The ultimate monday.com admin cheat sheet

This is a curated reference for anyone responsible for managing an Enterprise monday.com account. It’s not a feature tour, it’s a practical index of the things you actually need to find quickly, with the important caveats updated for how the platform works now.

Users

There are four user types on every monday.com account. Admins manage the entire account: users, billing, security, and settings. Members are your core team with editing access. Viewers are read-only, free and unlimited on all plans, and don’t consume paid seats. Guests are external people (clients, contractors, vendors) who can only access Shareable boards they’ve been explicitly invited to.

On Enterprise plans, you can also create Custom Roles: tailored permission sets that sit within the Member tier, useful for granting specific capabilities (say, user management for a department head) without full admin rights.

Guest availability and limits vary by plan. Guests are not available on the Basic plan. On Standard, you can have up to three guests for free at the account level; every fourth guest counts as a paid member seat. On Pro and Enterprise, guests are unlimited.

Pro tip: you can invite multiple users at once by including all their email addresses at the invite step.

Teams

Teams let you group users and add them to workspaces, boards, and dashboards in bulk rather than one by one. Set teams up before you start inviting users and the onboarding of each new person becomes a matter of adding them to the right team rather than manually granting individual board access. Find Teams under your profile avatar.

What to do when

A new user joins. Invite them (Administration, Users, Invite), assign the appropriate user type, and add them to the relevant team. Don’t create one-off permission sets unless their role is genuinely unusual. If you’ve purchased multiple monday.com products (CRM, Dev, etc.) you’ll be prompted to grant product access at the invite step.

A user leaves. Go to Administration, Users, Board Ownership. Transfer their board ownership to another team member. Do the same for Automation Ownership. Check the Content Directory for any dashboards or docs they own. Then deactivate them. Do this within 24 hours of departure. Note: integrations connected under their credentials will disconnect and need to be manually reconnected under a new owner.

A new team comes onto monday.com. Start with a Playground workspace and include the Basic Training board from the Template Centre. Decide whether the new team needs their own workspace (if their work is independent) or whether they should be introduced to an existing one (if their work is closely connected to a team already on the platform).

Permissions

monday.com stacks permissions in layers: account, workspace, board, and column. Each layer can only restrict what the layer above allows. If something isn’t working at the board level, check the workspace and account settings above it before assuming the board configuration is broken.

Board types: Main boards are visible to all workspace members (all plans). Private boards are invite-only and internal-only, available on Pro and Enterprise plans only (no guests). Shareable boards are invite-only and can include external guests, available on Standard and above.

Board permissions: accessible via the three-dot menu, top right of any board. Controls who can edit structure, edit content, and view the board.

Column permissions: accessible via the three-dot menu on any column header. Lets you restrict view or edit access to specific columns, useful for salary data, margins, or anything sensitive sitting inside a shared board.

Account permissions: Administration, Permissions. Sets the account-wide ceiling for what each user type can do: create workspaces, export data, invite guests, and so on.

Importing and exporting data

To import from Excel: in your board, click the arrow next to New Item, select Import Items, and follow the prompts. The first row of your spreadsheet should match your board’s column names. Current limits: under 100 columns and 10,000 rows per import. If your spreadsheet has multiple sheets, only the first sheet imports, so you may need to run the import multiple times.

To export a board: the fastest method is the export icon in the board’s top-right menu. This exports the active view to Excel.

Workspaces, boards, groups, and items

Workspaces are the top-level containers. Create them from the top-left menu. Choose Open (joinable by any member) or Closed (invite-only) based on the sensitivity of the content.

Boards sit inside workspaces. Add a new board via the + Add button, from a template, or as a new form. Change board type (Main, Private, Shareable) via the three-dot menu next to the board name or under Board Settings.

Groups are the colour-coded sections within a board. Add a group via the + Add button or the three-dot menu next to an existing group name. Use Ctrl+G to collapse and expand all groups.

Items are the rows in your board. Add them via + Add Item, or copy and paste text from elsewhere. Item terminology can be customised under Board Settings, Customise, if “task” or “lead” fits your workflow better than “item.”

Subitems live inside items. Add them by right-clicking on an item or via the three-dot menu. Note: subitems don’t support Button columns.

Connect board and mirror columns

Connect board columns link items across boards. Mirror columns pull data from a connected board into your current view. Together they’re among the most powerful features in the platform for building connected workflows across teams.

Practical caution: mirror only what you genuinely need to see in the current board. Over-mirroring creates maintenance overhead and can affect board performance. It’s often cleaner to click through to the connected item than to mirror every column across.

Scale note: mondayDB 2.0 (rolled out to Enterprise accounts from September 2024) significantly increased limits. Enterprise accounts now support 100,000 items per board, 100,000 connected items per board, and up to 500,000 items per dashboard (for supported reporting widgets). The connected boards per board limit remains 60 for standard boards, with Portfolio supporting up to 200. If you were previously working around platform limits in a large PMO or CRM setup, it’s worth revisiting what’s now possible.

Viewing and tracking activity

The Board Activity Log shows every change made to a board: who changed what, and when. Access it via Activity in the top-right corner of any board. You can filter by person, time, group, or column (filtering requires Pro or Enterprise). Automations appear in the log with a robot icon, so you can verify whether an automation fired correctly.

The Item Activity Log tracks changes to a single item. Open an item and select Activity Log. The Subitem Activity Log works the same way for subitems.

Last Viewed shows who on your team last opened a board and when.

All activity logs can be exported to Excel via the Excel icon in the Activity Log tab.

Automations

Every automation has a trigger, a condition, and one or more actions. Access the Automations Centre from any board and either use a pre-built recipe or create a custom one. You can add multiple actions to a single recipe, toggle automations on and off without deleting them, duplicate them across boards, and save custom recipes as templates.

The Automation Activity log shows whether each automation fired successfully, failed, or is pending. Use this before assuming an automation is broken.

Integrations

Integrations connect monday.com to external tools (Salesforce, Jira, Zendesk, email platforms, and so on) using the same trigger-condition-action logic as automations. Access them via Integrate in the board’s top-right menu.

If an off-the-shelf integration doesn’t exist for your tool, or doesn’t do what you need, middleware platforms (Zapier, Make) and the monday.com API are the next layer. That’s where custom integration work sits, and where the complexity increases enough to be worth a proper scoping conversation.

Filters

monday.com offers three filtering options within a board: the search bar (top left), the person filter (for filtering by assignee), and the advanced filter (for custom multi-condition rules). To keep a filter set for ongoing use, save it as a new view and rename it. The dynamic person filter is particularly useful for creating a single “My Tasks” view that shows each team member only their own items.

Dashboards

Dashboards visualise data from one or more boards. The practical difference between a dashboard and a Blank board view: dashboards pull from multiple boards; board views only show data from the board they’re in.

Design dashboards with the audience in mind, starting from the questions they need answered rather than from what data is available. Standardise your column names and status labels across boards before building dashboards: inconsistent labelling across boards creates fragmented reporting.

Connected boards per dashboard: up to 50 on Enterprise, 20 on Pro, 5 on Standard, 1 on Free. There is also a maximum of 20,000 total items, subitems, and linked items across all connected boards per dashboard. Interactive widgets (Gantt, Timeline, Workload, Table) cap at 20,000 items regardless of plan. For Enterprise accounts using mondayDB 2.0, reporting widgets such as Charts and Numbers can handle up to 500,000 items.

Toggle off Live Data if a dashboard is slow to load and you don’t need real-time figures. You can also schedule dashboard exports via the three-dot menu in the top-right.

Archive and delete

Archive keeps data intact indefinitely and removes it from active view. Deleted items go to Trash for 30 days and are then permanently gone, with no recovery option. Default to Archive when in doubt. Delete only when you’re certain you won’t need the data again.

To restore archived boards: profile avatar, Archive, find the board, three-dot menu, Unarchive. Note: if you restore a deleted workspace from Trash, it restores as an empty shell. You must then restore each board from Trash individually.

Security

2FA, SSO, and SCIM are all configured in Administration, Security. If a user needs these settings reset, go to Administration, Users, click the three dots next to their name, and select Reset.

The Content Directory (Administration, Content Directory) is an audit view of all private and shareable boards on the account, including who owns them. Use it to understand what exists and who can grant access.

Maintenance habits worth building

• Push teams to Archive rather than Delete whenever they’re clearing out old work
• Actively archive boards, dashboards, and docs that are no longer in use. A clean account is easier to onboard into and easier to audit
• Use the Scheduled Cleaning feature in Administration to automatically archive boards that haven’t been edited in a set period, reducing the manual review load
• Check the Apps Marketplace periodically. New apps are added regularly and occasionally one solves a problem you’ve been working around
• Enable monday.labs features selectively if you want early access to beta functionality

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