Published under The Tool Hat on HatStacked.com

Before we grew into an ERP system, we lived inside Monday.com. It was our project planner, our sales order board, our HR hub, and our sanity-saver. If you’re running a small business and feel like you’re drowning in spreadsheets, this post will show you how Monday.com can be that middle ground between chaos and control.

What is Monday.com, Really?

If you ask the company, Monday.com is a "work operating system." That sounds a little like something your IT guy says when he wants you to stop asking questions. In reality, Monday.com is a mix of project management, collaboration, and automation. Think of it as a digital whiteboard with superpowers.

For small businesses, it solves one of the most painful problems: keeping everyone on the same page without fifty versions of an Excel file floating around.

Boards are the backbone. Each board is essentially a table with customizable columns: text, status, numbers, dates, checkboxes, people, and so on. You can slice and dice your board into views: Kanban for tasks, Gantt for timelines, or dashboards for the birds-eye look.

The real kicker: you don’t need to be technical to set it up. Monday.com is drag-and-drop, color-coded, and forgiving enough that a business owner without a software background can make it hum in a day.

Why We Fell for It

Before we invested in an ERP, Monday.com was our everything. We had boards for sales orders, boards for marketing campaigns, boards for onboarding new hires, and boards for product launches. It was flexible, it was cloud-based, and it kept our growing team aligned.

The real "a-ha" moment came when we paired it with Zapier and BigCommerce. Suddenly, orders placed online flowed directly into Monday.com. Our sales team didn’t need to live in BigCommerce or ask ops for daily reports. The orders just showed up as tasks, ready to be processed.

That meant:

• Sales had visibility without logging into BigCommerce.
• Operations could track order status in real time.
• No one had to export CSVs every morning like it was 1998.

This setup worked brilliantly until we hit scale where a full ERP made more sense. But for years, it was enough to manage thousands of orders without breaking the bank.

Features Small Businesses Will Actually Use

Let’s skip the generic sales pitch. Here’s what matters if you’re a small business owner:

1. Boards and Views

Boards are where the action happens. For example:

• Sales Orders Board: Track order date, customer, product, fulfillment status, and shipping info.
• HR Onboarding Board: New hire name, paperwork status, training modules, mentor assigned.
• Marketing Campaign Board: Campaign name, platform, budget, creative status, and ROI.

The ability to flip the same board into a Kanban view or a Calendar view is huge. No one argues about "how to track things" because everyone can view it in their preferred style.

2. Automations

This is where you start feeling like a wizard. Automations let you say things like:

• When status changes to "Shipped," notify the customer service rep.
• When a new order is created, assign it to the operations team.
• Every Friday at 3 PM, generate a report for the boss.

We used automations heavily in our sales order setup. Orders that came in from Zapier were automatically tagged and assigned, cutting down hours of manual work each week.

3. Integrations

The marketplace is wide, but for small businesses, the heavy hitters are:

• Zapier: Connects Monday.com to almost anything.
• Slack/Teams: Keeps updates flowing to chat channels.
• Outlook/Google Calendar: Syncs tasks and deadlines.
• QuickBooks/Xero: Light accounting tie-ins, though we found these a little limited.

The Zapier + BigCommerce combo was our sweet spot. It was enough to build a sales order system that functioned like an ERP, without needing to pay ERP-level prices.

4. Dashboards

Dashboards let you roll up data across boards. For small businesses, this means:

• Total sales orders this month.
• Marketing spend vs. leads generated.
• Open HR tickets.

It turns your messy boards into clean charts that make you look like you have your act together during Monday morning meetings.

How Monday.com Fit Into Our Business

Here are a few concrete ways we used it before making the ERP jump:

• Sales Order Management: Orders came from BigCommerce into Monday.com via Zapier. Fulfillment team worked directly off the board. Statuses triggered automations and alerts.
• Marketing: Campaigns tracked with creative deadlines and budgets. Dashboard gave leadership quick ROI visibility.
• HR: New hires tracked with checklists. When paperwork was completed, automations moved the status forward.
• Inventory Projects: Not real inventory management (that was handled elsewhere), but project-level inventory initiatives like warehouse moves or cycle counts.

The key takeaway: Monday.com didn’t replace specialized systems, but it let us tie them together.

Related: Think Your Suppliers Are Reliable? Better Double-Check

Pros and Cons for Small Businesses

Pros

• Ridiculously flexible: Build boards for anything.
• Visual and intuitive: Color-coded, drag-and-drop simplicity.
• Great integrations: Especially with Zapier.
• Scales surprisingly well: Works for two people or two hundred, up to a point.
• Affordable entry point: Cheaper than ERPs and more powerful than spreadsheets.

Cons

• Not a true ERP: Don’t expect advanced inventory or financial management.
• Pricing scales with users: It can feel expensive if your team is large.
• Learning curve: While it’s easy to start, mastering automations and dashboards takes time.
• Data silo risk: If you don’t integrate well, Monday.com can become just another place data lives.

Pricing Breakdown

Monday.com offers tiered pricing:

• Individual (Free): Up to 2 users, basic boards. Fine for freelancers.
• Basic ($9 per user/month): Unlimited boards, but limited views. Good for very small teams.
• Standard ($12 per user/month): Adds automations and integrations. This is the sweet spot for small businesses.
• Pro ($19 per user/month): Adds advanced automations, time tracking, and private boards.
• Enterprise (Custom): If you’re at this stage, you probably already need an ERP.

For us, the Standard plan plus Zapier was enough to run sales orders, marketing, and HR without feeling boxed in.

When Monday.com Stops Being Enough

Here’s the honest truth: Monday.com is amazing until you outgrow it. For us, the tipping point came when we needed:

• Deeper inventory controls.
• Automated financial reporting.
• Complex multi-warehouse operations.

That’s when we graduated to a full ERP. But without Monday.com, we would’ve drowned years earlier. It gave us the breathing room to grow until ERP was worth the investment.

Related: Basic Small Business Accounting: Finally Explained Like a Normal Human Would

Final Verdict: Where Monday.com Fits in the Tool Hat

If the Tool Hat is about giving small business owners practical software, Monday.com deserves a front-row seat. It’s flexible, powerful, and still approachable. It’s not the final stop on your software journey, but it’s the perfect bridge between spreadsheets and an ERP.

If you’re not ready to spend six figures on software but you need to run your business like you mean it, Monday.com might just be the tool that keeps your operation stitched together.