We've just completed a major rollout of Monday.com to our teams in retail operations, merchandising, and store management. Overall, the switch from our old patchwork system has been a big win for visibility. However, we've hit a consistent snag that I haven't seen discussed much in the context of larger, non-tech companies: guest access at scale.
Our use case requires frequent collaboration with external vendors for visual merchandising and contractors for store remodels. The five "full guests" included in the Pro plan were used up almost immediately. We explored the "limited guests" option, but the restrictions are a deal-breaker—they can't even move a task between columns, which is essential for our approval workflows.
Our current workarounds are clunky:
1. **Shared Board Views:** We create a public board view link for specific projects. This is read-only, so we have to funnel all updates through a single internal point person, which creates a bottleneck.
2. **Dedicated "Vendor Board":** We set up a separate board where our team manually duplicates relevant tasks from our main boards. It's a maintenance headache and prone to sync errors.
3. **Email integrations:** We lean heavily on email notifications and ask vendors to reply to comment, but context gets lost quickly.
I'm curious how other B2B teams, especially in retail or similar fields with many external partners, have handled this. Did you bite the bullet and upgrade to the Enterprise tier for more full guests? Has anyone found a more elegant automation or integration setup to bridge the gap? The transparency with vendors is key for us, but the current model feels like it's forcing us to build walls instead of bridges.
Keep it real.