Migrate from Merlin Project to monday Work Management

Merlin Project is the top-level container. Each project file becomes either a monday.com Board (preferred) or a monday.com Workspace if the customer manages multiple related projects. We map project name to Board name, project-level notes to the board description field, and project start date to the board's creation date for reference. Active projects migrate to active boards; archived projects map to archived board status.

Merlin Project Activities map to monday.com Items on the destination board. Each Activity's name becomes Item name, start and end dates map to the Timeline column, duration maps to a number column, and any Notes field maps to the Item description. Custom Activity properties become custom columns on the board. We preserve the Activity's constraint field (As Late As Possible, As Soon As Possible, Fixed Date) as a text column in monday.com for scheduling reference.

Merlin Project zero-duration Milestones export as Activity rows with a milestone flag. We create monday.com Items with a Status column set to a milestone-specific label (e.g., 'Milestone') and the milestone date mapped to the Timeline column. Duration is set to 1 day to render correctly in the Timeline view. We flag milestones in the mapping notes so the customer's admin can apply a color or icon for visual distinction in monday.com.

Merlin Project stores Finish-to-Start, Start-to-Start, Finish-to-Finish, and Start-to-Finish dependency types per Activity. In CSV export these appear as predecessor-successor references. Monday.com's dependency column natively stores predecessor Item IDs and renders as dependency lines in Timeline view. We parse the predecessor chain from CSV, map each predecessor-successor pair to the corresponding monday.com Item IDs (resolved after Item creation), and write the dependency column values using the monday.com API. Note: monday.com dependency column supports predecessor linking but does not natively store dependency type; Finish-to-Start is the default rendering.

Merlin Project Resources (people, equipment, materials) with hourly rates export from the Resource view. We extract all resource names and rates and match by email to monday.com workspace members. Equipment and material resources are added to monday.com as team members with a role designation (e.g., 'Equipment' or 'Material') so they can be assigned to Items. Hourly rates migrate to a number column on the person's profile or to a rate column if the team uses a resource management add-on.

Merlin Project Assignments link Activities to Resources with an allocation percentage. Each assignment is a row in the export representing one Activity-Resource pair. We map each assignment to the monday.com Item's Assignees column, adding the resolved team member. If an Activity has multiple assigned resources, all appear in the Assignees column of the corresponding Item. Allocation percentage migrates to a number column named '% Allocation' if the customer's workflow requires it, since monday.com's native assignee field does not store allocation weight.

Merlin Project tracks resource hourly rates and can compute Activity and project costs from those rates. Monday.com does not have native cost-tracking by resource rate, but Pro tier and above support formula columns. We create formula columns (or number columns with manual entry) for cost fields: Activity cost = (hours from Merlin) x (hourly rate from Resource). We configure these during migration if the customer requests cost preservation; otherwise we document the formula structure for their admin to implement post-migration.

Merlin Project custom Activity properties (defined per project) appear as additional columns in the CSV export if they are visible in the exported view. We map each custom field to the equivalent monday.com column type: text to Text column, numbers to Number column, dates to Date column, dropdown values to Dropdown or Tags column, and checkboxes to Checkbox column. The customer chooses the exact column type during scoping since monday.com's column type set differs from Merlin's property type set.

Notes attached to Activities, Resources, or the project level in Merlin Project appear in the CSV export if the Notes column is visible. We map these to monday.com Item descriptions (rich text) for Activity-level notes, or to the board's Description field for project-level notes. Comment threads from Merlin Project do not export; we document the comment data as a manual re-creation step with a screenshot reference list provided by the customer.

Merlin Project stores scheduling constraints per Activity (As Soon As Possible, As Late As Possible, Must Start On, Must Finish On, As Late As Possible with a date). These appear in the CSV export as a constraint field if visible. We preserve the constraint value in a text column named 'Constraint' in monday.com. Advanced constraint-driven scheduling (like a constraint-based critical path) cannot be natively preserved because monday.com does not have a constraint engine; the constraint values serve as documentation for the customer's admin to manage dates manually in Timeline view.

Merlin Project attachments export as a file list (file names and paths) via the Attachments view CSV. Actual file binaries are stored separately. We extract the attachment list and provide the customer's admin with a file-path index. If the customer uses a cloud storage integration (Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint) already connected to monday.com, we document which attachments should be re-linked manually in monday.com's File column after migration.

Merlin Project supports dynamic baselines for tracking planned versus actual schedule and cost performance. Baselines are an in-app comparison feature and do not export to CSV. We capture the baseline dates and values (if visible as columns in the exported view) as a snapshot number column in monday.com for reference, but monday.com does not have a native baseline comparison feature. The customer's admin should use monday.com's Chart view or a third-party reporting integration for variance analysis post-migration.