monday.com Cross-Board Automation Limitations

meta_description: “monday.com cross-board automations lack conditional logic and multi-board actions. Single conditions only, no compound AND/OR logic. Learn the gaps and how BoardBridge solves them.”

You need one automation: When a vendor confirms on the Vendor Confirmations board, create a travel item on the Travel board — but only for outbound travel, only for confirmed vendors, and only if the event date is more than 30 days away.

In monday.com, you’d need to build:

1. One automation to create the travel item (but it fires for ALL confirmations, not just outbound)
2. A second automation to delete the item if it’s not outbound (workaround)
3. Manual filtering because you can’t check the date column as a condition
4. Separate automations for different scenarios

Five automations to handle one logical workflow.

Try BoardBridge Free → One trigger, multiple boards, compound AND conditions

Automation Pain Point #1: Cross-Board Automations Have Major Restrictions

Here’s what teams need:

One trigger → Actions across multiple boards:

• Vendor confirms → create item on Travel board AND Production board
• Status changes on Board A → update status on Board B AND send email
• Item created → copy to Board B with conditions (only if Type = “VIP”)

With compound conditions:

• Status = “Confirmed” AND Type = “Outbound” → create travel item
• Status = “Approved” AND Priority = “High” AND Budget > $10,000 → escalate

What monday.com offers:

Cross-board “create item” automation with these limitations:

1. Single condition only — status trigger, but no second condition like “AND dropdown = X”
2. Dropdown triggers not supported — you can’t trigger cross-board actions on dropdown changes
3. Limited column types transfer — Dependency, Link, Time Tracking, Location columns excluded
4. No dynamic group routing — items go to one static group, not conditionally routed
5. One target board per automation — if you need to create items on two boards, you need two separate automations
6. No compound AND logic — cannot combine “status = X AND dropdown = Y”

The result: Teams build 10-20 separate automations to handle scenarios that should be one rule with conditions.

What Monday.com Users Are Saying

Thread: Match automations need dropdown menus as column change trigger

Monday.com’s “match” automations only support specific column types as triggers. Dropdown columns are excluded from the column change trigger selector.

Thread: Create item in another board — location column not copying — April 2025

“When I try to create an item via automation from 1 board to a second board, location columns on the source board don’t appear to be supported to copy to the second board.” — julDH14 (Julie H), April 1, 2025

No monday.com staff response.

Thread: Automation by column change does not work if the change was by automation — October 2023

“when an item is created in the board NEW an automation is activated to connect the item…On the board CURRENT there is an automation that suppose to be activated by column change…It does not get activated by the change that happens with the automation.” — elromlu, October 26, 2023

Implementation Consultant confirmed: If Board A’s automation changes a column on Board B, Board B’s automations triggered by that column change do not fire. Monday.com automations don’t chain.

Thread: Moving items with subitems to another board via automation doesn’t carry subitems columns

When moving items with subitems cross-board, subitems are created but their columns are left empty. No column mapping for subitems.

Thread: Create an automation to create multiple items based on column — March – November 2023

“when status changes to done. It should duplicate this item but it duplicate it multiple times according to the number in another column” — Eystar, March 1, 2023

“items get continually created until I go in and turn off the automation” — kdawkins, November 8, 2023

Monday.com staff (BiancaT) suggested creating separate automations for each numerical value — “a bit tedious to set up.”

Official monday.com documentation confirms (Cross-board automations – monday.com Support):

Unsupported column types for cross-board mapping:

• Dependency
• Link to Item
• Time Tracking
• Location (undocumented) Source
• Formula, Mirror (read-only)
• Dropdown (unreliable as trigger) Source

Supported: Item name, People, Date, Status, Numbers, Timeline, Link, Phone, Email, Text, Priority, Label Source

No mention of compound conditions or multi-board actions.

How BoardBridge Solves This

1. Compound Conditions with AND Logic

Scenario: Vendor confirms → create travel item, but only for outbound travel.

BoardBridge rule:

• Trigger: Status changes to “Confirmed”
• Condition 1: Dropdown “Type” = “Outbound”
• Condition 2: Date “Travel Date” > Today + 30 days
• Action: Create item on Travel board

All conditions must be true for the action to fire. Learn more about monday.com compound conditions with status and dropdown.

Native monday.com: You’d need separate automations for each Type value, and you cannot check date conditions at all.

2. One Trigger → Multiple Board Actions

Scenario: Vendor confirms → create travel item AND production item AND send email.

BoardBridge rule:

• Trigger: Status changes to “Confirmed”
• Actions:

1. Create item on Travel board
2. Create item on Production board
3. Send email to logistics team

All three actions fire from one trigger.

Native monday.com: Three separate automations.

3. Conditional Group Routing

Scenario: Create travel items in different groups based on type.

BoardBridge rule:

• Trigger: Status = “Confirmed”
• Condition: Type = “Outbound”
• Action: Create item in “Outbound Travel” group
• Different rule: Type = “Return” → “Return Travel” group

Native monday.com: Static group selection — items always go to the same group.

4. All Column Types Supported

BoardBridge transfers:

• Text, email, phone, date, number (same as monday.com)
• Status labels (with text-based mapping, resolving ID mismatches)
• Dropdown values (with text-based mapping)
• Location (planned for future release)

Note: Dependency, Formula, Mirror are still excluded (they’re computed or relational, not writable). Learn more about monday.com data transfer between boards with proper column formatting.

Real-World Example: Vendor Confirmation Workflow

Vendor Confirmations Board:

• Vendor: “Alex Johnson”
• Status: “Confirmed”
• Type: “Outbound” (Dropdown)
• Date: March 15, 2026
• Destination: “Chicago”

When status changes to “Confirmed”:

BoardBridge evaluates:

1. Is Type = “Outbound”? → Yes
2. Is Date > Today + 30 days? → Yes (assuming today is before Feb 13, 2026)
3. → Create item on Travel board
4. → Create item on Production board
5. → Send email to logistics team

All three actions fire automatically.

Native monday.com: You’d build:

• Automation 1: Status “Confirmed” → create item on Travel (fires for ALL confirmations)
• Automation 2: Status “Confirmed” → create item on Production
• Automation 3: Status “Confirmed” → send email
• Manual filtering or workarounds to handle Type and Date conditions

Seven Operators for Conditional Logic

BoardBridge conditional rules support:

1. equals — Status = “Confirmed”, Type = “VIP”
2. not_equals — Type ≠ “Cancelled”
3. contains — Notes contains “urgent”
4. starts_with — Name starts with “VIP”
5. ends_with — Email ends with “@acme.com”
6. is_empty — Email is empty (block action)
7. is_not_empty — Email has value (allow action)

All operators work on any column type: text, email, status, dropdown, number, date.

Cross-Board Trigger Chaining

Scenario: Item created on Board A → updates Board B → triggers action on Board C.

Native monday.com: Automations don’t chain. If Board A’s automation changes Board B, Board B’s automations do not fire.

BoardBridge: Supports multi-step chaining. Board B’s rules fire when Board A updates it, which can trigger Board C actions. See monday.com status change cross-board trigger guide for more details.

Example flow:

1. Vendor confirms on Confirmations board
2. → Creates item on Travel board
3. → Travel board item creation triggers Production board automation
4. → Production board status change triggers email to team

All automated, all connected.

Dynamic Column Value Insertion in Actions

When creating items cross-board, BoardBridge can:

• Use column values from the source item in the target item
• Concatenate values (e.g., “Name – Type” as the new item name)
• Apply conditional templates (different email body based on Type)

Example:

Source item: “Alex Johnson” with Type “Outbound” Target item name: “Alex Johnson – Outbound Travel”

The item name is dynamically built from source column values.

Limitations You Should Know

OR logic is not supported. All conditions are AND’ed together. If you need “Status = A OR Status = B,” create two separate rules.

Subitems are not fully supported. You can create subitems, but subitem column mapping is limited.

Cross-workspace actions are not supported. All boards must be in the same monday.com workspace.

Formula and Mirror columns cannot be written to (monday.com API limitation — they’re computed, not writable).

Stop Building Workaround Automations

With monday.com’s limitations, a single logical workflow requires building 5-10 separate automations, each a workaround, each prone to breaking.

BoardBridge lets you build one rule with compound conditions — Status = “Confirmed” AND Type = “Outbound” → create item on 3 boards, send email, update status. All in one rule. All with AND/OR logic. This is the monday.com if-then conditional automation approach you’ve been looking for.

Ready to simplify your automation architecture? Book a free 30-minute demo: https://calendly.com/rp-spaceo/call-with-rakesh-est-timezone

Related Articles

• monday.com Status Change Cross-Board Trigger — How to create items on multiple boards with conditions
• monday.com Conditional Automation (If-Then Logic) — Compound AND conditions explained
• monday.com Prevent Duplicate Items with Automation — Idempotency and deduplication