Ultimate Notion For Business Setup Guide in 2024

Looking to use Notion For Business? You’ve come to the right place! In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know to set up Notion for your company. Starting from a basic teamspace structure, setting up the most important databases for your workflow all the way to building dashboards for your team – this the complete Notion For Business Guide in 2024. So let’s open up a blank page in Notion and get ready to build a great operating system for your company.

And if you don’t want to build this yourself, scroll down to the bottom of the page for a free Notion template.

What Makes A Great Notion For Business Setup?

Before you dive into creating the individual building blocks of this Notion for Business setup, let’s quickly talk about the overall framework of the system.

First, you need to understand the users and the purpose of this setup. What does your business do, how does it operate day-to-day and what do the individual team members or departments need to do their best work?

A great Notion system supports your team every step of the way. It surfaces relevant information in the right context, helps to coordinate on larger projects and gives management an up-to-date view to make sure everything is on track.

Since every business is unique and you know your business best, only you know exactly what you need from a Notion setup. However, based on working with dozens of companies across all industries, I’ve come up with this blueprint setup that will get you 80% of the way in just half an afternoon (or less if you download the template).

For this blueprint, you’ll create the following databases:

• Team Directory
• Teams / Departments
• OKRs (or any other type of medium to long-term goals)
• Projects
• Tasks
• Docs (for SOPs, notes and other documentation)
• CRM (for client or customer management)
• Individual team members’ dashboards database

These databases make up the backend of your Notion System. They store all the information that flows through it so you can organise and connect it.

If you already know that you need to handle other type of data too, then you can set up these databases as well. Some common, industry-specific examples include:

• A prospects or deals database listing out companies you might want to invest in as a VC
• A marketing campaign database listing out content if you’re a particularly content driven company
• A Product Dev database that represents your R&D process
• An inventory database containing your physical goods
• A location database if you have brick-and-mortar stores

In addition to these databases, you’ll create a series of dashboards. Dashboards make up the frontend of any Notion system and it’s how you’ll interact with it 90% of the time.

At the very least, a Notion workspace for a company should contain the following databases:

• Company Home Page
• Teams Dashboard
• Individual team members’ dashboards
• Project Dashboards
• Company Wiki

This article assumes that you run a business with several people and need to manage a team. If you’re a solopreneur, you can always remove the items geared towards collaboration.

Now that you know the basic structure of what we’re going to build, it’s time to dive in. Simply follow the guide step-by-step. If you get stuck, check out the youtube video linked above to see me build this out in real time.

Don’t have the time to build this yourself? Or need a more tailored solution? Book a free discovery call with me and see how I can help you and your team unlock your full potential with the perfect digital workspace.

So, let’s dive in and create an awesome Notion setup for your business!

How To Create Teamspaces In Notion?

Before you start creating the databases, you should first create the Teamspaces for this setup.

We haven’t mentioned teamspaces yet, so you might be wondering: what are they?

In simple words, Teamspaces are containers inside your Notion workspace.

They help you break down the workspace and structure the system. Most importantly, Teamspaces allow you to manage access rights within different departments.

You could actually omit this step and just set up a single teamspace for your company.

Most of the time, I recommend though that you simply replicate your organisational structure.

So if you organise your company and teams according to functions like Marketing and Operations, add one teamspace per function.

If you use cross-functional departments focused on a product line, use these as inspiration for your teamspaces.

It’s the easiest and most intuitive way to ensure you’re team knows exactly where to find what.

For the remaining guide, we’ll use these three teamspaces as an example:

• HQ (for the overall business)
• Marketing
• Operations

While creating the Teamspaces, you should also set the permissions.

By default, it will be set to Open (anyone can see and join this Teamspace).

However, certain teamspaces shouldn’t be accessible to everyone. If you set up a separate teamspace for HR, Legal or the C-Suite, make sure to set it to closed.

If you’re on a Business plan and you want to keep a certain teamspace completely secret, you can select Private. This way, no one will even know this teamspace exists.

Speaking of permissions, let’s take a quick look at managing access rights in Notion.

How To Set Up Access Rights In Notion

If you plan on using Notion with a larger team, it’s essential that you set up proper access rights. It’s not the most interesting topic and it’s tempting to jump ahead, but this will help save you from a lot of headache down the line.

Just one quick example: if you have several teamspaces and want to add members only to their relevant teamspace, you’d need to add every user individually (and remove them if they switch teams) without a proper setup.

This is not scalable at all and it’s easy to mess things up.

So, what’s the better way to do it?

I suggest you start creating User Groups from day one. With User Groups, you can create clusters of team members based on teams or departments and then give the whole group access to certain pages, databases and teamspaces.

For example, you can define that all users under the Marketing User Group will automatically be added to the Marketing as well as the Design Teamspace but not the HR Teamspace. This way, you’ll not only be able to automate the process of adding new members (based on their role or team) but also reduce the number of clicks you need to take to onboard a new person.

To create User Groups, go to Settings & Members > People (under Workspace). Now in the Groups tab, just click on the Create a Group button to create user groups.

For this example, you can create the following user groups:

• Admin
• Users
• Marketing
• Ops

Of course, feel free to adjust this to your specific situation. If you don’t want to create many user groups, at least create two user groups for better management—Admin and Users.

Now, to add user groups to certain Teamspaces, click on the three-dot menu of any Teamspace and select Add Members. Now search for any user group that you want to assign and click on Invite. By default, it will add the user groups as Teamspace members.

If you are on a Business plan, you have the option to add a certain user group (e.g., Admin) as a Teamspace Owner. Otherwise, you can only add user groups as Teamspace members whereas owners need to be added individually. In most cases, this is more than enough.

Now that you’ve created the User Groups, it’s time to start creating the building blocks for an awesome Notion setup for your business.

Setting up Notion Databases For Your Company

So far, you created the Teamspaces and added your User Groups.

Now, it’s time to build the backend of this Notion workspace by creating all the databases along with the necessary fields (called properties in Notion).

Before you do so, let’s talk about two common mistakes people make when creating a Notion for Business setup:

• Having too many databases
• Not fully utilizing the power of Notion databases

In this setup, you’re going to address both problems. You’ll only create the databases that you need, and you’ll definitely leverage the full power of Notion databases by using Select, Relation, Formula, and the awesome Rollup property types.

Start by creating a page named Backend in the HQ Teamspace.

It’s always a great practice to have all your core databases in a single page. This way, the setup will be clean and organised – plus, everyone on the team will always know where to find the core databases.

Then, go ahead and create all necessary databases as simple inline databases. You’ll learn in a second one-by-one how to set them up, but creating them all at the start will make the setup a lot easier.

As a reminder, here’s the list of standard databases for your company setup in Notion that I recommend:

• Team Directory
• Teams / Departments
• OKRs
• Projects
• Tasks
• Docs
• CRM
• Member Dashboards

Why inline, you may ask? It’ll be easier for you to add various database properties, add relations with other databases, and above all, you’ll get to see how all databases work as a whole system. Later, you’ll turn them into their own pages to make them easier to handle.

While going through the next steps of setting up each individual database, ask yourself (or your team) which information you actually need.

Then decide which of these you need to see at a glance (using database properties) and which can be hidden or stored inside the page.

It’s easy to go overboard and try to track everything. But at the end of the day, someone somewhere has to fill out that property for it to actually be helpful. You’ll reach a point where adding more context doesn’t help you anymore and just slows down the system because no one wants to spend 10 minutes filling out properties for a simple task.

Setting up a Team Directory in Notion For Your Company

First things first, let’s take a look at the Team Directory database.

It’ll act as a user directory to store all the members of your team and company. While this database won’t have the biggest impact on your day-to-day operations, it’s a best practice to keep everyone informed on who actually does what (and maybe get to know their coworkers a bit better)

For this database, you this is a good list of properties:

• Name (Default Property): Name of the members
• Role (Select Property): The role of the members
• Team (Relation to Teams database): Which team they belong to
• Email (Email Property)
• Picture (Media & File Property)
• Meeting Link (URL Property)
• Head of (Relation to Teams database): If the member is head of any department
• Notion Account (Person Property): The Notion user account of the member

Feel free to adjust this list of properties to your specific needs. Cut what you don’t need and add additional context where required.

When creating the database properties, take the time to select a specific icon for each one. This will greatly help you later down the line and lifts the UI of your setup to the next level.

Pro Tip: Make sure to stay consistent with your property icons, particularly for relations to other databases. These should always match the main icon of the other data type. For example, if you use the target icon for an OKR, each relation to your OKR database should have this icon so people see at a glance what it’s about.

How to set up your teams in Notion

You already did most of the heavy lifting for this database when you defined your teamspaces earlier.

Just like you used your organisation structure to decide which teamspaces to set up, you can now do the same to create the different teams or departments in this database.

Why have a database for teams if you already use teamspaces? Teamspaces only allow you to “group” pages and manage access rights – but you can’t connect them to individual entries. We need this database to label all other information in your company so that we can later show all projects, tasks, OKRs, notes etc. that belong to a specific team

In this database, you should add the following properties (as always adapted to your specific use case):

• Name (Default Property): Name of the team or department
• People (Relation to Team Directory database): To assign members to the teams
• Leads (Relation to Team Directory database): To assign the lead of the team
• OKRs (Relation to OKR database): To Assign them any goal
• Projects (Relation to Projects database): Assigned projects
• Docs (Relation to Docs database): Any project related to this team or assigned to them

How to set up OKRs in Notion

No matter whether you believe in OKRs, BHAG or moonshots – your company is likely going to have some form of goal setting to help with medium-term planning.

And one of Notion’s superpowers is helping you connect this overarching goals with your day-to-day tasks. Few tools make it his easy to connect the planning and action sphere of your business

This is one of the favourite features of Ciarán Doyle, the person who’s responsible to help some of Europe’s largest companies adopt Notion at scale.

You can customise this database to fit your specific methodology of goal setting. The below example is a great starting point:

• Name (Default Property): The goals or key objectives
• Status (Status Property): For tracking the goals. Instead of the default ones, you can set the options as Not Started, On Track, Off Track, Done, Cancelled.
• Quarter (Select Property): To set the time frame—in which quarter the goal should be achieved
• Teams (Relation to Teams database): To assign a particular team for the goal
• Projects (Relation to Projects database): What projects should be completed to achieve the goal

How To Set Up Your Company Projects in Notion

Now that you have your larger company goals defined in Notion, it’s time to break down the plan into more actionable elements.

Unless you follow a specific Project Management Philosophy like Agile, you most likely have two key elements that represent the action side of your business: Projects and Tasks.

Let’s first set up your Projects Database since this is the next element in your planning & execution hierarchy.

A great starting point for your Projects database would include the following properties:

• Name (Default Property): Name of the projects
• Status (Status Property): Current status of the projects
• Tasks (Relation to Tasks database): Assign tasks related to this project
• Progress (Formula Property): Track project progress based on completed tasks
• OKR (Relation to OKRs database): Link to the goal this project supports
• Responsible (Person Property): Assign users/members responsible for the project
• Team (Relation to Team database): Assign the team associated with the project
• Docs (Relation to Docs database): Link relevant documents or notes for this project
• Client / Customer (Relation to CRM database): Identify the client or customer for this project
• Last Edited (Last Edited Time Property): Use this property to filter out inactive projects

To create a progress bar, use the following formula in the Progress (Formula Property):

(Tasks.filter(Status == “Done”).length() / Tasks.length()).multiply(100).round().divide(100)

Set the Progress field settings to:

• Number Format: Percent
• Display as: Bar

This will display the project’s completion percentage and a progress bar. As tasks are completed, the progress will be updated accordingly.

You might wonder why we’re using the Person property when there’s already a Team Directory.

Using the Relation property won’t allow you to dynamically filter and view projects assigned to specific users (whoever is currently looking at the Notion database).

By using the Person property instead, you can filter elements using ‘ME’, which means it’s much easier to build tailored Notion dashboards at scale.

How to set up Company Tasks in Notion

Now that you’ve created the Projects database, it’s time to set up the Tasks database. This database is straightforward and should include the following properties:

• Name (Default Property): Tasks or action items
• Status (Status Property): Track the status of the tasks. You can enable the option to show as checkboxes for simplicity.
• Due Date (Date property): Set deadlines for tasks
• Responsible (Person Property): Assign a team member to each task
• Project (Relation to Projects database): Link tasks to relevant projects
• Teams (Rollup Property): Display the team responsible for the project associated with each task
• Docs (Relation to Docs database): Connect relevant documents or notes for each task

For showing the Teams (Rollup property), use the following settings:

• Type: Rollup
• Relation: Project
• Property: Team
• Calculation: Show original

How to set up your Docs Database in Notion

The Docs database is crucial for storing all important documentation and notes for your business.

It plays a vital role in maintaining knowledge, workflows and processes to ensure that your company keeps improving over time (instead of having to reinvent the wheel with every new project).

For this database, consider including the following properties:

• Name (Default Property): Name of the document or note
• Status (Status Property): Track the status of documents (Not Started, Drafting, In Review, Done)
• Valid until (Date property): Define the validity period of the document
• Projects (Relation to Projects database): Link documents to specific projects
• Tasks (Relation to Tasks database): Link documents to specific tasks
• Responsible (Person Property): Assign the team member responsible for each document
• Created by (Created by property): Mention the user who created each database item
• Teams (Relation to Teams database): Link documents to relevant teams
• Type (Select property): Categorize documents (SOPs, Documentation, Notes, Brainstorm, etc.)

How to set up your CRM in Notion

Now, let’s set up the CRM database.

For this example, we’re keeping it simple and include only the most essential elements for a CRM, but if your business relies heavily on tracking people (like a VC or Private Equity firm), you’d need to expand this to fit your needs.

• Name (Default Property): Name of the customer or client
• Status (Status Property): Track the current status of the customer (Lead, In negotiations, Won, Lost)
• Projects (Relation to Projects database): Link the client or customer to relevant projects
• Responsible (Person Property): Assign the team member responsible for each client
• Email (Email Property): Contact email of the customer

Setting up Your Database Views

So far, you created all the core databases your business needs.

Now, it’s time to move to the next step – creating database views within the main database. The reason for creating views in the main database is simple: reusability and scalability.

Let’s say you need a Project database view in both the Team dashboard and Individual members’ dashboard.

Without creating the views in the main database, you’d have to manually recreate them each time you want to create a linked Project database.

That’s a lot of unnecessary work.

Instead, by creating them in the main database, you can use them anywhere needed, ensuring consistency with predefined filtering and sorting. Pretty neat, right?

For each database, you’ll need to decide:

• Which information is crucial and needs to be shown
• What views to create for each database

In this setup, you’re going to create database views for the following databases:

OKRs Database Views

For the OKRs Database, create two database views:

Gallery View

• View Type: Gallery
• Card Preview: None
• Properties to show: Name, Status
• Hide database title

By Team Views

• View Type: Gallery
• Card Preview: None
• Properties to show: Name, Status
• Group by: Teams
• Filters (Optional): By Quarter to show OKRs from a particular quarter (Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4)
• Hide database title

Projects Database Views

You should consider the following base views for your projects database:

Kanban View

• View Type: Board
• Hide database title
• Properties to Show: Responsible, Duration, Progress
• Filters (Create a filter group): Where Status is not Done or Last edited time is on or after One month ago
• Group by: Status
• Toggle off Hide Empty Groups (Notion hides empty groups by default)
• Toggle on Color Columns

Project Nav

• View Type: Board
• Card Preview: None
• Hide database title
• Filters: Where Status is In Progress

My Kanban

This database view focuses on showing projects assigned to a specific team member. It leverages the power of the Person property to achieve this.

For this, you’re going to leverage the power of Person property. So, duplicate the previous Kanban View and add an additional filter. Go to Filters, and click on Add filter. Set the filter type And Responsible contains Me.

Tasks Database Views

Similar to the Projects database, the Tasks database will be utilised in multiple areas across the workspace. Typically, your business will require at least three different Tasks database views:

Open Tasks

This view displays all incomplete tasks assigned to the current user or tasks that are unassigned but created by the user.

Using the “Either assigned to you or not assigned to anyone but you created it” filter is a great way to ensure nothing gets lost. If you only filter by “assigned to me” you risk that people forget to assign someone as responsible and then can’t find the task again.

To set up this view, create a Filter group with the following rules:

• Filter Group 1:
  • Where Responsible contains Me
• Or (Create another filter group):
  • Where Responsible is Empty
  • And, Created by contains Me

In the main filter, add:

• And, Status is not Complete

Additionally, sort tasks by due dates (Ascending) so that the earliest tasks appear first.

Done / Completed

This view is similar to the Open Tasks view but displays only completed tasks. Simply adjust the filter to:

• Status is Complete

Docs Database Views

To keep your organisational knowledge management up and running, create a view that shows people all their documents.

My Docs

Similar to the My Tasks view, this displays documents that are assigned to or created by the current user or not assigned to anyone but created by the current user. Set up the following filter:

• Filter Group 1:
  • Where Responsible contains Me
• Or (Create another filter group):
  • Where Responsible is Empty
  • And, Created by contains Me

Additionally, sort entries by Last edited time (Ascending) to ensure the most recently edited documents are at the top.

Now, all your core databases and their respective views are set up!

To finalise the backend setup for your company in Notion, turn each inline database into a page and assign the corresponding icon to the page.

How to set up your Company Dashboards in Notion

With the backend of your Notion system complete, it’s time to shift your focus to the front end of the system — dashboards, overview pages, and the homepage. Since your default database views are already prepared, building these other components will be much quicker

A great starting point for your company setup in Notion would be the following:

• Company Homepage
• Team Dashboards
• Individual Dashboards
• Projects Dashboards
• Company Wiki

Again, all these should align closely with your business requirements and team preferences, so feel free to adapt this where necessary.

Set Up Your Company Homepage

Start by creating a company homepage, primarily designed for navigation. Team members can use this page to quickly get to any relevant page. It’s best to take a moment here to brainstorm what these central pages are in your company. Here are a few starting ideas:

• Links to important pages and dashboards
• The Team Dashboards (eg. Marketing, OPs, Design, etc.)
• Link to the User’s dashboard
• An option to create a new user’s dashboard (Using Notion Button and Filters)
• Help Section (If there’s any issue using the Notion setup)

Set Up Your Department Landing Pages

If you want to create a separate landing page for each team or department, simply duplicate the homepage you just created and add a new two column section.

In this section, use one column to link to the most important documents for people from other teams looking for help (i.e. request a design from the marketing team) and use the other column to link to the most relevant documents for the team members.

If you want, you could also add linked views to the team projects and tasks. Doing so would require you to set a manual filter on each view which can get quite cumbersome if you have a lot of teams (and views).

A quicker method would be to use the method shown in the next chapter to set up automated dashboards for each team using self-referential filters.

Set Up Automatic Dashboards For Your Teams

With the team/department database already in place, you’ll now create a template for Team Dashboards to ensure all current and future teams have their dashboards instantly set up!

Start by creating a new template (name it New Team) in the Team Dashboard and only show the essential database properties. Ensure the page is full-width for optimal viewing.

Next, based on your business requirements, set up the necessary linked databases. Leverage the pre-built database views you’ve already created. Typically, team dashboards should include:

• OKRs (Gallery View)
• Projects (Kanban View)
• Tasks (Open and Done views)
• Docs

Additionally, apply a filter in each linked database to display items specific to each team. Navigate to Filter and set Where Teams Contains [New Team].

This is called a self-referential filter and it’s one of Notion’s most powerful features. This setting will automatically update whenever you apply the template to a new project so that it shows only entries related to this specific project (instead of the [New Team] template).

To enhance functionality, include Notion buttons to:

• Create New Project
• Create New Doc

Make sure to set this template as the default for the Teams database. This way, every new team created will automatically populate with linked databases showing only relevant team-related items — a truly efficient setup!

Lastly, since it’s a dashboard, improve usability by setting pages to Open in Full Page in the main database views.

Now that the team dashboards are set up, let’s move on to creating the individual dashboards.

Set Up Dashboards For Individual Team Members

To create the Individual Dashboards and leverage the power of Notion templates, you need to create an additional database — Personal Dashboards.

Begin by going to the Backend page in the HQ Teamspace. Create a new page, choose Table, and then select New Database. Add a new property called Belongs to (Person Property).

Next, create a new template within the Personal Dashboards database. Include the following linked databases, similar to what you’ve done for the Team dashboards:

• Projects (My Kanban view)
• Tasks (Open and Done views)
• Docs (My Docs view)

Make sure to apply a filter to all linked database views: Where Responsible contains Me.

Additionally, at the top of this template, add two sections:

Quick Links: Include essential Notion pages or website links for quick access.

Quick Actions: Here, insert Notion Buttons for creating:

• New Project
• New Task
• New Doc

For these buttons, the Responsible property should be set to Person who clicked button. This way, the user who creates a new project, task, or doc will be assigned responsibility for it.

Using Notion buttons is particularly important if you enable Lock Pages on dashboards or landing pages. When pages are locked, users can only create new database items using Notion buttons.

Return to the Company Homepage and under the Need Help? section, add an additional Callout. Here, create a Notion button to help users create their personal dashboards if not created already.

Now, it’s time to move on to creating the Project Dashboard.

Set Up Project Dashboards

Begin by creating a new template for the Project Database. Hide unnecessary database properties that teams don’t need. For optimal use, display the following properties:

• Responsible
• Status
• Team
• Duration
• Progress

Next, create three Toggle Headings:

• 1️⃣ Planning
• 2️⃣ Execution
• 3️⃣ Review

These will be used for the team to brainstorm and plan any project. If you have a specific process for these project phases, add it inside the toggle so it can be referenced whenever a new project is started.

Beneath that, you’ll add the following linked databases:

• Tasks (Open & Done views)
• Docs

Ensure each linked database view has a filter (Project Contains New Project) to display only items related to this project.

Don’t forget to set this as the default template for the Projects Database.

Company Wiki

If you want to scale your business, one thing that you need is a proper company wiki (for employees, stakeholders, clients, etc.) Building a comprehensive company wiki is crucial for improving operational efficiency as well.

So, for this page, start with these sections:

• Start here (Introductory documents)
• Company (Company-related documents)
• Perks & Benefits (Employee benefits)

Below these, create multiple linked databases with filters to show specific document types (Meeting notes, SOPs, Brainstorms, etc.).

Additionally, include a Docs pipeline section to manage the documents. Create a Kanban view to visualize the current status of each document, facilitating easy management of document pipelines by admins and users.

With the Company Wiki set up, you’ve completed configuring your Notion Workspace for Business.

Now, the final step is to secure your company workspace against accidental changes.

Final Steps For A Secure Company Workspace

Defining your access rights and user groups is only half the battle when it comes to creating a secure Notion Workspace. But you also need to apply them correctly to your now mostly finished setup.

First and foremost, ensure that all core databases and important dashboards or pages are locked. This prevents accidental changes and safeguards the system.

Next, make sure that only your admins have full edit access on your databases. Everyone else should be set to “Can Edit Content”. This prevents any accidental changes to the database structure (i.e. the properties and their names).

To do so, go through all your databases in the backend and make sure your settings look like this:

• Admins: Full Access
• Users: Can edit content
• Everyone in the workspace: Can edit content
• Teamspace members: Can edit content

Remember to use your User Groups to set these access rights rather than assigning rights to individual people.

With these settings, you’re already on a good way – but you should check out the most impactful Notion Security Mistakes to avoid any additional pitfalls.

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