How to Pre-Fill monday.com Forms with Existing Item Data

Word count target: ~2,200 words Content track: BoardBridge Product (Track 2)

You have an item on a monday.com board. It already has a vendor name, a project date, and a contact email. You want to send that vendor a form — pre-populated with what you already know — so they only have to fill in the blanks.

Simple idea. Frustratingly complicated in practice.

Forms Pain Point #1 (Pre-fill requires Enterprise): Monday.com does have pre-fill options, but they come with a catch most guides don’t mention: the useful ones require Enterprise, they only work for 7 field types Source, and at the end of it all, your form still creates a new item instead of updating the one you already have. If that’s not what you need, you’ve just hit one of the platform’s most-requested unsolved problems.

This guide walks through exactly what monday.com’s native pre-fill can do, where it breaks down, and what to use instead if your real goal is to have existing item data flow into a form — and have that form write back to the same item.

Quick note: If monday.com’s native tools aren’t solving this for you, BoardBridge — Form & Workflow Automation for monday.com was built specifically for this gap. Book a free 30-minute demo to see it in action.

What “Pre-Fill” Actually Means in monday.com

Before diving in, it helps to separate two things that often get conflated:

1. Pre-fill: Showing existing data in form fields when the form loads, so the person filling it out doesn’t have to retype information you already have.

1. Update existing items: Submitting a form that writes to a board item that already exists — rather than creating a brand-new row.

These sound like they go hand-in-hand, but monday.com treats them separately. You can have one without the other. And in practice, what most people actually want is both.

How Native monday.com Pre-Fill Works

Monday.com offers two pre-fill mechanisms. Which ones you can access depends on your plan.

Option 1: URL Parameter Pre-Fill (Pro and Enterprise)

This is the most documented approach. Every monday.com WorkForm has a public URL. On Pro and Enterprise plans, you can append parameters to that URL to pre-fill specific fields.

The format looks like this:

“ https://forms.monday.com/forms/[form-id]?columnId=[value]&columnId2=[value2] “

For example, if you want to pre-fill a Short Text field mapped to a column with ID text_mkn2, you’d append:

“ ?text_mkn2=Acme+Corp “

To find your column IDs: open the board, click on a column header, and select Column Settings → Column Info. The ID is listed there (it looks something like text_mkn2 or dropdown_abc1).

This approach works and it’s genuinely useful for some workflows — especially if you’re generating form links via automation with known values.

Forms Pain Point #2 (URL parameter pre-fill requires Pro+): URL parameter pre-fill is a Pro/Enterprise-only feature. Standard plan users get nothing.

Option 2: Account-Level Pre-Fill (Enterprise Only)

If you’re on Enterprise, you have access to a more elegant approach: account-level pre-fill. When a signed-in monday.com user opens a form, it can automatically populate fields from their account profile — name, email, phone number.

To enable it: open the form builder, go to Settings → Advanced, and toggle on Pre-fill.

This is cleaner than URL parameter pre-fill because it doesn’t require you to build custom URLs. The downside: it only works for logged-in monday.com users. External vendors, clients, or contractors who don’t have a monday.com account won’t see anything pre-filled.

What Most Guides Don’t Tell You: The Real Limitations

Here’s where most how-to posts stop. Here’s where the real story starts.

Limitation 1: Only 7 Field Types Can Be Pre-Filled

Forms Pain Point #3 (Pre-fill only supports 7 field types): Even on Enterprise, URL parameter pre-fill works for exactly 7 question types:

• Short Text
• Long Text
• Email
• Phone Number
• Single Select (dropdown)
• Multi Select
• Country

That leaves out: Date, Number, Rating, File, Checkbox, Signature, and any other column type. If your form has a date field and you want to pre-fill it from an existing board item’s date column — you can’t. Not even on Enterprise.

This is confirmed in monday.com’s official documentation Source.

Limitation 2: URL Parameters Are Manual (and Messy)

To pre-fill a form with data from a specific board item, you’d need to:

1. Look up the item’s column values
2. URL-encode each value
3. Manually append them to the form URL
4. Send the custom URL to the right person

Unless you’re using an automation to build those URLs programmatically, this is a manual process every single time. At scale — think 50 vendors or 200 event submissions — it breaks down fast.

Limitation 3: The Form Still Creates a New Item

Here’s the one that gets people. Even if you pre-fill a form perfectly with data from an existing item, when the respondent submits it, monday.com WorkForms creates a brand-new board item.

Your original item sits there unchanged. A duplicate now exists with the submitted data. You’re left reconciling two rows instead of having one updated record.

This isn’t an oversight — it’s how WorkForms was designed. The platform’s native forms have always been new-item-creation tools. The community has been asking for forms that update existing items since 2020. The mega-thread on the monday.com community forum requesting this feature has accumulated 162+ replies and over 23,000 views across 6+ years — and the fix is still limited to Enterprise users with significant constraints.

“The original request was to give users a way to edit existing items using forms… what we got was a way for users to edit items CREATED with forms.” — monday.com community member, July 2025

Limitation 4: Response Editing Is Enterprise-Only (and Crippled)

Monday.com added “Edit Form Responses” as an Enterprise feature in early 2025. It sounds like what you’d want — but it only works on items that the form itself created. Items that already existed on your board before the form was published can’t be edited via this feature.

There’s also a 10-edit limit per submission. After that, the response is permanently locked.

The Actual Use Case Most People Have

Let’s be honest about what most people searching for “monday.com form pre-fill existing data” are really trying to do:

• Event management: Vendors or speakers should be able to view and update their existing booking record.
• Client onboarding: New clients receive a form pre-filled with data from discovery calls so they can confirm and fill in the rest.
• HR workflows: Employees fill annual update forms with their current data already shown — they only correct or add to it.
• Contractor management: Each contractor gets a form tied to their specific record on the board.
• Approval cycles: A form goes out pre-filled with proposal details for stakeholders to review and sign off.

In all of these cases, the goal is:

1. Form opens pre-filled with data from a specific existing item
2. Person fills in or corrects the fields
3. Their submission updates that same item — not a new row

That’s a complete workflow. Monday.com’s native forms handle step 1 partially (with plan restrictions and field-type limitations) and can’t do step 3 at all.

Going Beyond Native: How BoardBridge Handles This

BoardBridge — Form & Workflow Automation for monday.com was built specifically for this use case. Here’s how it works differently.

Every Item Gets Its Own Form URL

In BoardBridge, each monday.com item automatically has a unique form URL. When someone opens that URL, the form loads pre-filled with that item’s current column values — no URL parameter building, no manual encoding, no Enterprise requirement.

The URL looks like:

“ https://[your-domain]/f/[form-key]/[item-id] “

You can generate and send this URL via a button-triggered email from monday.com. One click, and the right person gets a pre-filled form that maps directly to their item.

Pre-Fill Works on All 10 Field Types

BoardBridge’s pre-fill isn’t limited to 7 question types. It works across all 10 supported field types:

• Text, Long Text, Email, Phone, Number
• Date, Dropdown, Checkbox, File Upload, Location

Date fields, number fields, dropdowns — all pre-filled from the existing board item’s columns when the form loads.

Submissions Update the Existing Item — Not Create a New One

This is the core difference. When someone submits a BoardBridge form, the submission writes directly to the item it was built for. No new rows. No duplicates. The original item gets updated.

You can also control field-level overwrite behavior: mark a field as protected to prevent later submissions from overwriting a value set in an earlier one. Useful for things like “lock the contract start date once it’s confirmed.”

Available on Any Monday.com Plan

There’s no plan gate here. Standard, Pro, or Enterprise — all monday.com plans get the same pre-fill and existing item update capability through BoardBridge.

A Real-World Example

Here’s a workflow one of our event management clients needed:

They run a company with 300+ items on a Monday.com board — one per vendor or band. When an event was coming up, they needed each vendor to:

1. Confirm their contact details
2. Provide travel preferences
3. Sign off on their show details

Before BoardBridge: They’d export data, build spreadsheets, collect responses in email threads, and manually update the board. Took 2-3 people several days per event.

With BoardBridge: A button click on each band’s item triggered an email with a personalized form link. The form opened pre-filled with the band’s current details — show date, venue, fee, contact name. The band updated and submitted. The board item updated automatically.

No new rows. No duplicate records. No manual reconciliation.

Summary: What Each Option Gets You

Capability	WorkForms (Standard)	WorkForms (Pro)	WorkForms (Enterprise)	BoardBridge (Any Plan)
URL parameter pre-fill	❌	✅	✅	✅
Account-level pre-fill	❌	❌	✅	N/A
Pre-fill all field types	❌	❌	❌ (7 types only)	✅ (all 10 types)
Per-item unique form URL	❌	❌	❌	✅
Updates existing items (not creates new)	❌	❌	❌	✅
Unlimited re-submissions	❌	❌	❌ (10 edit cap)	✅
Available to external contacts	✅	✅	✅	✅

What to Use and When

If your goal is simple — pre-populate a couple of text fields to save the respondent some typing, and a new board item for each submission is fine — native URL parameter pre-fill on Pro/Enterprise is enough.

If your goal is to send someone a form that shows their existing data, let them update it, and have that update reflected on their actual board item — monday.com’s native forms can’t do that, regardless of plan. That’s a job for BoardBridge.

BoardBridge — Form & Workflow Automation for monday.com handles the full loop: unique per-item form URLs, pre-fill on all field types, and submissions that update the existing item directly. No Enterprise required.

Want to see it in action? Book a free 30-minute consultation with BoardBridge by TaskRhino: https://calendly.com/rp-spaceo/call-with-rakesh-est-timezone

Related reading:

• Complete guide to monday.com form pre-fill and limitations →
• Update existing items without creating duplicates →
• Form conditional logic on any monday.com plan →
• Enterprise form features available free →
• BoardBridge Forms Engine documentation →

Published February 2026 | TaskRhino — monday.com Certified Consulting Partner