How to use Atlas · Lancaire Mechanical Services

Start here — your account

Signing in the first time, and what the authenticator prompt is for.

Your first sign-in

An administrator invites you. You get an email titled Finish setting up your Atlas account with a button to choose your password. The link expires in 24 hours — if it has, ask for another; there is nothing to lose because no account exists yet.
Choose a password of at least 12 characters. It cannot contain your email name or be one of the obvious ones. Press Create Password & Activate Account.
Atlas creates the account and sends you back to sign in with the password you just chose. From then on you use Work Email and Password.

Forgotten it later? Use Forgot your password? on the sign-in screen, or ask the office to send you a reset. There is no password box inside Atlas — a reset link is the way.

The authenticator

Owners, administrators, and anyone an administrator has marked, must enrol an authenticator app once. Atlas shows a setup key to type into your authenticator (Google Authenticator, Authy, 1Password — any of them), then asks for the current code and Enable Authenticator.

After that, ordinary sign-in is your password alone. Atlas only asks for a code again when you do something protected — managing employee accounts, saving company settings, editing your own profile. That prompt is titled Verify protected action: enter the current code, press Verify, and the thing you were doing continues by itself.

If the prompt appears when you did not expect it, you touched something protected — that is normal, not an error. If you have no authenticator enrolled yet, Atlas takes you through enrolling one first.

What you can see, and why

Roles decide which screens you get and which numbers are on them.

Atlas has six roles: Owner, Administrator, Office / Dispatcher, Service Technician, Installer and Accounting. Your role sets a sensible starting point, and an administrator can grant or remove individual privileges on top of it.

Owners and administrators see everything.
Office sees the whole company: dispatch, reports, inventory, estimates and costs.
Technicians and installers do not see the Dispatch board or Revenue Reports. Installers also do not see Estimates.
Accounting sees the money and the reports, and can view the dispatch board without being able to change it.

Two things are withheld rather than hidden, and it is worth knowing which: internal cost, the labour rate and gross margin are separate from selling prices. A technician sees what the customer is charged for a part but not what it cost us. Where a price is fixed by the price book, the box stays visible and read-only rather than disappearing, so you can still see the number you are quoting.

A screen you cannot reach is not a fault. If your job needs it, an administrator can grant it in the Employee Bank — ask rather than working around it.

HQ — your first screen

The company at a glance, and the fastest way to start anything.

Quick Actions starts the four things people begin most often — a Service Ticket, a Customer, a Property or an Estimate — without navigating anywhere first. The tiles below them open the rest of Atlas.

Each page also carries its own create button where the work lives — + New Customer on Customers, + New Service Location on Service Locations, + New Service Ticket and + New Estimate on their pages. The search box in the top bar looks across customers, properties, equipment, tickets, estimates and even blocked time — if you know the name, search is faster than the sidebar.

Customers

Accounts, contacts, and the Do Not Service flag.

Adding a customer

A customer and their first address are created together, because a customer with nowhere to send a truck is not usable. Fill in Customer / Company Name, then the Primary Service Location block underneath — property name, street, city, state and ZIP.

Start typing the street and pick from the list. That locates the address for routing; a typed address still saves if it is not found.
Billing address is the same as the service address is ticked by default. Untick it only when the bills genuinely go elsewhere.
Site / Access Notes is where gate codes, entrance directions and hours belong. It is the first thing the technician reads on the ticket.
Email takes more than one address, separated by commas.
Save & Create Ticket saves the customer and takes you straight into a new call for them.

Atlas checks for duplicates before it saves and warns you if the name, phone or email looks like an account we already have. Read the names it offers before you continue — a second record for the same customer splits their history in half.

Do Not Service

Set Status to Do Not Service and record the reason. From then on, anyone writing a ticket for that customer sees a red warning and cannot save it without ticking the override box and typing why. The override is kept on the ticket.

Job History

Job History in the sidebar is the imported record of work done before Atlas, alongside what Atlas has recorded since. It is where you look when a customer says "you were here last spring" — search it before assuming a call is a first visit.

The reason and internal notes you type on the customer are stored in your browser only — a colleague on another computer sees the flag and the warning, but not your wording. Put anything the whole company must know in a place everyone reads, and tell the office.

Service Locations

The physical addresses we work at, and who owns them.

Every ticket, unit and agreement hangs off a property, not off a customer — which is what lets a building change hands without losing its history.

Search by address, property name, customer, phone, email or ZIP. Filter by city, or by whether the property has a maintenance agreement.
Opening a property shows the customer and their contact details, the access notes, known filter sizes, the equipment installed there, and past and upcoming work.
Open in Maps ↗ hands the address to your phone or computer's maps app.

There is no "new property" button on this page by design. A property is created with its customer, from the customer picker while writing a ticket, or from a maintenance agreement — always attached to somebody from the start.

When a property is sold

Use Transfer to New Owner on the property, not a new record. It moves the address, the equipment at it and the maintenance agreement to the new customer, and records the reason you type. Tickets, estimates and invoices already raised stay with the previous owner, which is what keeps their paperwork straight. Transferring needs the property-transfer privilege; if you do not have it, the office does.

Equipment and Atlas ID

Every unit we touch, its data plate, its photos and its warranty.

Adding a unit

From Equipment, choose + New Equipment. Find the customer, pick the Service Location, and name the unit something a technician would say out loud — RTU-1, Main Heat Pump.

The Asset Tag box is read-only: Atlas issues the tag when you save. Retiring a unit releases its tag so its replacement can carry it.
Filters are entered one row per size, with a quantity. A unit taking two 20x20x1 and one 16x25x1 is two rows, not three.
Manufacturer, Model and Serial Number are what every warranty lookup needs. A unit missing any of them is flagged for identity review until somebody fills it in.

EQ Pulse — reading a data plate

Press EQ Pulse and photograph the data plate. Atlas reads the plate, decodes the model and serial, checks coverage, and fills in what it can. On a unit that already has photos it offers the ones on file first, so you do not have to find the file again.

It only fills empty boxes — it never overwrites something you typed.
It refuses rather than guesses: if it cannot read both model and serial, if the plate belongs to a different serial than the unit you have open, or if that serial already belongs to another record, it says so and changes nothing.
Check the model and serial against the plate before saving. A misread character becomes a wrong warranty answer months later.

There is no QR sticker to scan on equipment. "Scanning" in Atlas means photographing the data plate.

Photos and video

Add photos from the unit's Photos section. Technicians and installers can record video on a unit even where they cannot edit its record — a walkaround of an install is worth more later than a paragraph of notes. Deleting a photo asks twice on purpose.

Warranty, on the Atlas ID page

Atlas ID in the sidebar is the equipment register: every unit, its identity, and where its coverage stands. The chips read Covered to a date, Ends a date when it is inside 90 days, or Expired. The tiles across the top are filters — click Expiring ≤ 90 Days to see just those.

Fix Next walks you through the units missing a manufacturer, model or serial, one after another.
Copy Serial & Open OEM Lookup ↗ copies the serial and opens the manufacturer's own page. Paste the result back with Paste OEM Result — Atlas reads it, shows you exactly what it found and where, and saves nothing until you confirm.
Fill In Warranty is the manual route. Typing an expiration date sets the status for you and tells you it did.
Export CSV gives you the whole register for a spreadsheet.

Anything you type by hand is recorded as manually verified, and a model decode will never overwrite it. Unknown stays unknown rather than becoming a guess — that is deliberate, and it is why the register can be trusted.

Inventory and Truck Stock

What the warehouse holds, what each van carries, and what to order.

Truck Stock — the one technicians use

Truck Stock tracks what each van carries against what it should carry.

− records one used, + records one restocked. Each press is a movement on a ledger, signed and dated — the row locks until it is saved, so pressing twice quickly cannot double-count.
Typing a number in the on-hand box records a correction to what the van actually holds, not a restock. Both are kept, and they read differently in the history for good reason.
Carry is the par level: how many that technician should have.
+ Add part searches the price book so the part stays linked to its catalogue record. You can add something typed by hand, and Atlas will tell you it is not linked.
Remove from list keeps the movement history — add the part back later and its history comes with it.

The Inventory order tab totals every van's shortfall into one list of what to buy. Office staff can switch which employee's truck they are looking at; everyone else sees their own.

Warehouse inventory and purchase orders

The Inventory page holds warehouse stock, purchase orders and receipts. + Item adds a part with a reorder point; Adjust records a count change with a reason; + Purchase Order raises a PO against a vendor, and its detail has Mark Received when it lands.

Mark Received receives the whole order at once. There is no partial receipt yet, so for a split delivery record what arrived with an adjustment and leave the PO open until the rest lands.

Invoices and payments

Billing a completed call, and taking the money safely.

An invoice is always raised from a service ticket, so what we bill matches what we did. Open the ticket and press Create Invoice, or use + New Invoice on the Invoices page and pick the ticket. Atlas builds the lines from the ticket's parts and labour.

Take Card Payment opens the card fields for a card in front of you.
Payment Link copies a link the customer can pay from anywhere.
Charge Card on File charges a card the customer has already authorised. Saving a card asks who authorised it, and that name is kept.
Record Payment is for money taken elsewhere — cash, a cheque, an ACH that landed in the bank.

Never type a card number into Record Payment, or into notes, or into a ticket. It stores an amount, a method and a reference only. Card details belong in the card fields, which go straight to our payment processor and never touch Atlas.

The customer's payment page shows only the invoice number, the total and what is due — no line items, no notes, no internal figures. A receipt is recorded when the bank confirms the payment, not when the page says thank you, so a payment can take a moment to show as paid.

Revenue Reports

What we billed, by technician, week, department, day and service.

The four tiles answer Revenue, Gross Profit, Gross Margin and Average Ticket for whatever the filters currently show. Filter to one technician and the revenue tile switches to what is attributed to them.

Revenue on a job with more than one technician is split by recorded crew hours where we have them, and evenly where we do not. The Basis column on each row says which — read it before drawing a conclusion about somebody's numbers.
Profit and margin are calculated only over jobs whose costs we actually know, and the tiles say how many that is. A job billed without recorded costs is left out rather than counted as pure profit.
A job with nobody assigned shows as Unassigned rather than vanishing.
Where Atlas has worked out the department from the job's own words, the row is badged Atlas classified. Correct the record if it guessed wrong.

The Calendar

Where the week lives: service calls, tasks, blocked time and reminders.

Getting around

Month, Week and Day switch the view. The arrows move one month, week or day at a time, and Today jumps back.
The four tiles across the top — Today, This Week, Overdue and Needs Scheduling — are counts you can click. Overdue and Needs Scheduling open a list of exactly those calls so nothing sits forgotten.
The search box filters by customer, address, ticket number or technician. The two dropdowns beside it narrow to one technician and to Open calls or All calls.

Colours on the calendar

Every entry carries a coloured edge showing who it belongs to — the employee's dispatch colour, set in the Employee Bank. A call with nobody assigned stays neutral, and an Urgent call keeps its red edge, because priority matters more than whose it is. Change someone's colour and the calendar repaints straight away; you do not need to reload.

Putting something on a day

Click any day and Atlas asks what you want to put there. Each choice says what it does:

Service Ticket — schedule a call on that day.
Estimate — start a proposal with the follow-up date set.
Task — an office to-do tied to that day, like ordering a compressor. A task does not have to belong to a property.
Block Time — mark an employee unavailable.
Reminder / Follow-up — a note that surfaces on the day.
PO Due Date — the day a purchase order is expected to land.
Schedule Existing Ticket — pick an open call that has no date yet and drop it on this day. This is the one to reach for when a customer calls back to book.

Blocking someone's time

Click the day, choose Block Time.
Pick the Employee and a Reason — Vacation, Sick Day, Day Off, Personal Time, Training, Unavailable or Other.
Duration is All Day unless you choose Specific Time, which is when the start and end time boxes appear.
Block Time saves it. Everyone sees it — blocked time is shared, not a note in your own browser.

Click an existing block to change it, or use Remove Block to free that person up again. Blocked time honours the technician filter, so filtering to one person shows both their calls and their time off — which is the whole question the screen exists to answer.

Tasks and blocked time appear on the month grid, the week columns and the day agenda. The month grid shows the first few entries per day and then + N more — open the day to see everything.

Service Tickets

The record of a call: who, where, what was wrong, what was done.

Writing one

+ New Service Ticket, then work down the form: customer, service location, equipment, then the work. Customer and location are required, and so is Problem / Scope — that line becomes the ticket's title everywhere else in Atlas, so write it as you would say it to the customer.

The ticket number box says Assigned on save. Atlas issues numbers; nobody picks their own.
Picking the customer fills in the service address and shows the access notes underneath.
Technician offers the active employees; leaving it blank is fine and means unassigned.
Arrival Time and duration are what put the call on the calendar and the dispatch board.

Templates, so nobody retypes a PM

The chips at the top of the form apply a Service Task Template — the standard wording for a job like a split-system PM — into the right boxes. Task Library opens the full list, where you can tick several individual items and press Add to ticket.

Applying a template adds to what is already there, never clears your words, and skips anything already written. Templates are authored in Admin Settings, not here: writing up a call and reshaping every future call are different jobs.

Parts and hours

+ Add part or material adds a line. Type two letters of a part name and pick it from the price book — description and price come with it.
The price is captured at the moment you add it. Re-opening an old ticket never silently reprices it, which is what makes last year's tickets still true.
Free text is allowed for anything not in the book.
Labour hours take quarter hours. If you cannot see a rate, that is deliberate — record the hours and the office handles the money.
On a job with a crew, Crew Hours on the ticket splits the work between people, and the revenue reports use that instead of an even split.

Status, and what it means

A call moves Open → Scheduled → En Route → Arrived → In Progress → Complete. From the field it only moves forward: reopening something is a dispatch decision, so ask the office rather than trying to force it back.

Once a call goes past Scheduled it is locked against reassignment and rescheduling — the dispatch button reads Locked. That is on purpose: moving a job somebody is already driving to is how customers get missed. The office can still change the work itself; it is the who and when that freeze.

Dispatch

Getting the right person to the right address at the right time.

The board opens on a Selected day and shows four numbers: how many calls need dispatching, how many have nobody on them, how many are on the chosen day, and how many hours are booked.

Needs Dispatch is the working list — anything unscheduled or unassigned.
Technician Workload shows each person's day, striped in their dispatch colour, so you can see who is full before you promise a time.
Dispatch or Manage opens the call: choose the technician, set start and end, then Save Dispatch Changes.

Scheduling an unscheduled call moves it to Scheduled by itself. A window has to end after it starts and cannot exceed twelve hours. Every assignment and reschedule is recorded with who did it and what it was before.

Who appears in the technician list: active technicians and installers, anyone in Service, Installation, Maintenance or Dispatch, anyone already on a call — and anyone ticked available for dispatch in the Employee Bank. That last one is how an office manager who also runs calls appears here without changing their access.

PMA — maintenance agreements

Agreements, the visits they owe, and the findings that come out of them.

PMA opens as its own screen. The command centre lists what is Overdue, what is Due next 30, open deficiencies, renewals inside 90 days, and the assets carrying the most risk. Every count is a list you can open — the number and the rows behind it always agree.

For a technician: doing a PM visit

Open the agreement and press Open Checklist on the visit.
Pick the equipment; the checklist narrows to the items that apply to it.
For each item record Pass, Fail or N/A, the measurement where one is asked for, and a note. Press Save Item as you go.
Press Complete Visit when the unit is done.

A measurement outside its configured range creates a deficiency on its own — which is the point. Record the number you actually read; the system turns it into the follow-up work.

For the office: keeping visits on the board

The Actions menu carries + Add Visit, Dispatch Calendar and Maintenance Visits.

Maintenance Visits is the board: filter by needs scheduling, scheduled, overdue or completed, then Schedule, Reschedule or Unschedule each one. Scheduling sets the appointment only — it never changes what the agreement owes.
+ Add Visit creates one against an agreement, with an optional time and technician. Leave the time blank and it waits on the needs-scheduling list.
The dispatch calendar tints each visit in the assigned technician's colour and lets you drag it to a new slot.

Closed visits are protected: a completed or cancelled visit cannot be reassigned, rescheduled or unscheduled, and somebody who is not an active employee cannot be given a visit at all.

On your phone

What the field app is for, and the one button that matters.

Open Atlas on a phone and you get the field view. On a call, the card headed Your next step shows a single wide button in plain speech — On my way, I have arrived, Start work, then Job complete. Press it as it happens; the office sees the call move in real time and stops having to ring you for a status.

The button only appears on calls assigned to you. Viewing somebody else's call shows no buttons — that is the design, not a fault.
After you press it, Atlas re-reads the call from the server rather than assuming, so what you see next is what was really saved.
Photographing a data plate uses your phone's own camera app. Take the photo square-on and close enough to read the smallest line; Atlas refuses a plate it cannot read rather than guessing at it.

If a step button says the ticket is not assigned to you when you believe it is, stop and tell the office rather than working around it — the assignment is what the whole day's reporting hangs on.

Employee BankOwner & admin

Accounts, roles, dispatch identity and what each person can reach.

+ Invite Employee fills in the whole card up front — name, role, department, permissions, dispatch colour — and Send Secure Invitation emails the link. No account exists until they choose their password, so an unclaimed invite leaves nothing behind. If email is not available Atlas gives you the link to pass on yourself.

Dispatch Color is that person's identity across Atlas: their calls, their blocked time and their PMA visits all wear it on the calendar and the dispatch board.
Available for dispatch is separate from role on purpose — an owner or office manager who also runs calls can carry it without giving up their access.
Permissions are individual. The role sets the starting point; ticking a box grants that one privilege to that one person.
Send Password Reset is the answer to "I am locked out".

Deactivate, do not delete. Turning off account access stops the person signing in while keeping their name on every ticket, estimate, invoice and PMA visit they ever touched. Deleting an account with real history is refused for exactly that reason — the history is the company's, not the account's.

Settings

Your own account, how Atlas looks, and the company defaults.

Everyone has this page. Edit My Profile lets you change your preferred name, work phone and skills. Your role, department and dispatch colour are set by an administrator — ask if one is wrong.

The colour scheme is yours alone and follows you to any machine you sign in to: Atlas, Slate, High contrast for sunlight or tired eyes, Dark for night dispatch and a phone in a cab, Meadow and Orchid.

Owners and administrators also get Company Administration, which holds the company name, the default labour rate, markup and tax, what technicians may see, and the office hours and holidays the customer-facing pages read. Saving those asks for your authenticator code, because they change what everyone sees.

Estimates and bids

One record, two documents: a line-item estimate or a commercial bid.

Starting one

From Estimates, choose + New Estimate. The editor is the proposal itself — what you see is what the customer gets.

Document chooses Estimate or Bid. Both print on the same record, so switching does not lose your work.
Letterhead chooses Classic or Signature artwork.
Prepared for has two tabs. A customer picks an existing account and property. Anyone else is for a bid to somebody who is not a customer yet — type the contact name, the company, or both. A company on its own is enough; you do not need a contact person.

The money

+ Add Line adds a priced line. + Add Optional Line adds one the customer can choose — it prints as optional and is left out of the total until they accept it.
The In total box on each line controls whether that line counts toward the price the customer sees.
A discount takes a label and a value, so the proposal can say Military Discount or PMA Discount in the customer's own language.

Words the customer reads

Scope / proposal notes is what the customer is agreeing to. On a bid it prints as the Scope of Work.
Choosing Bid reveals two more boxes: Clarifications and exclusions (one per line) and Proposal terms. They arrive prefilled with our standard wording so you edit rather than retype, and clearing a box back to blank puts the standard wording back on the printed bid.

The prefill never overwrites something you typed. Switch between Estimate and Bid as often as you like — your words stay.

Getting it to the customer

Save the estimate, then open the Send panel.
Send from Atlas opens a short compose box — the customer's email address and a message — and sends the proposal with a private link. Nothing is sent until you press send, so you can edit the note first.
Copy Link gives you the same link to paste into your own email or a text message if you would rather send it yourself.

The customer opens the link, reads the proposal, and accepts and signs it on their phone or computer. Their signature comes straight back into Atlas.

Editing a signed estimate. If a customer has already accepted, Atlas stops you before you save and tells you who signed, for how much and when. Saving anyway withdraws their acceptance and the estimate goes back to unsigned — so the answer is usually to raise a change order instead. Rewording a bid's clarifications or terms does not touch a signature; only changes to what they agreed to pay do.

A sent link is a key. Anyone holding it can view and accept that proposal. Send it to the customer, not to a group address, and use Withdraw if it goes to the wrong person.

The Price Book

The shared list of parts and prices behind estimates and ticket parts.

Search by name or part number to price a line — type and press Enter to list every match at once. Editing a price here changes it everywhere it is used from that point on — it does not rewrite proposals you have already sent.

Marking what the vans carry

The book is mostly flat-rate repair tasks and trip charges. The Truck stock column marks the rows that are physical parts a technician carries, and those are the only ones the + Add part picker on Truck Stock offers by default. Tick the box beside a part and it is saved where you stand — there is no need to open the item.

The tick box in the column heading marks or clears every row on the page at once. It asks first and names the number, and it never reaches beyond the rows on screen.
The Truck stock filter narrows the list to On trucks or Not on trucks, so working through 371 items is a job you can leave and come back to. With On trucks chosen, the count at the top is how many parts are marked so far.
Combining it with the Category filter set to Products is the fast way through — services and trip charges are almost never truck stock.
The same tick lives on the item itself as Stock on trucks if you are already in there editing a price.

Deleting an item is permanent. Atlas warns you first, and tells you how many employee truck-stock rows point at that item, because those rows lose their link to it. If the item is simply no longer sold, mark it Retired instead — that keeps the history readable. Deleting is right only for something entered by mistake.

What customers see

The Customer Portal, so you can answer questions about it on the phone.

Customers sign in at the portal with the email address we hold for them. They see their own equipment, service history, invoices and estimates, and any maintenance agreement — nothing else, and nothing about other customers.

They can send a service request from the portal, choosing which property it is for. It reaches the office as a request to call and confirm — it does not book itself onto the calendar.
If someone says the portal shows nothing, their email address probably does not match our records. They can add another address themselves, or the office can link it.
A customer with a proposal link does not need a portal account to accept it.