Hi all,
I’m hoping someone can help me understand the best-practice structure for a scenario I imagine many organisations face - long-term projects with monthly invoicing. I’ve scheduled the move from Pro to Enterprise, and while I believe Enterprise gives me more formula and board capabilities, it looks like I may still hit the same limitation around dashboards and sub-items.
I’m quite new to Monday but I’ve been building our system from the ground up, and I’d love to sanity check whether I’m missing something obvious before I start building automations.
Our business scenario
We deliver mechanised rail services. I am looking for a solution for our ongoing contract work. Each contract has one master project, but we invoice the client per swing/month.
Key complexity:
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Each month’s value changes based on machinery, hours, delays, travel, etc.
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Even under contract, we may win or lose individual months against competitors.
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We need scenario on/off toggles for financial modelling - I currently have this as a status column and it’s working well.
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We use probability scoring (10/40/70/90/100).
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Some clients have regular monthly work, others are irregular.
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Finance needs rolling 3-month and 12-month revenue forecasts as an example.
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Leadership needs high-level visibility of the parent project, not 60+ individual items broken down per month for the length of the project.
Because of this, the most logical structure for us is:
One parent item = project
Sub-items = each swing/month of invoicing
This keeps everything clean and makes sense operationally.
The problem
Dashboards currently don’t treat sub-item values as first-class data. I believe so anyway from everything I am trying (pro tier currently).
This means:
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I cannot reliably calculate revenue per month from sub-items
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Formula results in sub-items aren’t usable in dashboard widgets
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I am forced to create groups with monthly items just so dashboards read the data
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This becomes extremely messy for multi-year projects
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It prevents me from confidently moving into automations until the structure is right
I’m ideally looking for a logical, native solution — not heavy manipulation, workarounds, or huge duplication of data.
What I’m hoping to find out
Before I continue building:
1. Is there a known best-practice way to:
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Keep the project as the parent item
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Track monthly revenue swings in sub-items
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Have dashboards read sub-item values for forecasting
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Maintain probability and scenario toggles
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Avoid creating hundreds of parent-level items?
2. Does Enterprise offer anything that meaningfully solves this, or will I face the same sub-item dashboard limitations?
3. Am I missing a completely different recommended structure for multi-month projects?
Where I’m at
I haven’t used a Monday consultant yet because our internal sales and operational process was very unstructured until now - I’ve finally mapped everything into logical columns and workflows, and now I want to make sure I build the right foundation before introducing automations.
Any recommendations or examples of how others manage long-running, variable-value projects would be hugely appreciated.
Thanks so much!
Note: I did look for a similar topic, but it wasn’t answered in the thread. Someone reached out directly to the person so apologies if this is answered somewhere. I am struggling to find it.
