Grouping and Summation of Sub-Items for Efficient Resource Management

Feature requests
,
1

We are a construction company and currently use one of your boards to list all tasks within a project. In this board, each item represents a specific task. Each task has its associated sub-items, which refer to the materials required for that task. Each sub-item details the type of material, its unit price, quantity, etc. A single task might need multiple materials, leading to multiple sub-items under it.

One point to note is that different tasks can sometimes require the same materials. This means that different items might have sub-items with the same name, and while the material type and unit price might be consistent, the quantity can vary. For larger projects with multiple items, we often see repetitive sub-items, with the primary difference being their quantities.

Currently, managing our materials information is a cumbersome process. We have to manually compile all the data, sum it up, and then manually create a board to reflect the material costs. This has become a tedious task, resulting in many of our team members being reluctant to use the Monday system to track these data points.

Moreover, we believe that the ability to group sub-items and then directly create a view or board from them is a very common need. Many companies, besides ours, would likely benefit from and use this feature.

To streamline our resource management, we need a feature that can “group” all these sub-items based on their type, and then sum up their quantities and total costs. Ideally, the resultant dataset could be saved as a new board or a specific view. As of now, it seems this feature is not available.

Example:

  1. Current Project Board Structure:

Task A (Item):
Steel Reinforcement (Sub-item): Type - Steel Reinforcement, Unit Price - $10, Quantity - 100
Concrete (Sub-item): Type - Concrete, Unit Price - $50, Quantity - 50

Task B (Item):
Steel Reinforcement (Sub-item): Type - Steel Reinforcement, Unit Price - $10, Quantity - 200
Sand (Sub-item): Type - Sand, Unit Price - $5, Quantity - 300

  1. Desired Grouped View or Board:
    Steel Reinforcement: Total Quantity - 300, Total Cost - $3000
    Concrete: Total Quantity - 50, Total Cost - $2500
    Sand: Total Quantity - 300, Total Cost - $1500

Your consideration to incorporate this functionality would be greatly beneficial for companies like ours, dealing with large-scale projects and intricate resource management.

2

Hi @zzwwhh

Welcome to the community! The app Rollup Subitems allows you to add subitem values and put the outcome in the parent item. From there you can easily use this parent item info (e.g. Total Quantity Steel, or Total Cost Concrete) in any dashboard as the information written to the parent item columns is written in a normal monday.com column.

To be able to separate Steel, Concrete, etc. you can use filtering, this allows for different values for the totals based on the type of material used.