A residential design studio tracking every project’s hours against contract

The challenge

The client is a high-end residential design studio. The founders wanted to take on more projects without spending their days on administration, and to see where hours were going on every job.

What was in the way

• Projects were built and tracked by hand in Google Sheets.
• Hours worked weren’t visible against what had been contracted.
• The manual setup capped how many projects the studio could run.
• The founders were spending their time on admin instead of design.

The system we designed

We moved the studio to Monday.com with a Master Projects board and a Launch button. Launching a project builds its own board from a template, containing only the phase groups in scope, and writes the new board’s ID back to the master row so the two stay linked.

Every project tracks contracted hours, including change orders, alongside actual and remaining hours. Status mirrors back to the master board, so the founders see every project from one place. Legacy projects were migrated into the new structure by automation.

Key automations and integrations

• One-click launch: a templated project board, scoped to the phases sold.
• Hours sync: actual hours are rolled up and remaining hours calculated against contract and change orders.
• Status sync: project progress is mirrored to the master board.
• Daily updates: days active are refreshed automatically on every project.

The impact

• The studio runs 83 active projects from one master board.
• Overruns surface on their own: one project contracted at 29 hours was flagged after consuming more than 54.
• The hours sync alone has run more than 25,000 times in production.

Why it scales

Launching is one action, and hours and status roll up automatically. Adding projects adds design work, not admin.