Move from monday boards to a real CRM

This single step decides whether the migration is clean or messy. A monday CRM account that has been in use for a year or two usually carries between five and twenty boards, each with its own columns, automations and editors. A few of those boards are real objects. Most are views, snapshots or workspaces that should not survive as objects in a proper CRM.

Answer three questions on a whiteboard before you touch monday. The exercise usually cuts the board count from fifteen to four or five.

• Which boards are real objects? Contacts, Companies and Deals almost always are. A board called "Q4 outbound" is a view. A board called "Renewals 2026" is a view.
• Which columns matter? For each board that survived, which columns are actually read by a view, a report, or daily work? Everything else is a candidate for deletion.
• Which connections matter? Connect-board columns become real relationships in Attio. Decide which need to come across as links between records, and which were only labels.

monday exports any board to CSV or Excel from the board menu. Export each surviving board separately: Contacts, Companies, Deals, and any custom object you decided to keep. Activities, notes and files come across in a second pass.

• Connect-board columns export as text, not as relationships. The values are the names of linked records, not their IDs.
• Keep the monday item ID on every row. If a reimport or a reconciliation is ever needed, those IDs are the only reliable key.
• monday's import on the way in caps at 50 columns, 8,000 rows and 10 MB per file. The export is not capped the same way, but the limits matter if you ever bounce data back through monday.

An hour here saves a day of fixes after import.

• Remove duplicates. monday exports routinely carry the same person or company across several boards; pick one source of truth per record.
• Standardise enumerated fields: one spelling per status, industry, source and owner.
• Normalise phone numbers and dates to a single format.
• Resolve connect-board columns. Replace each linked record name with the corresponding external ID. This is the step that lets relationships survive; skip it and every link is lost.
• Delete columns nobody uses. If it was not on the list from the data model exercise, it does not go in.

Build the Attio objects first. People, Companies and Deals map cleanly onto monday's Contacts, Accounts and Deals boards, and monday's deal stages become statuses on the Deals object — same names, same order, so reporting continuity holds. Then import.

• Companies first, then People linked to Companies, then Deals linked to both.
• Activities, notes and custom objects last, once everything they depend on exists.
• Map the monday item ID to an external identifier during the import so records can be relinked later.
• Spot-check 10 to 20 records after each file, before moving to the next one.
• Above a few thousand records, or when several related custom objects move together, the Attio API is cleaner than the UI.

monday's "when status changes to X, do Y" recipes are tied to board columns. Attio's automations are tied to object attributes and statuses. The shape is different, so do not try to port them one to one — rebuild from what the team actually needs now.

Most teams finish this step with fewer, cleaner automations than they had. That is usually a sign the old recipe list had accumulated dead entries nobody removed.

monday dashboards do not migrate either. Recreate each widget that somebody actually opens as an Attio view or dashboard widget. A large share of the old widgets turn out never to have been opened.

• New lead assignment by owner or territory.
• Stage-change triggers that create tasks or post messages.
• Deal-won notifications into Slack or email.
• Activity creation from calendar and email sync.

• Treating every board as an object. If fifteen boards become fifteen custom objects, you have rebuilt the same mess in a more expensive tool.
• Porting connect-board columns as text. Resolve them into real relationships during cleanup or the links are gone.
• Migrating every automation. Same rule as the columns: rebuild, do not port.
• Skipping the data model step. This is the single biggest cause of a painful monday migration.
• Losing monday item IDs in the export.
• Cancelling monday too early. Keep read access for a month or two; it is cheap insurance.

For a typical small or mid-size team — under 30 users, a few real custom objects, moderate data volume — budget one to three weeks end to end. Moving the data itself takes a few days. The rest is the data model rebuild and the automation rework.

Larger accounts with heavy customisation and dozens of boards run to four to six weeks. Count the boards first; it predicts the timeline better than the record count does.