Automate monday.com to Slash Admin Time: A 4-Step Guide

Okay, for those of you that don't know me, my name is Tara. I'm the founder of a company called Simple Day. We are

monday.com platinum partners and advanced delivery partners. I have been running this company for about four

years and we have helped hundreds of companies get started with monday.com. Just a little bit of background about

me. I actually started in marketing where we needed a more complex tool than the tool that we were using. So, I found

Monday, totally fell in love with it. It actually wasn't even called Monday at the time. totally fell in love with it

and started using it. And that's basically how this started. Four years ago, I decided it would really be fun to

be in Monday all day long. That's really how I started this company. And you know, fast forward to where we are now

and we've done a lot of implementations for a lot of different kinds of companies and a lot of training just

helping people get started with Monday. So, one of the things that I always hear about and I think that's like always top

of mind for me is how can people use automation especially how can we use automation to save time? I think you

know every single article that you read everywhere you know definitely on LinkedIn or everything you read that

talks about you know AI and all this and we don't even need to get into AI but just talking about automation really

saves time no matter what role you have in your business. So if you're a CEO or a founder or a project manager,

operations, a manager, really it doesn't matter what where you are and what role you have, I think that there's always

ways that people can save time. And that's a little bit about what we're going to talk about today. So I just

want to start with talking about some of our goals. Now, when we think about like what are things that we actually want to

do to save time, like how can we actually do this? You know, it's it's nice to like have this lofty goal like,

okay, I'm going to save 50% of my time, but we really need to do it in a little bit of a more systematic way, which is

what we're going to review in a minute, because we want to make sure that we are doing the right things that will save us

time and setting ourselves up for success. Like I've seen, you know, some companies, I feel like they're just

building these automations for the sake of building automations, but not necessarily because they're actually

saving time. Now, a lot of areas where I see like what the goals are where you can save time is definitely to eliminate

double data entry. I see a lot of people that are either using two different systems and they're entering data twice

or they're actually entering data in two different boards within Monday. So, that's like definitely one room, one

area that we can look at. Another one is obviously standardizing workflows that you have similar workflows across

different boards. Um, additionally, standardizing workflows in terms of like what can you automate

because it's a repetitive process and then like let's standardize it. Uh, reduce repetitive tasks is definitely

something that can always be looked at. I think that's probably like one of the top thing that people are telling me,

you know, they just have like these repetitive tasks within Monday. I think that we want to work on spotting the

gaps within our workflows. Like where do our workflows break? You know, like if someone's using Monday, hopefully you

guys are using Monday more than a glorified to-do list, then there's usually gaps in the workflow. So, we

need to really, one goal needs to be to understand where those gaps are. I would say that handoffs between different

people on team is definitely something that a goal to look at to see how we're handing things off to people and then

making sure the next steps are clear. Obviously, we want to build automations that can grow with your team. And

obviously, underlying everything is dashboard. So, these are just some of the topics that we're going to cover

today. Now, what I want to jump into is I actually want to jump into a fourstep process. It's actually really

straightforward and really simple, but I think it is critical for every business to do in order to have automations that

can actually save you time. The first step that we need to do is we need to review what you're actually doing now.

Okay? So if you want take out a pen and paper actually we're going to we can do this together or you could write it

anywhere you know some people prefer the computer some people on paper but the first step is to just review which means

review everything that you have so I divided these into three different categories the first is review your

tools now in today's world everyone is working with a million different tools you know I think our tech stack maybe is

like 20 tools I don't know Rosa or Michelle you could And that you could correct me if I'm wrong on that number,

but we're working with a lot of different tools and a lot of different companies work with a lot of different

tools. So, it's important to think about what tools you're using, but also are these tools talking to each other? I'm

going to give you an example. I talk about this example all the time because I think it's such an amazing example for

us about how we were able to save so much admin time by having tools talk to each other. So when we send out

proposals, we use a tool called Ankor and our CRM is with within Monday. So in order to send out a proposal within

Ankor, I obviously need the person's email address, phone number, and company name. So I literally was manually

copying from Monday into Ankor. And I'm like, this is rid at one point I'm like, this is ridiculous. It wasn't that much

time, but it was a repetitive task I was doing every single time. I was sending out a lot of proposals a week. So, we

built an automation that allowed these tools to work together. Now, I change a status in Monday and it automatically

sends all the contact information to Ankor. It also creates proposals and send them out from Gmail, but that's a

separate automation. But think about your tools like review all the tools that you have and figure out are they

talking to each other or they're not. Another great example that I hear from so many companies is they use Monday for

their bidding for their jobs, but then they actually invoice through QuickBooks and there's no connection between Monday

and QuickBooks. So, they're manually going from one tool to another. The same thing. Think about how these tools can

talk to each other. And what tools are requiring you to do double work? Like this. Both of these examples that I just

gave you was essentially double work because I was already entering someone in Monday. Actually, it's not because

they were automated to there from Calendarly, but they were entered in Monday and then they had to be entered

in anchor or an invoice, you know, could be entered in Monday and then in QuickBooks. So, you constantly need to

be looking at are you doing double work because you have different tools. That's the first thing to look at. The second

thing that you need to look at is what are your repetitive tasks? What's taking up most of your time? And is this every

day? Is it once a month? Is it once a week? that's just going to help define this item that we can turn into some

kind of automation. I find it very hard to find people that don't have repetitive tasks in their job. It

doesn't matter what you do, but everyone has some kind of repetitive tasks that they're constantly doing. Or there's

company processes that are constantly reoccurring. One great example is onboarding employees. You know, like you

if you're adding employees or you're working in an HR department, every time you add an employee, that's the same

task every single time. They all need an email address, they all need a computer, they all need access to Zoom or whatever

other tools. That's repetitive and something that can be built into a process. The same thing is with

onboarding clients. So, if we go back to this original example that I gave you about my integration between Ankor and

Monday. So the second part of the integration is as soon as someone signs a contract for me within Inker like it's

one like a deal is one within ankor it actually automates into Monday telling me that the client was signed and then

it kicks off a whole onboarding flow. So that's like another example of things that were totally automated. So back to

this example within ankor this is like I said so as soon as someone is one like we won a client there's an onboarding

process the onboarding process is the same every single time most companies have some kind of onboarding process for

your clients for your customers for your patients that's a repetitive task you need to think about it we need to

categorize it but then you can put it into a system and the last thing that I think people need to look at and review

is you need to Look at the gaps in your system. Like what gets lost? Where do you realize that there's friction or

there's tension? What point in a workflow do things fail? And the last thing that I think is really important

to look at and people don't look at this enough is do you have one source of truth? I'll give you an example where I

see this a lot. A lot of people have a CRM and then they also use Monday, let's say for work management. So obviously

you can have your CRM within Monday or you can have your CRM in another tool, but are you entering that data twice?

Like all of your customers data, are you entering it twice or do you have one source of truth with all of your

customers data and then you're connecting it in different places? So these are the three areas that I want

you to think about. And then I actually want you I'm going to give everyone a minute now and I'd love you to just take

a minute to write a list. I know this is pretty basic, but I think that we don't take enough time to actually do this

within our business. And if you don't take that step back to actually do this, then you are not going to be able to

analyze what you can do better and what you can automate. I definitely would recommend writing this list like have it

written down. And then we are going to go to step number three. Step number three is once you actually have this

list, I want you to add time to all of these things. like how much time does it take you for that double entry within

your two separate tools? How much time does it take you at a lost workflow or these repetitive tasks? How much time

does it take you? I think once you actually add time and quantify this information, you're going to be

surprised by how many things you can actually automate because this is going to add up to a lot of time. Now, the

final step of this is to plan. And I think it's actually relatively simple. I think you just need to almost close your

eyes and you say in an ideal world how would things run given the different technological tools that we have today

between Monday make zapier any AI tool you can do a lot of things like you would be shocked by the amount of things

that you can actually automate. So I would really start with your dream list like what is your dream list and how do

you actually want things to run then okay you may need to make such some adjustments based on certain

requirements or maybe there's you know like a budgetary concern or something like that because the tools are

expensive but I think people would really really be surprised by what can actually happen okay I see a question

here can you connect the CRM with work management in Monday 100% you can connect the two so if we go back to that

original example that I gave. My leads are in my CRM. When a deal is marked as one within the CRM is marked as one, it

kicks off a whole workflow that creates a task in my taskboard with all the onboarding tasks within work management.

That's actually one of the advantages of working within a tool like Monday because you have different products that

all connect seamlessly together. So 100% you can have automations between different ones. also can connect them.

So another example is like I have a revenue board that I use and my revenue board is connected to my deals board

within the CRM. So I don't have like two lists of clients. I have one list of client that's just connected to my

revenue board. So after you've taken the time to hopefully plan this, I really want to encourage you to think about

what you can do now to help you spark your imagination. I want to talk about two specific use cases that we worked on

within our company that really did cut down the admin time. The second use case specifically was that measurement of 50%

as reported by the client. But as I was preparing for this, I also saw this use case and I thought it was actually a

really great use case. So I wanted to share it as well. So the first use case is a company that we worked with a

couple of months ago. The truth is I didn't work on them. Someone on my team named Danny worked on them and they rent

cranes like huge cranes that people use for construction. So they rent they rent out these cranes. They weren't using

Monday. So everything was kind of like all over the place. So the fact that they just had a system and everything

was in one place was already a start to make it better. But I want to show you their whole a little bit about what they

did because I think um you're going to see how much they were able to automate. Okay, back to our use case. Um so Korean

rentals. So basically we we helped set them up within the CRM and we had your standard leads, accounts, contacts, and

deals. This was something that was actually like very new for them because they were tracking this on an Excel

spreadsheet. And anyone who uses Excel knows that you can have five different versions of Excel and it's just not as

powerful as a tool like Monday. So just getting to a tool where people could communicate, you know, was something

that was very helpful. Now what happened in this company when someone decided that they wanted to rent a crane so that

they gave like a verbal approval or they approved on email, they needed to get a contract. Now I do want to say that

there were two different kinds of cranes that could have been rented. I honestly, like I said, I was the project manager

here, so I don't know the difference between the cranes, but you'll see why it's important later because the

workflow later is going to reflect these two different things. So, what happens when a deal is one, so first it needs to

go to the contracting board. Okay? Because on the contracted board, that's where they dealt with sending out the

contracts and just keeping track of all of that. But it also went to a project board. Now, like I said, they had two

different kinds of crane rentals. So they had two different kinds of projects boards. I don't remember the names

actually. You'll see it in the next slide because I showed you a copy of the automations. But what they did is they

automated all the tasks that you needed to do. If you look at these three automations, and this is essentially

like these quick automations were what saved them so much time. The first one is when status changes to one, create an

item in the contracting and connect the two boards. So we solve that problem of having like duplicate data because we're

just connecting the boards and we're automatically putting them in the contracting which is the next step of

the process. So it's automatically saying to the next person tag you're in charge now. Now you can see the last two

automations here are basically like if crane type is GME so then it's going to create a board from one kind of template

and if crane type is GMA create a board from a second template. Now if you look over here at the next slide, so you can

see this is an example of their template for GMA. You can see over here that they had 46 sub items. So before they had a

process like this, they literally were writing out like 46 tasks that they needed to do for every single client and

they were constantly renting out cranes. Can you think of how much time they were saving by having this process? someone

signs, it automatically creates a new board for them with all of the tasks that they needed to do. So, it was a

pretty easy process for them to follow once it was set up because it's just an issue of just doing the tasks. Now, like

I said, these boards were connected, so we still maintained that one source of truth. And then, like I showed you, the

tasks were automatically added. So, now we're going to move on to a client of ours. They're called Marshall Renee

Construction. Just to give you a little bit about the structure of their company, their team includes over 30

different field crews, multiple estimators, admin and staff. They basically were getting 70 to 100 bid

offers per day, so they were pretty large construction company. When we first started with them, they basically

were using two different CRM for different target audiences. They had no handoff process to when a bid was won.

They were manually scheduling 30 different crews at a time. They had double data entry because things like

when they scheduled a crew, they needed to send them the name of the place of where the construction was, all the

details about it. There was no visibility into any of their marketing performance and there also was unclear,

unclear boundaries of where where data lived because they were also using SharePoint. So they have a lot of images

and they had construction plans and and all these different things that needed to be associated with an account, but no

one knew where everything was because things weren't organized. So what we did is we came in, I hope you can see this,

and we basically built out a CRM for them. So you could see they have lead leads and deals and contacts and

accounts. Pretty standard Monday CRM. Again, they had a CRM two different places. So going from not having that to

having it was definitely a big deal because everything's organized in one place. Similar to the cream company,

they also had a job board. So anytime a job was won, it automatically went to the job board. I hope that you're

noticing a pattern because I feel like I'm I keep on repeating myself about the same things. But again, this was a

repetitive process that was automated. So every time they don't need to think about, oh, we have a new client, what do

we do? It's just automated. we know okay we have this client this is our process let's just get started what they also

did which was very interesting and this kind of connects back to this double entry is like I said they had different

crew members and they had a separate board for the crew members you could see here under divisions they had crew

members and within their crew members they had each of the people that worked on the crews I believe that they also

had the rates but I'm not 100% sure like how much each crew charged but if I'm wrong about that definitely we've done

other use cases where people also have this information. And then all of a sudden by connecting boards and pulling

in information about rates and all of that, then you're you a have one source of truth, right? Because you're not like

adding the information twice, but b then you could do job costing right on the board because you know how much time

they spend. So you can multiply it by their rate. So that was something that was like a huge timesaver for them

because they were constantly like, you know, seeing which person is on which board. And then obviously the scheduling

which was like a huge piece of this. And then we created three different dashboards for them. They had a leads

dashboard, a deals dashboard, and a jobs dashboard. And essentially, we all know that having dashboards within Monday is

something that I think really does cut a lot of time. It's not necessarily like admin time, but it's maybe it's admin

time if they're putting together information for you. But having this information at your fingertips is

something that's critical and it's something that I talk about a lot just as being a business owner or you know

potentially managing a team is that you need to understand like where your projects are holding. You need to

understand what your investment you're putting in, what are you getting out of it, you know, how are your employees

doing, how's your revenue. Each business obviously has different important metrics that they need to be working on

and understand and define. But for this example, they were doing tons and tons of marketing and they had no visibility

into what ads are actually bringing us revenue. Now, as soon as you have a way to take those leads, automatically put

them into one CRM, pull in the place where they're coming from, then you can automatically track like, "Hey, we did

an ad on YouTube, and we can see all of these leads that we've gotten, which equals X number of dollars in revenue

while we only spends X number of dollars in marketing." I can't stress enough like as a business owner how important

this is to have this information because you really need to understand like I mean it could be different for each

company but you really need to understand the metrics behind what's important for your company. So, not

having to do that manually, which is what they were doing beforehand, is something that cut down a lot on the

admin tasks because they had these all these different dashboards that someone was manually figuring out at the end of

every month and now all of a sudden they had them here and they were automated and they didn't need to do anything in

order to get this information. So that's the second example, a second use case, you know, that we found really made a

difference in terms of the admin, you know, cutting down on admin work. Now, I want to take a step back to go back to

this question. You know, when we look at in an ideal world, how would things run within your business? I want to point

out just some of the different ways that Monday can help with these automations. Now, I don't know everyone's level here

of Monday, but I just want to take a minute to explain some of the things that you can do to cut down on this

admin task. So, one of the basic things that I see, and we kind of touched on it, is reoccurring tasks. People have

reoccurring tasks all the time. There's a very easy automation that you can set up in Monday that just says, you know,

every time period, let's just say every month, create a task. Like for me, I have tasks at the end of the month that

I always need to do. I have tasks every two weeks I always need to do and it's simply the automation automatically

creates these tasks. You want to get more complicated, you can do more complex automations, but there is a lot

that you can do in terms if you're just creating automations for these automated tasks. That's going to save you a lot of

time. The next thing you know is looking at automations. The next thing to look at is to look at workflows. If anyone's

familiar with workflows, workflows is kind of I would say like Monday's version two of their automations. I

don't know if that's the right way to say it. Um they actually renamed visit to AI workflows and it's basically more

complex workflows but what you can do is use these workflows to do things like you know what I spoke about is

reoccurring tasks. So I just want to get back to some other key ways that you can and we discussed this a little bit in

the beginning key ways that you can cut your admin time. So obviously we spoke about just now the reoccurring tasks

also reoccurring projects. Think about that like onboarding a new client, onboarding employees or new projects. It

doesn't necessarily only need to be tasks. It can also be projects. The next way to cut down is to also think like we

said in the beginning is that handover. When you hand something over from one person to another. So instead of having

to you know to like let's say write someone in Slack or tag someone you can automatically like when an item is this

status change the person or when an item moves to a group change the person. So thinking about that handover I think is

critical. Other things that we mention is just the double entry to always keep on thinking about that. I really would

take the time honestly to look into the automations and the workflows and see what's out there. Like you would be

shocked by the different automations that people can do. I actually was on the phone on a call with someone today

and he showed me a really cool he actually built it in Monday vibe. But what it was was his company was

constantly creating purchase orders to send to their finance department. It was very intense like intensive. So they

basically like uploaded all of their products and he created a VI that they could automatically create a purchase

order and send it to the finance team and then the finance team can easily approve it. So think outside the box.

Like I'm I really just want to push you to realize that there's so much that you can do in terms of automating your

workflows. I think sometimes our imagination is what limits us. So I think it's important to just take the

time and think like okay I don't have any limits. What do I want to happen? you know, I want these five things to

automatically happen. I actually spoke to someone yesterday, a new client, and he's like, "Okay, we're using these

three tools, three different tools where we track information, and we have a monthly meeting, and I want data from

all those tools to come into one place." Like, he was like, "It it's it's not possible." I'm like, "Yeah, it is

possible." Like, you may need to be uh, you know, take more time to build out the workflow, build out the scenario,

but there's a lot that you can do to cut down on this admin time. I think the biggest problem is people don't spend

the time thinking about where that can be done. Obviously, you need to build it and obviously it takes time to build it,

but thinking is the first step. Like we went through that four-step process. Thinking and figuring out where you can

cut down on time is the first step. Then, you know, it's like up to your creativity in terms of what you can

build. So, I guess I challenge you with taking the time to think about your workflows, thinking about what is your

admin work and where you think you can cut down and coming up with ideas. So, I just want to say thank you and let me

know if there's any questions that I can answer before we wrap up. Peter, thank you for your question. I see if a

company has nothing as in construction focus, would you roll out I'm assuming you need mean work management rather

than CRM or start with CRM and add work? They have no eyes on the project management. Everything is in paper and

folder. That's a great question, Peter. You probably need CRM and work management. I would figure out which is

the biggest issue for you right now. Meaning like are your projects falling through the cracks and therefore you're

not making money anymore or are you losing all your leads? Like which is the biggest fire? And I would start with the

biggest fire if you can't do both at the same time. I think that both of them are really important. I would figure out

just what the biggest fire is and I would start there because you got to start somewhere. So like you know patch

up the biggest hole first. That's that's what I would recommend. I definitely would get everything out of paper for

sure. Okay. So work I see Peter you just wrote back work management is a priority. I would start with work

management then if that's your priority I would go to that. Okay. Another question from Paul. Thank you. I have

hundreds of automations set up across 10 to 12 boards currently and also have been hesitant to start using workflows

on the pro plan. Is it easy to transition or what would you suggest in that scenario? Okay, so first of all, on

the pro plan, you're limited to the number of workflows that you're allowed to use. I would check the pricing. I

honestly Monday's constantly changing their pricing, so I don't want to say anything regarding pricing. I would

check the pricing for workflows. So that's that's number one. Assuming that the pricing makes sense for you, usually

you can translate like when you do this transition a number of automations into one workflow. The reason that you may

want to do this is because it's easier to manage over time. But if it's something that works for you and you

don't need to change it, so you may not have to transition it. You know what I'm saying? Like I've seen boards that have

like hundreds of automations and they're just like they can't find anything. I've also seen companies that had like I

think we did one it was like 60 automations or something or maybe 40 and like we put it into like one. We were

able to build the whole thing in one workflow. So sometimes you can do that. There's two reasons you would do it. A

if the management is too hard for you of all these automations or B if you want to add a feature that only workflows has

and automations doesn't have. That would be why I would consider it. Workflows definitely does have more options than

automations because automations are more linear and workflows are not as linear. Like the other day I was actually

recording a YouTube video and I did a video on a match automation. So match automation is when you match one thing

from one board to another board. So within regular automations you could just say like okay matches two

information but what happens which is very true like what happens if there's no match so then what happens? So within

workflows you have the option to say if it matches do this but if there's no match then do that. That is what I would

suggest. And I'm reading here David. I have to say, "Hi, David. I'm glad to have you." David is actually a workflow

master. So, he probably can answer more questions than I can on workflows, but he is a very big fan of workflows and

has done unbelievable things in workflows that initially we built out. He was one he is one of our clients um

that initially we built out with make. So, if you're using make and you want to remove make to use things for workflows,

that is something else to consider that I didn't bring up. I really just want to say thank you for everyone that joined.

I hope that you got some insights and some ideas for how you can help reduce your admin work when you're working

within monday.com. I really want to thank you all for joining and have a great day. Hit the like button if you

enjoy this video and remember to subscribe to receive tips and tricks on how to use monday.com. Thanks so much

for watching and I'll see you soon.