From spreadsheets to boards: Get project budget control for Monday.com

If you’re still using spreadsheets to get project budget control while your team operates with Monday.com, indeed, you’re not the only one, but it’s also true that it's costing you time, accuracy, and visibility (which means more money spent!). As your projects move faster and budgets are getting tighter, relying on spreadsheets, disconnected from the software tool where the work happens, makes collaboration harder, decisions slower, and makes your project management less efficient than it could be.

If you want to take full control of your project management and budgets, and associate those costs and expenses without leaving Monday.com. First, it’s important to learn about the advantages of centralizing your project data (such as budgets, costs, and expenses)

Why do we claim that spreadsheets hold teams back?

As Monday.com is a software tool focused on powering and centralizing the way your team works on projects, the collaboration process gets tighter, tasks move, and visibility gets stronger across teams. When it comes to budget management and cost tracking, most teams still rely on spreadsheets. And that's bad news your your projects.

Manually tracking budgets in an Excel sheet means version chaos, hidden errors, zero collaboration (or at least chaotic, and somehow limited), and slows decision-making because of the lack of visibility. For project managers, finance leads, team leads, and operations teams, this old-school approach kills momentum, and for the Project Management Office (PMO), this is a problem regarding the overall visibility and project portfolio control.

Copy and pasting budgets between Excel and Monday.com creates a crazy silo very prone to errors.

What’s the actual problem with spreadsheets when controlling project budgets?

While Monday.com excels at organizing the way your team is working on X project or X amount of projects, it also keeps them aligned, but let’s be honest, until now, there was probably no necessity of having a financial management of some sort. But now you have, this is probably you're reading this. So, keep going...

Managing budgets associated with different projects (in the shape of boards, in Monday.com), tracking costs (direct/indirect), expenses as CAPEX/OPEX, establishing cost ownership, and even forecasting budgets, are basic aspects of project finances that are missing in the platform or at least those require heavy customization.

As a study made by Monday.com alongside RepData LLC, they mentioned in this blog:

92% of employees say productivity is a key to success in businesses (2023).
80% of employees worldwide believe that collaboration and productivity software tools improve employee engagement.
Only 26% of employees fully agree they have the tools to streamline work processes.

As this last statistic shows, it falls in the "not having the financial area controlled and integrated where the projects are being managed".

As a result of this situation, teams need to resort to external solutions, a.k.a. spreadsheets, to handle financials. By acting like this, but out of necesity, teams are breaking the flow, adding manual steps, and creating silos. When real-time budget visibility is critical, Monday.com alone can’t provide the necessary financial data to have an integrated picture of your projects.

Because of this situation, teams usually struggle with daily:

No real-time updates. Numbers fall behind reality.
Limited collaboration. No easy way to share ownership.
High error risk. Formula breaks and manual input mistakes.
Siloed data. Budgets live outside your workflow tools.
Zero visibility for executives. It’s hard to pull clean, accurate reports.

If you’re managing budgets between spreadsheets and Monday.com, you’re juggling two disconnected systems and missing opportunities by not acting fast and staying in control.

What benefits does having project budget data integrated in the same project management tool?

Real-time visibility. If your budgets live in the same tool, financial data updates alongside your project progress, providing instant access to budget progress without manual work.
Team alignment. Project managers, finance teams, and team leaders now have alignment about spending, priorities, and timelines without chasing separate files or tools.
Faster decisions. It eases spotting trends, catching overruns, and making informed adjustments on the fly. Forget about exporting, reformatting, or syncing spreadsheets to understand where things stand.
Fewer errors. Manual entry and spreadsheet juggling are now reduced, and the gatekeeping is now democratized. Those wrong formulas, outdated numbers, or duplicate versions are no longer there. It reduces the risk of human error and ensures shared visibility.
Better collaboration. Everyone in the team can now oversee what they need without confusion. You get ownership, transparent communication, and fewer surprises.

How does Monday.com help having project budget control?

Monday.com gives structure, automation, and team alignment. It’s a relevant platform to plan and track work, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. But when it comes to deep budget control, like forecasting, CAPEX/OPEX, or direct/indirect tracking, or financial reporting, it needs a boost. And here’s where Budgety for Monday, available at Monday.com's Marketplace, provides a great solution.

Budgety is available for Jira, and now, for Monday.com

Budgety is a budget management app for Monday.com that helps you track costs, expenses, and forecast spending, allowing teams to stay aligned, right where your work happens.

What Budgety for Monday.com does?

Budgety turns Monday.com into a simple budget tracking platform, giving finance, ops, marketing, team leaders, and IT teams (and whoever else who needs it) a shared, real-time view of their numbers.

It helps you manage costs and expenses across projects without jumping into spreadsheets. It also allows you to keep managing your projects (or boards in this case) inside Monday.com, where your work is already happening.

What does Budgety for Monday.com do that a spreadsheet can't do?

Among the advantages Budgety for Monday.com offers, you can get a lot of benefits, all this, without building formulas or wrangling broken spreadsheets:

Feature	Spreadsheets	Budgety for Monday.com
Real-time updates	❌ Manual refresh	✅ Instant sync with boards
Budget categorization (CAPEX/OPEX)	❌ Manual labels	✅ Built-in categories
Forecast vs actual comparison	❌ Complex to set up	✅ Automatic & visual insights
Report generation	❌ Time-consuming	✅ One-click, real-time reports
Collaboration	❌ Single-user ownership	✅ Multi-owner, in-platform

How is Budgety for Monday.com useful in real life?

Budgety for Monday.com brings real-life clarity to project spending by letting teams track, manage, and adjust budgets directly where the work happens, as you can see in these few examples:

Marketing campaigns: It helps to track campaign budgets across multiple channels. Assign costs per ad or event. See real-time spend vs forecast and stay on top of ROAS.
IT projects: To control CAPEX for hardware, OPEX for services. Link every cost to a task and stay in control of upgrades, licenses, or dev hours.
Operation teams: When managing indirect costs across departments. Track real costs vs planned budgets and adjust before overspending hits.

The smart way to manage project budgets

As you can see, there’s always a bright side when bringing your projects together, and managing project budgets shouldn’t slow your team down; on the contrary, it should drive smarter, faster decisions.

Budgety for Monday.com allows you to ditch that spreadsheet chaos and bring everything into a real collaborative space, and that means spending less time on reporting and more time on action. Learn how by booking a demo.

Centralize your project data, and get a single source of truth. Get CAPEX/OPEX, and direct/indirect cost and expenses tracking, and reporting that’s useful for both project leads and executives. Whether you're in marketing, IT, or finance, whatever the team that needs to crunch those numbers, Budgety is there to give you the clarity, control, and compliance required for your projects.