Providing more visibility to your company’s project budget data is typically the first step toward making better decisions. However, visibility alone isn’t enough, and here’s where the concept of a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) comes into play. In this blog post, you’ll learn what financial control in Monday.com means, how to build a single source of truth for projects and budgets in Monday.com, and how it fits within the context of project delivery, to make faster decisions, clearer accountability, and better planning.
A SSOT avoids decentralized, fragmented tools that result in teams guessing over project delivery, project budgets, and costs, leading them to make awful decisions when forecasting or overall developing unhealthy projects across their portfolio.
Combining the software where you’re already managing projects, your budgets and their costs, changes the game, given that it brings everyone under the “same roof”, allowing shared views at different stakeholder levels, proving a more critical view of the project advancement, and allowing to make better informed decisions, and faster. Allow the team to shift faster when it’s due. Same numbers, same progress, same reality.
Projects are constantly generating data, such as tasks completed, hours worked, scope changes, risks, and, of course, costs and budgets. If your projects live in Monday.com, but your budgets live in other tools, this is not very accessible and not coherent. A single source of truth (SSOT) is not just one tool; it’s a structured environment where everything is connected.
By being logical about this united approach, stakeholders don’t have to reconcile multiple versions of “the truth,” and decisions can be made using live, consistent data.
For project and portfolio management, this means your operational reality (what the team is doing) and your financial reality (what it costs and what’s left in the budget) are visible together, not in two separate universes.
In many teams, Monday.com is home for project planning and collaboration. Boards, automations, status columns, and ownership fields make it easy to see how work is progressing, but when it comes to budget management, things often take a different path. Because:
This fragmentation usually happens because the budget & costs fields aren’t part of the initial board design, as financial data is sometimes considered “too sensitive” or “too complicated” to bring into the project tool (Monday in this case).
As by default, there’s no standard app to handle budget structures, categories (CAPEX/OPEX, direct/indirect), or forecasts in a way that makes sense for non-finance users, this data stays out of the project tool.
As a consequence of this fragmentation, this situation creates a multiverse of realities where one is in Monday.com, where the work happens, and another is spreadsheets, where the money is tracked, creating team data silos, misunderstandings, delays, and misaligned decisions, and expectations start to grow.
Making decisions such as extending the scope for “X” project without knowing the impact on spend, and prioritizing low-impact work while high-cost items keep slipping.
Without a single source of truth, someone has to manually export project data from Monday.com, match it with spreadsheet budgets, and resolve discrepancies between versions
As you can see, this is beyond trivial, given that it isn’t just administrative work; it’s time taken away from analysis, planning, and actual delivery projects, increasing the possibility of delivering errors affecting budgets, forecasts, projects, and even executive decisions.
A single source of truth brings both together in a way that’s easier to understand and act upon, and this can be solved simply by installing Budgety for Monday on your boards. Budgety for Monday isn’t just a cost-tracking add-on. It’s a dedicated budget management layer that connects project data with financial data in a structured and intuitive way.
Having this central for budgets and costs for your projects in the same place you’re managing your projects will allow you to link project boards to overall budgets, specify the costs within each of them, classify them according to industry standard costs, such as CAPEX, OPEX, and which are indirect costs.
Nevertheless, by the possibility of forecasting your project budgets, it’s also possible to check in real time how much has been spent on each initiative or task, how much budget remains, and check how actual spending compares to your plan. Making project budget reporting accessible for every stakeholder.
By having all this project data centralized, instead of juggling multiple tools, teams open one workspace and get both stories at once: the story of progress and the story of spend.
A single source of truth is ultimately about confidence: confidence that everyone is looking at the same reality, and that decisions are based on data that matches how work is actually progressing.