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monday.com
Templates are your best friend when it comes to streamlining work processes, making your life easier, and saving resources.
This is why monday.com’s board template function is helpful in streamlining workflows, ensuring consistency, and enhancing team productivity.
In this post, you’ll learn how to use board templates and extend their functionality to lower-level board elements.
Let’s get going!
What are monday.com Board Templates
On monday.com, boards are components within workspaces where you can input and manage all of your tasks. The best thing about boards is that they are highly customizable and allow you to manage any workflow.
Whether you are a recruiter opening a new position, a marketer planning out social media strategies, or a salesperson managing CRM tasks, monday.com boards give you the flexibility to tailor your work as you wish.
The second best thing about boards is that they can be turned into customizable templates.
Just imagine you’re a marketing manager overseeing a product launch campaign. You create a detailed board that tracks every aspect of the campaign, from initial planning and content creation to advertising schedules and social media posts. Once you’ve set up the workflow, you can save this board as a template.
So, the next time there is a product launch, you can use this monday.com template with all the necessary tasks, timelines, and assigned team members for steps like scheduling social media posts, coordinating with influencers, and launching ad campaigns.
How to create your own Board Template
To create a board template on monday.com, first navigate to the board you want to use as a template. Click on the three-dot menu in the upper right corner, select “Save as template” and that’s it, you’re done!
When you save a board as a template, all its elements are saved as well: the structure, columns, items, groups, and any enabled automations. So, when you use the template, it maintains the same workflow and functionality as the original board.
Once a board is saved as a template, it becomes a “template board.” Any changes made to the board, including editing, deleting, and archiving, will be applied to all future boards created from this template.
By default, only you, as a board owner, can edit the template board. Editing access for others depends on viewing permissions, so users can only edit what they can view. The permission settings can be adjusted and are very customizable, allowing you to give editing access only to specific elements on the board.
How to access templates in monday.com
Once you have created your board template, you can use it by navigating to the left sidebar and clicking the “+” button on the right of the search bar of your current Workspace. Then, click “Choose from templates” to access the Template Center and use your new board template.
Ways to use monday.com templates in automation
Alternatively, you can automate the creation of a board from a template to save even more time. Instead of manually setting up each new board, you can automate this process based on specific triggers.
For example, a sales team can set up an automation that creates a new board from the saved template whenever a lead status is marked as “Qualified” in their CRM. This template can include columns for deal stages, assigned team members, key dates, and other follow-up actions.
On monday.com, these automation triggers are called “recipes”. To set one up, navigate to the automation center by clicking “Automate” in the upper right corner of a workspace and click the “Board automation” tab. Here, you can select triggers, such as “When status is changed to…”, then configure the action to “Create Board from Template.”
While monday.com allows you to save the entire board structure as templates, it doesn’t support saving lower-level board elements like individual groups, items, or subitems as separate templates.
Take the marketing manager’s example—every product launch involves tasks such as creating social media posts, coordinating with influencers, scheduling advertisements, and so on.
Now, imagine the marketing manager only needs the social media posts group from the board template and not the ads. With the current setup, the manager would have to manually recreate or remove elements, which could lead to errors and waste valuable time.
To overcome this limitation, you can use Smart Templates that will help speed up recurring processes in your workflow.
How to extend board templates functionality using Smart Templates
So, how can Smart Templates solve these issues? Let’s break it down.Smart Templates let you save and reuse groups, items, and subitems in any monday.com workspace or board. This means you can create a detailed task just once and then reuse it as a template wherever you need it.
Smart Templates can be installed directly from your board or through monday’s App Marketplace.
To save a template, simply select the item, group, subitem, or any combination of the elements you want to save. For example, you can save one item and four subitems together as a template. Click on the three-dot menu on the left side, and under “Apps,” select “Save as Smart Template.”
To create an item or multiple ones from a saved template, go to the relevant board, select the item/subitem, open the Smart Templates view, expand the desired template, and choose “Create Item”.
Whether your team is involved in a single project or several, Smart Templates streamline repetitive tasks like onboarding, event planning, invoice management, hardware procurement, and feature releases.
Once you save a template, you can easily edit it by adding or removing columns with different parameters. This editing capability allows you to modify the number of items, adjust their order, and customize the columns to ensure the template fits your specific needs.
For instance, if you’re managing a project with a sequence of tasks such as “Design,” “Development,” and “Testing,” you can rearrange these tasks or pre-populate fields with specific data, such as setting the “Due Date” for each task or assigning a “Task Owner.”
Another feature that expands Smart Templates’ flexibility is column mapping. This helps to use templates on multiple boards, even if they have different sets of columns.
For example, if your template has a “Task Owner” column and your board has an “Assigned To” column, you can map these columns so that the data from the “Task Owner” column in the template is transferred to the “Assigned To” column in the board. This way, the right team members will be assigned to the right items without manual data entry. Smart Templates can also be tightly integrated with monday’s automation features.
You can create automations that use a template based on specific conditions, such as status changes or scheduled dates. For example, you can set up an automation to create a new group every Monday morning to start off weekly planning. Like the regular monday.com automation, these can be set up to fit your specific workflow needs.
Using monday.com ready-made templates
If creating and using your own templates is not your favorite thing, then you’re in luck because monday.com has an entire library of board templates.
The Template Center offers various templates designed for almost any team activity. Whether you need a project management template, or to organize a marketing campaign, or plan an event, there is a template for it all.
These are fully customizable templates, and the best part is that you can still use them with Smart Templates.
There is no single “best way” to work. It’s all about finding what works best for you and your team. This is why monday.com board templates and Smart Templates are great solutions. They are extremely flexible and can be tailored to your needs to streamline your unique workflows.
Happy templating!?
