If you use monday CRM and sometimes feel like you’re fighting against your own system, you’re not imagining things.

monday CRM is a flexible platform, and the default setup gives you a useful starting point for managing leads, contacts, companies, deals and activities.

But there’s a catch.

The more seriously you use it, the more likely you are to run into limitations in the way the default CRM boards are structured.

These aren't necessarily obvious when you first set up your CRM.

In fact, that’s part of the problem.

You can build a perfectly functional CRM using the default setup, only to discover months later that the way the boards and connections work makes it difficult to manage the system you actually need.

Over the years, I've built and worked with a lot of monday CRM systems, and I've found there are a few recurring issues.

Here are some of the biggest ones.

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1. Your activities aren't as connected as you think

At first glance, monday CRM's Activities board seems to give you a way to keep track of calls, meetings, emails and other interactions.

And it does.

But there’s an important limitation in how those activities connect to the rest of your CRM.

You can connect an Activity to a Deal, Lead, Contact or other CRM record.

The problem is that the connection isn't two way.

For example, you might have an Activity connected to a particular Deal.

From the Activities board, you can see which Deal the activity relates to.

But when you go back to the Deal, you can't see any of the Activities associated with it - because the connect boards column that connects them is one way and only visible in the Activities board.

That creates a surprisingly awkward workflow.

You know you've had conversations with a prospect.

You know you've had meetings.

You know there are follow-ups.

But finding the complete history of those interactions from the Deal itself isn't as straightforward as you might expect.

Why this matters

A CRM isn't just a database of contacts and deals.

It's supposed to help you understand the relationship you're having with those people and companies.

Ideally, when you open a Deal, you should be able to quickly understand:

• What has happened?
• Who have we communicated with?
• When was the last interaction?
• What was discussed?
• What needs to happen next?

The default setup doesn't always make that easy.

There are ways to work around this using connected boards, mirror columns, automations and additional structure.

But once you start doing that, you're already moving beyond the default CRM setup.

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2. Winning the deal doesn't automatically create the work

This is one of the biggest conceptual gaps in the default setup.

A CRM tends to focus heavily on the journey from lead → deal → customer.

But what happens after the deal is won?

That's when the actual work often begins.

You might need to:

• onboard the client
• schedule meetings
• create project tasks
• send documents
• collect information
• complete deliverables
• follow up
• invoice
• schedule recurring work
• manage an ongoing project

The customer doesn't disappear just because the deal has moved to Won.

Unfortunately, the default CRM setup doesn't automatically turn that newly won deal into a structured body of work.

And monday's task management can introduce another problem.

Your work can become spread across multiple boards, with tasks effectively buried inside individual items.

The information exists.

The problem is visibility.

You can have all the right tasks in your system and still struggle to answer a very simple question:

What do I actually need to do today?

That's not really a CRM problem.

It's a system-design problem.

(And yes, there is always My Work - but My Work doesn't show you everything and is way more limited functionality-wise than a Board View.

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3. Your CRM can become a collection of disconnected boards

One of the reasons monday.com is so flexible is that you can build almost anything with boards.

That flexibility is also one of its biggest challenges.

The default CRM gives you separate places for things such as:

• Leads
• Deals
• Contacts
• Companies
• Activities
• Projects
• Tasks

Individually, these boards make sense.

But your business doesn't operate in separate boards.

A lead becomes a deal.

A deal is connected to a customer or account.

An account has contacts.

Those contacts have conversations.

The customer may have projects.

Those projects contain tasks.

Those tasks may have deadlines, dependencies and recurring work.

It's all one relationship.

The challenge is making monday understand that.

Without some additional architecture, you can end up with a collection of boards that are technically connected but don't necessarily behave like one coherent system.

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4. Automations become difficult to manage

This is another problem that tends to appear later.

When you first start using monday CRM, you might have a handful of automations.

No big deal.

Then you add another.

And another.

Then someone asks:

"Can we make this happen automatically?"

So you add another automation.

Before long, you've got dozens of recipes doing things across multiple boards.

And now you have a new problem:

What the hell is actually going on?

😅

You need to know:

• What does each automation do?
• Which board does it operate on?
• Which columns does it depend on?
• What triggers it?
• What does it change?
• Does another automation depend on its output?
• What happens if you change a column?
• What happens if you change the board structure?

The monday Automations Centre tells you what automations exist.

It doesn't necessarily give you the documentation and system architecture you need to understand how your CRM works as a whole.

That's an important distinction.

As your system grows, managing the automations becomes a job in itself.

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5. Some limitations aren't obvious until you've built around them

This is probably the most frustrating part.

The biggest problems aren't necessarily things that stop you from using monday CRM.

They're limitations that you may not discover until you've already designed your processes around the default setup.

For example, you might decide that:

"We'll just connect these two boards."

Then discover that the connection doesn't work in the direction you expected.

Or:

"We'll just use mirror columns to bring that information across."

Then discover that the information you actually need isn't available in the way you expected.

Or:

"We'll just create an automation for that."

Then discover that the automation can't perform the action you need.

None of these things necessarily make monday CRM unusable.

But they can force you to rethink how your system is designed.

And if you've already built hundreds of items, automations and workflows around the original design, changing direction can be painful.

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So, is there actually something wrong with monday CRM?

Not necessarily.

The default monday CRM setup is a starting point.

And for some businesses, it may be all they need.

The problem comes when you assume that the default setup is also the finished system.

That's where I think a lot of businesses get into trouble.

They start with the standard boards.

Add a few custom columns.

Add some automations.

Connect a couple of boards.

Add some more.

Then keep bolting things onto the system as new requirements appear.

Eventually, they have something that technically works but feels increasingly difficult to use.

The problem isn't necessarily monday CRM itself.

It's the architecture sitting on top of it.

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What does a better monday CRM system look like?

For me, the answer isn't simply:

"Add more features."

More features can actually make the problem worse.

The goal is to create a system where the different parts of your business actually work together.

Your:

Deals → Contacts → Companies → Activities → Tasks → Projects → Workflows

shouldn't feel like separate systems.

They should feel like different parts of the same system.

You should be able to move from a deal to the relevant customer information, understand what communication has taken place, see what needs to happen next and manage the resulting work without constantly hunting around different boards.

And as the system becomes more sophisticated, you also need a way to understand and manage the system itself.

That's why I don't think the answer to monday CRM's limitations is simply to throw more features at it.

It's about building around the limitations rather than pretending they don't exist.

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The idea behind monday CRM 2.0

This is the thinking that eventually led me to build my own enhanced monday CRM framework.

I call it monday CRM 2.0.

Superficially, many of the boards look almost identical to the default Monday CRM Boards (Leads, Deals, Accounts etc). But these boards are way more powerful and feature better connections to create a really solid fundamental structure to layer your own workflows on top of.

(And because the Kitset includes full documentation of every automation, column, board and feature - all connected to each other and with short simple demo videos explaining how they work - if you want to keep your data where it is you can simply "copy" and paste" the automations columns and features included in Monday CRM 2.0 into your existing boards.

It starts with monday CRM and adds the structure, connections, workflows and functionality that I found were missing from the default setup.

Things like:

• More advanced deal and pipeline management
• Better-connected contacts and companies
• More useful activity and communication tracking
• Automated record creation
• More structured task management
• Recurring tasks and subtasks
• Automatic task creation
• Better connections between CRM and project work
• More advanced workflows
• And a much more structured way of managing the automations and infrastructure behind the system

The important point is that you don't necessarily need all of this.

The default monday CRM setup may be perfectly adequate for what you're doing today.

But if you've started running into some of the problems I've described here, it may be a sign that you've outgrown the basic setup.

And that's where things get interesting.

Because instead of abandoning monday CRM and moving to another platform, you can take a different approach:

Keep monday CRM.
Keep the flexibility.
Keep the platform you already know.
But build a system that avoids the limitations of the default boards and offers advanced features and a sounder fundamental structure.

That's the basic idea behind monday CRM 2.0.

And it's something I'll be exploring in more detail in future articles.

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The bigger question

The question I think is worth asking isn't:

"Is monday CRM good or bad?"

It's:

"Does the way I've built my monday CRM actually match the way my business works?"

Because there's a big difference between having a CRM that contains all your information and having a CRM that actually helps you run the business.

And that difference is where things get interesting.