a per-project board is free on the phases template page.

For a guided build, Workflow Design Co. sells a DIY monday.com system as a video walkthrough. It costs $499 one-time and is designed for monday.com Pro. In their words, it's aimed at "Solo designers & small studios" (their pricing page, October 7, 2026). We have no relationship with them. For a two-person interior design firm it's a fine first step, and the next is Foundation, from $3,000, on our pricing page.

Where Monograph belongs if the question is hours and margin

Say the question you cannot answer is "which phases lose money" or "how many hours did we burn in Design Development on that house". Then you want timesheets, invoicing and profit reporting in one product that understands fee phases without being taught. That product is Monograph, which describes itself as "Firm Management Software for Architects & Engineers" (monograph.com). It costs $45 to $490 a month per firm, and "Pipeline is offered separately as an add-on" (monograph.com/pricing, October 7, 2026).

monday.com Pro has time tracking, but it tracks time against tasks, not fee phases. In monday.com, you build a project's profitability report from formula columns and a dashboard rather than opening a ready-made one. If timesheets are the whole problem, Monograph answers it on day one, and monday.com runs the projects, the CA log and the proposals beside it. The monday.com vs Monograph comparison has the side-by-side and how studios run both.

What belongs to other tools

Drawings and document management. monday.com holds a link to the set, never the set. If your pain is versioning, markups and consultant access to the model, use Dropbox, Autodesk Construction Cloud or Revit worksharing. Put a link on the project row.

Accounting. The ledger stays in QuickBooks. monday.com can hold the invoice schedule and the paid status, pushed and pulled through a custom app. If the problem is the books themselves, a bookkeeper fixes that first.

A firm that only needs a shared calendar. Three people who want to see each other's site visits need Google Calendar, which they already have.

A firm with several offices and resourcing across them. That firm gets its own quote instead of a package price, and the work starts with the free review.

And a principal who wants a tool that enforces process without anyone in the studio owning it. Whatever the tool, someone in the studio has to own the process. Within a year, a system nobody is responsible for pruning gets as out of date as the spreadsheet it replaced.

When to wait

When you're mid-crisis on a deadline. A system designed in the week before a plan check submittal gets designed around the panic, and the panic is not your normal workload. Finish the submittal, then book the call.

When the principal cannot give two hours a week for two weeks. The build needs one recorded intake call, the demo and one review session where you click through the structure before we automate it. It also needs the decisions that come out of that session. Without those hours, the system gets built around guesses, and guesses are what you have now.

When an operations hire starts next quarter. Let that person own the choice of tool and the shape of the build. A system they inherit is a system they resent; a system they commissioned is one they run.

When a merger, a partner change or a change of accounting system is within three months. The structure encodes who sees what and where the money lives. Settle those first and build once.

What a consultant adds, and when it pays

Five things, in the order they usually matter:

1. An audit of what you already have. We count every board, column, automation and project in your Asana, Trello, spreadsheet or half-built monday.com account, and write up what to keep.
2. A migration whose counts reconcile in both directions, so nothing arrives twice and nothing goes missing. For Studio Yona, a Los Angeles architecture studio, that was 77 projects and 2,109 tasks out of Asana with zero mismatches. The method is on the migration page.
3. Integrations that need custom code. With no native QuickBooks connector, pushing invoices and pulling paid status back is custom code. So is generating your contract and proposal PDFs from the project record.
4. Verification scripts. A 42-check script reads the live account and fails loudly if a column has been renamed or a label deleted. Without one, a renamed column can quietly drop a dashboard to zero.
5. The two clear weeks that nobody at a busy studio has.

Whether it pays is arithmetic you can do before the call. Put a number on the principal's hour. Count the hours a week spent updating the project spreadsheet, rebuilding the invoice schedule and chasing consultants from memory. Multiply to get a year's cost, and compare it with a build from $7,000, paid once.

If the two are close, do it yourself. If the year's cost is far higher, book the review. We'll ask for the sum on the call.

The options side by side

What it costs if you do bring us in

Foundation starts at $3,000 and takes one week. It's one master project board with phases and milestones, a project intake form, three automations, one dashboard and a recorded one-hour training. Full System starts at $7,000 and takes two weeks. It's Foundation plus the proposal pipeline, fees and billing by phase, the CA log for RFIs and submittals, consultant coordination, client approvals, permissions and dashboards.

If you set up monday.com yourself and the account has grown messy, Overhaul fixes it, from $5,000. We audit the account, rebuild the boards and automations nobody trusts and clear out the duplicates. Your data stays where it is.

All three are starting prices. After the free review, you get a fixed quote that covers any custom code and the move from Asana, Trello, Monograph or spreadsheets, reconciled row by row. The care plan is $600 a month for 4 hours or $1,100 a month for 8, covering changes, new automations and a quarterly review. Other work after the build gets its own fixed quote.

The 30-minute review is free and recorded. It ends with a written list of what to fix first, whether or not you buy anything. Inclusions and exclusions are on the pricing page.

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