Daily

Back up a monday.com board to CSV nightly

A CSV copy of the whole board, with every column, arrives in your inbox each night.

Runs: Daily
Apps: monday.com
AI: Not needed
Access: read

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: every night at 11pm, export all items and columns from my monday.com Inventory board to a CSV file and email it to me.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

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First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.

Why use it

Why teams use this automation

A monday.com board is often the only copy of a client list, a production schedule or an approval log. If someone bulk-deletes a group, an import overwrites a column, or an admin leaves and their boards are archived, the data is gone or very hard to reconstruct. Teams usually discover they have no backup at the moment they need one, usually right after an accidental change.

Every day ClickRuntime fetches all items and column values from the board you name, flattens them to a CSV file with one row per item and one column per field, and emails it as an attachment. The file's date is in its name, so you can find any day's state later.

It is a practical safeguard for anyone who treats a board as a system of record.

What you get out of it

A restore point from any recent day
If a column is overwritten on Wednesday, Tuesday's CSV still holds the old values. You can compare the two files and re-enter exactly what changed instead of guessing. Each file is named with its date, so choosing the right one takes seconds.
Protection against accidental deletion
Deleted groups and items can be hard to recover after the retention window. A copy in your own mailbox exists independently of monday.com and of whoever had permission to delete.
Data outside a single tool
A CSV opens in Excel or Google Sheets and imports elsewhere, so a move to another platform does not start from scratch. The export doubles as a migration file. Opening the file in a spreadsheet takes seconds, and the columns line up with your board for reference.
Evidence of past state for audits
When an auditor or client asks what the schedule looked like on the 3rd, a dated file answers it. Board history inside monday.com is not always enough to show that.
No manual export habit
Nobody has to remember to click Export on a Friday. The daily rhythm means the worst-case data loss is about one day of edits. Daily timing means the worst-case loss is one day of edits, and no one has to be the person who remembers.

How it works

What happens, step by step

Every night, ClickRuntime reads every item on your monday.com board, with all its column values.
It turns them into a spreadsheet file (CSV), one row per item.
The file is emailed to you, with the number of items in the subject line.

Before it runs live

Connect monday.com

What you get

RunsDaily

Back up a monday.com board to CSV nightlytoday, 9:00Succeeded

Email · Inventory backup: 412 itemsid,name,SKU,Stock,Location 9876543210,Oak desk large,ND-OAK-L,14,Leeds

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.

Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.

Changes you can ask for

Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
Add an AI step, for example to summarize, sort or draft a reply
Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
Combine it with other monday.com steps into one automation

Under the hood

The code that runs this automation

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.

scheduled_board_backup.pyexample

import csv, io
from clickruntime import on_trigger, notify, http, credentials

BOARD_ID = 1234567890  # your Inventory board
QUERY = """query ($board: [ID!], $cursor: String) { boards(ids: $board) { items_page(limit: 500, cursor: $cursor) {
  cursor items { id name column_values { column { title } text } } } } }"""

@on_trigger
def run(event):
    headers = {"Authorization": credentials.secret("MONDAY_API_TOKEN"), "API-Version": "2024-10"}
    rows, cursor = [], None
    while True:
        page = http.post("https://api.monday.com/v2", headers=headers, json={"query": QUERY, "variables": {"board": [BOARD_ID], "cursor": cursor}}).json()["data"]["boards"][0]["items_page"]
        rows += page["items"]
        cursor = page["cursor"]
        if not cursor:
            break
    titles = [c["column"]["title"] for c in rows[0]["column_values"]] if rows else []
    buf = io.StringIO()
    writer = csv.writer(buf)
    writer.writerow(["id", "name"] + titles)
    for item in rows:
        writer.writerow([item["id"], item["name"]] + [c["text"] for c in item["column_values"]])
    notify.email_me(f"Inventory backup: {len(rows)} items", buf.getvalue())
    return {"items": len(rows)}

FAQ

Common questions

Does the CSV include subitems and updates?

It contains items with their column values. Subitems can be included as extra rows with a parent column, but update threads and file attachments are not part of a standard column export. Files attached to items, such as uploaded PDFs, are not copied, so keep those backed up elsewhere if they matter.

Is there a size limit on the attachment?

Email providers cap attachment size, often around 20 to 25 MB. A text CSV of several thousand items is far below that, and very large boards can be split by group or sent weekly. Checking your mail provider's limit before adding many wide boards avoids bounced messages.

Can several boards be backed up?

Yes, each board produces its own CSV, either attached to one email or sent as separate messages. List the boards you want. The API token must have access to all of them. Splitting them keeps each file small and makes it obvious which board a CSV belongs to.

What permissions does it need?

read. Nothing else in your accounts is used.

Does it need AI?

No. It runs without AI, so it doesn't use your plan's AI allowance.

How many runs does it use?

One run each time it runs (daily). Checks that find nothing to do and stop right away aren't counted.

Can I change how it works?

Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

On a schedule