How to use Atlas

Start here — your account

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

Your first sign-in

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 email comes from Atlas, on the Lancaire letterhead, and its link opens the Atlas you asked from. It works once, and only when you press Set New Password, so opening it to look is safe. If you use an authenticator, the page then asks for its code, and a wrong code or a password it turns down can be tried again on the same page.

The authenticator

Owners, administrators, anyone an administrator has marked, and anyone with Payroll access must enroll an authenticator app once. Atlas shows a code to scan with your authenticator (Google Authenticator, Authy, 1Password — any of them); Can't scan? Type the key shows the setup key to type instead. Then enter the current code and press Enable Authenticator.

After that, ordinary sign-in is your password alone. Atlas only asks for a code again when you do something protected — opening Payroll, managing employee accounts, saving company settings, editing your own profile. That prompt is titled Verify protected action, and the same words under your name in the top bar open it whenever you want to verify ahead of time: enter the current code, press Verify, and the thing you were doing continues by itself.

Talk instead of typing

On a computer, any box of several lines — Notes, a write-up, a scope — shows a microphone in its bottom-right corner while the cursor is in it: Talk to type. Press it and talk; the words go in where the cursor is. It turns red while it listens.

• Ctrl + Shift + Space – talk to type, in any text box
• Esc – stop

Press it again, click out of the box, or stop talking for a few seconds, and it stops. Nothing is saved until you save. On a phone, use the microphone on the keyboard.

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 have the side menu’s Inventory folder like the office: their own Truck Stock, Needed Materials and Supply Houses. Its fourth row, Extra Stock, is the office’s.
• 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 labor 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.

HQ — your first screen

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

Quick Actions are the four round buttons tucked behind the bell beside the page title in the top bar, on every page. Rest the pointer on the bell and they open in a row to its right: a Service Ticket, a Customer, a Property or an Estimate, each started without navigating anywhere first. Hold the pointer on one to see its name. The tiles on HQ open the rest of Atlas.

Promises on HQ lists what was promised to customers on calls (see Customers, Calls) and is not done yet: yours, or everyone's for an owner or administrator, soonest first. One past its day turns amber. Press Done when it is kept and it comes off the list.

A red button always asks before it does anything: delete, remove, withdraw, sign out. Say no and nothing happens. Where the button already has its own question, such as a deletion that lists what goes with it, that question is the one you are asked, and never twice.

Letterhead, at the bottom of the side menu above the guide, is an office page — field technicians and installers do not see it — and works like the rest: the company letterhead with nothing on it but what you type, on the letterhead you used last, Classic or Signature, picked on the switch above the sheet. Under Classic, Steel or Pulse beside it is how the masthead looks on screen, the same company setting the estimate editor picks; print and PDF are always the steel, still. Type straight onto the paper — the date, who it is to, a subject line and the letter; the same small B and I bar the estimate boxes have sits over the box you are in, or press Ctrl+B and Ctrl+I, and bold and italic print that way — then the round Print or send button beside the switch opens Print, Email, Text and Save PDF. Email sends the letter as a PDF: on a phone the share sheet opens with it attached, so pick Mail; on a computer without one, the PDF is saved and a new email opens for you to attach it to. Text takes you into Messages: New text opens with the letter’s PDF and a short note in it, and the first line of who the letter is to already in the search. Pick who it goes to, press Open conversation, and the PDF waits in the tray above the box until you press the send arrow — nothing goes before that. If you cannot text from Atlas (your role, or texting is not set up), the line under the buttons says so and the share sheet opens instead. There is no save button because none is needed: the letter stays as it was left, for the whole office — whoever opens the page next, on any computer, finds the same letterhead, date, subject and words, and the line under the buttons says when it was last kept. New letter starts over: today’s date, the same letterhead, the rest empty — for everyone, so it asks first when there are words on the page.

A letter’s Classic masthead is the steel, and it stands still — a letter is for printing and PDF.

Or have the assistant write it. Open it from the search box as you would anywhere and say what the letter should say — “write to Dr. Case that the fall visit is due, offer Tuesday”, or “a list of tools a new tech needs, on the letterhead” — and its answer carries Write it on the letter. Press it and the words land on the page; a page you have already written on gets them offered beside it, with Use this draft and Keep mine. It says only what you asked for, never a price or a promise you did not, and it sends nothing anywhere.

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.

A name spelled a letter off is still found. The top bar searches all of Atlas; every other search box searches only its own page or list. When nothing matches what you typed exactly, any of them offers the records a letter or two off, closest first: “Hanah” finds Hannah, “Honeycutt” finds Huneycutt, “capasitor” finds the capacitors. A right word is never padded with near ones, and a number is matched exactly as typed.

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, On my way sits beside Start timer. On my way texts the customer from the company’s number: pick how long, read the text, press Send text. It then reads Texted with the time, and pressed again it sends the running-late text. It moves nothing on the call. A main line, which cannot take a text, says so beside the customer’s name and the button reads Call: Atlas rings it from the company’s number and the Assistant’s voice says the same words twice, after the beep if a machine answers. It then reads Called. If a text bounces because the number turns out to be a landline, Atlas calls it the same way. Start timer tells the office you are on the job, and the timer runs from there. Pause stops the clock for lunch or a parts run and Resume starts it again; the time worked leaves the pauses out. While your timer runs, the timer glows green in the ticket, and the top bar shows On #71 12m on every page, under the page name on a phone. It turns amber while paused, and pressing it opens the job. An install’s timer shows the same way. Job complete sits beside them. A technician’s Job complete needs the call’s Work Performed written first; without it, it takes you to the box on the Notes tab. The office can complete a call without it. The time worked goes on your timesheet as job hours when you press Job complete, unless hours are already on the call. Job complete then offers Create Invoice, which opens the ticket’s invoice; close it to skip. The invoice opens asking Collect payment? with what is due: Take card (the office) or Record payment goes on to take it, and Not now leaves the invoice as it is. A technician’s invoice opens right there, made from the parts and labor on the ticket at the ticket’s prices, with what is owed and what is paid. To collect, press Record Payment and pick how it was taken — cash, a check with its number, or a card run on the company’s own terminal. Record the money, never the card or bank number. A technician bills only their own calls, and the office still edits, sends and voids invoices. A completed call shows how long it took. The office — an owner, administrator or dispatcher — sees the same timer on any call. The same timer sits under the tiles of a ticket opened from Service Tickets, on a phone or a desktop, so a job can be started from either. Press it as it happens; the office sees the call move in real time and stops having to ring you for a status. The ticket's Location tile shows the full address, city and state, and pressing it opens directions in Maps.

An owner or admin who also runs calls can see their phone the way a technician does: Field view, the wrench at the end of the clock row in the side menu, turns it into My Day, as home, and the technician’s short menu, Inventory folder and all, with only the calls assigned to you — all of them, not one at a time. Payroll is My Hours there, your own timesheet only, as it is for a technician, and Messages stays on the menu so customers’ texts can be answered from the truck. Press it again for the office. The phone remembers which; a computer is always the office, and your permissions do not change.

• Your current call is the first one assigned to you that is due: already underway, scheduled for today or earlier, or not scheduled at all. A call booked for a later day waits for its day; when nothing is due, My Day says when your next call is.
• Whoever a call is assigned to can take the customer's card payment when it is done — technicians, installers, the office and the owner alike. The only way to stop someone is to turn off Collect payments for that person in the Employee Bank.
• The bar at the bottom of the screen — Search or ask Atlas — is the search and the Assistant in one: tap it and the keyboard is already up, so you type straight away, and the words in the bar dissolve and re-form while it waits for you; the Atlas mark at its end opens the Assistant. Above it, a row of chips within thumb reach: New Ticket, then Calls, Estimates, Parts, Calendar and Customers, and Today to come back to HQ. The top of the screen keeps the menu, the page's name and the bell; the menu button wears a green ring while you are on the clock, and the clock is at the top of the menu. On the calendar's month grid a hatched day is one the company is closed — tap it and Atlas names the holiday. The bell opens the same notification menu the desktop has, on the screen, and a line about an estimate takes you to that estimate’s card.
• Owners, administrators and the office get HQ as three screens: swipe sideways, or tap Today, Office or Money in the switch at the top. Today is the day's calls and your clock. Office is the desktop's Office Operations Inbox — Communications (unread texts, in a blue bubble), unassigned, overdue and urgent tickets, completed work and open estimates, a row each with the same counts the desktop shows; tap one to open its list. Overdue Calls opens the call itself, or a short list to pick from when there are several. Anything at zero is folded into one "all clear" line. Money is what is not invoiced, what is unpaid and the purchase orders still open. Technicians see Today alone.
• 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.

Asking the assistant

What the assistant can answer and do, and exactly what leaves the building when you ask.

It has read this guide. A question about what Atlas can do, or how to do something in it, is answered from these pages, and the answer carries an Open the guide button to the topic. When the search box finds no record for what you typed, its Ask the Assistant button sends the same words here.

The small blue cube at the end of the search box opens the assistant. Type a question and press Enter — ask about the software (“how do I add a visit to a PMA”) or about today’s work (“which invoices have been open longest”). The camera inside the question box is Add a photo: ask about a nameplate, a job sheet or a part label, with or without typing anything.

It reads aloud. Highlight any text in Atlas and a Read aloud pill comes up under it; press it and the words are said in the assistant’s voice. Stop at the foot of the window, or Esc, ends it.

It reads the drawings. Ask about a job’s plans — “what are the ceiling heights”, “what does the RTU schedule say”, “which sheet shows the kitchen” — and it reads the takeoff’s plan set: the reflected ceiling plans, sections and schedules. With a takeoff open on the Takeoff page, that is the set it reads; otherwise it finds the takeoff you name. It answers from what is printed and names the sheet, and says so when the set does not show it (a mechanical-only set has no ceiling plan). It reads the whole set, so give it a minute or two; it changes nothing.

It finds a name spelled a letter off. Ask for “Hanah Rodnauer” and, when no customer or employee has those exact words, it offers the names a letter or two off and asks “Did you mean Hannah Rodnauer?” before it uses one.

It briefs the day. “Good morning” or “what’s my day” – money in yesterday and today, what is owed, today’s calls and jobs by tech, anything unassigned or overdue, who is on the clock, and estimates waiting on a customer. It changes nothing.

It does the work. Ask it the way you would ask the office: “text Charlie St Joseph that we’re on the way”, “who texted back today”, “move the Hicks install to Thursday and put Orlando on it”, “mark the Locust visit complete”, “change line 2 on invoice 14 to $180 and email it”, “put a 50% deposit on estimate 20”, “archive Palermo’s”, “take two capacitors off Orlando’s van for ticket 18204”. It texts customers and reads their texts; changes customers, contacts, tickets, jobs and visits, calendar entries, estimates, invoices, maintenance agreements, the Price Book, supply houses, truck stock and bids; merges duplicate customers, deletes texts, logs calls, bills a job's draws and retainage, posts to the Billboard and drafts write-ups; at a call it pauses the timer, texts On my way, writes the notes and ends a visit to come back; it changes an employee’s card, leaving their role, permissions and email as they were; it edits website photos, quick replies, the scan rules and a contractor’s profile one piece at a time, adds parts to a call and calls a customer from your phone; it makes, changes and receives purchase orders, changes a bid sheet, Often needed and the Day Plans library a piece at a time, records a unit’s warranty from the paperwork, makes an estimate’s link and copies it, switches your colours, and deletes an employee’s account, a ticket’s photo, a Day Plan or a purchase order; and runs the same checks as when you press the button yourself — what your account cannot do, it cannot either. A change starts from the record as it stands, so only what you asked for moves. Anything that goes to a customer or an employee, deletes something or touches what is owed waits for your Yes in the panel, and a text shows the number it is going to. It never takes card payments or handles card or bank numbers. What it cannot do — text a photo, charge a card, count on the drawings — it says, with where to tap instead.

• Draft an estimate – name the customer and the work (“draft an estimate for the Hicks job: new condensate pump and float switch”); it asks first, then builds a draft from the Price Book and past accepted estimates at their prices. Lines marked [Price needed] are $0 for you to price; labor only if you ask; nothing is sent.

• Reports from a sentence – “revenue by technician for September”, “unpaid invoices over 30 days”: a table in the panel, totals at the foot; Copy as CSV for a spreadsheet. Read only; card and bank numbers never appear.

From the keyboard (⌘ for Ctrl on a Mac), from any page, even in the search bar:

• Ctrl + / – open (again to close)
• Ctrl + Shift + / – open listening (again to stop)

To put it away, say or type close, that’s all or never mind: the panel closes and stops listening straight away, with nothing sent. Asked in other words (“I have what I need”), the Assistant closes it itself once it has answered.

Or talk to it. The pearl at the end of the question box is Talk to Atlas. Press it and say your question — four small bars at the front of the box move while Atlas is listening and sway while it answers: the words land in the box as you speak, the question goes after just under a second of silence — a breath mid-sentence does not send it — and the answer is read back to you, short, the way a person would say it. It starts on the first sentence while the rest is still being voiced. Cut in by pressing the pearl while it talks: it stops and listens. On a computer you can simply talk over it. While Atlas is working on a longer answer you hear a soft tick every couple of seconds, so a quiet moment is Atlas thinking, not a dropped connection. In the car the answer comes through CarPlay or Bluetooth the way music does, and when the conversation ends Atlas hands the sound back, so your radio or music picks up again. Atlas then listens for your next question, so you can keep the conversation going hands-free; press the pearl again (Stop talking to Atlas), or close the panel, to stop. The Voice picker in the panel head chooses which of your device’s voices reads the answers. Your browser does the listening and the talking, so no audio leaves your device — only the words, the same as a typed question.

The short Ask Atlas note that opens with the assistant shows once: it goes away for good once you have asked a question or closed the panel, or sooner if you press Got it.

Where your words go. Your question, a short summary of the records already on your screen, and what Atlas looks up while it works (names, towns, numbers, statuses, totals, dates) are sent to Anthropic. Names and towns travel; phone numbers, email addresses and street addresses do not — they are taken out before anything is sent. When the assistant emails or texts the customer on file, your browser fills in the address or number itself, so the assistant never sees it. Atlas keeps no copy of a photo you attach.

A photo travels exactly as taken. It is shrunk in your browser and sent once, but Atlas does not read, crop or redact it — a photo of paperwork can carry a phone number or an address in the picture itself, so crop out anything that should not go before you attach it. The note beside an attached photo says the same thing.

It remembers your conversation. What you asked and what it answered over the last 30 days — up to 40 turns — goes with your next question, on your phone and your computer alike, so “yes”, “schedule that for Thursday” or “the customer from this morning” means something. It is kept on your own account, where nobody else can read it, with phone numbers and email addresses taken out. Say forget or start over and it forgets the whole conversation.

It knows what is new. It has read Atlas’s change log as well as this guide, so “what changed with the bell” or “can it do that now” is answered from the latest updates.

It does what you ask. Tell it to do something and it does it, the way you would: “send Orlando a fresh invite”, “make a ticket for Hero at the Cliff Cameron building Thursday at 9 and give it to Jake”, “email estimate 20 to the customer”, “add Palermo’s Restaurant”, “rename that property The Locust Farm Bureau”. A property it adds takes the name exactly as you say it. It looks up what it needs, makes the changes, and lists each step in the panel as it goes, ending with a line saying what it did. It works as you: every step is made from your browser with your own sign-in, so it can do exactly what your account can do and nothing more. When your account is not allowed, it says so.

People by name. Say the person as you would to the office — “put a task on Tori Smith” finds Torey Smith — and it puts them on in the same step. When two people answer to the name it asks which. A task or reminder needs nobody on it. Someone with no Atlas account (a name from the imported roster, say) or an inactive one cannot be put on anything: it does the rest without them, puts their name in the title, and says so in one line.

When it cannot do something, it says so in one short line — what did not happen and what you can do — not a list of what it tried.

It asks first before anything hard to take back: deleting a record, anything that goes out to a customer or an employee (an email, a text, a sign-in link), and anything that records money. The panel shows what it is about to do (and where it is sending it) with Yes, do it and No. No means it stops and tells you it was not done. Ask it to start or draft something and it opens the form filled in for you to check and save instead.

What it will not do. It never takes a card payment, sends a pay link or touches a saved card, and it never handles a card, bank account or routing number — one typed into a question is blanked before it goes anywhere. For money it only files a payment you have already received: the amount, how it was paid and a check number. One request makes at most five changes before it asks you about each further one, and never more than 25. Text inside a record — a note, a pasted invitation — is read as information, never as an instruction. Every change it makes is logged under your name, and so is any lookup that fails (where and why, never what it read), and the owner can switch its changes off at any time, leaving it to look things up and answer.

Customers

Accounts, contacts, merging customers entered twice, and the Do Not Service flag.

The search on the Customers page finds a customer by their name, company, phone, email or billing town, and by the address of any property Atlas has for them: typing a street or a ZIP lists the customers with a property there. The suggestions under the box are the same people, and a property with a unit number shows the unit, so twelve apartments at one street address read as twelve properties rather than one address repeated.

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.

Until you type your own, Customer / Company Name is built from the company or the contact's first and last name, and changes as they do. A renamed customer's maintenance agreements take the new name when you press Save Changes.

More properties for the same customer are added from their panel: open the customer and press + Add Service Location beside Physical properties. The customer is already chosen and the town, state and ZIP start from their billing address, so only the new street (and a property name, if it has one) needs typing; press Save property.

Photos & notes, at the bottom of a customer's panel, holds the photos, videos and notes taken at their site visits, newest first, with who took each and when. A photo opens full size; a video plays in place. × takes one off; the office, or whoever added it, can do that.

Their service calls are in the same list: each call's photos, and its Diagnosis and Work Performed, marked with the call's number (Call #71). Those belong to the call, so they have no × here; change or remove them on the ticket. A cancelled call's are left out.

• 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.
• Lead Source is one box for how they found us. Click into it and it lists the sources this company uses, most used first. Type and it narrows them, and also lists the customers whose names match: pick one and it reads "Referral · their name". A source or a name that is not in the list is kept exactly as you typed it; Enter keeps what you typed.
• A customer picked there is linked as the one who sent them. The referrer's card then has a Referrals section: who they sent, the work that came of it, and a thank-you owed once a referred customer has paid something. Mark thank-you sent records when it went out; Atlas tracks the thank-you and never pays it. What a thank-you is ("$50 gift card") is set there by an owner or administrator, and so is the Thank-you reminders switch: off, the card still lists who was sent and the work won, but nothing is owed and there is nothing to mark. Merging customers carries their referrals to the one kept.
• 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.

The command menu

Open a customer and their panel leads with the command menu: how many jobs, units, properties, tickets, estimates, invoices and maintenance agreements they have, and the things you do for them next, + Schedule New Job and + New Estimate first. The account details follow underneath. Each count opens what it counts: Jobs the job history, Locations the properties further down the same panel, and Equipment, Tickets, Estimates and PMA their page, already searched for this customer. Invoices opens the Invoices page showing only this customer's invoices; change the search to see everyone's again. Open customer on a conversation in Messages opens the same panel.

The same menu opens from a customer's name anywhere Atlas prints it as a link: the Customer tile on a service ticket, the customer on an estimate or an invoice, and the owner of a property. Customer Profile in it takes you to the customer's own panel. Edit Customer opens their details to change, and Save or Cancel brings you back to where you were, such as the invoice you pressed their name on.

Calls: what was said on the phone

Every customer has a call log, for the office. Calls sits among the counts at the head of their panel, beside Tickets, with how many notes there are; press it and the log opens on the same panel: the note you are writing at the top, the notes already written underneath, newest first.

• Pick how the call went: Called us, We called, Voicemail or In person. Talked with starts on the customer's name; change it when it was a tenant or a property manager.
• About ties the note to one of their tickets, estimates or jobs. The note then shows on that ticket too, so the technician opening the call sees what the office was told.
• Type What was said, and What we promised with the day it is due and who keeps it. A promise with a day goes on HQ for that person until it is marked done. Remind me sets the day two working days out and puts the promise on you.
• Save note saves it. Atlas signs it with your name and its own time; you cannot type either. A saved note is locked: nobody can change it, not even the owner.
• To fix or add to one, press Add correction under it. The correction is kept under the note with its own name and time, and the note itself stays as it was.
• Send recap emails the customer a short summary ("Per our call today at 10:14 AM:" and the note's words, and what was promised). Where it went and when are kept on the note. A customer with no email on file says so; the note is still saved. On the form, Send recap saves the note and sends it in one press.

Customers entered twice

When Atlas finds customers that look like one customer entered more than once, a Possible duplicates button appears beside the search on the Customers page, with a count, and each of those rows wears a small tag. It groups records that share a phone number (however it was typed), an email, or a billing street and ZIP. A similar name alone never counts.

• Press the button, or the tag on a row, to look at one group at a time: every record side by side, with what hangs off each one.
• Tap the record to keep. Untick Merge this one in on a record that really is a different customer. Where the records disagree on a detail, every value is its own tick; see How the ticks work below.
• Each card lists the addresses of that record's properties, not only how many there are.
• Merging moves every property, ticket, estimate, invoice, unit, agreement and job history record onto the one you keep, all at once, after one last look that lists what will move. The others are archived as merged. They are not deleted.
• Not the same sets the whole group aside and it is not offered again.
• The merge buttons sit at the top of the panel and stay there while you scroll down through the details, with a line saying what will move to the customer you keep.
• To do many at once, set each group up and press Add to batch instead of merging it. The next group opens. When you are done, press Review and merge all, check the list, and merge them all. The merges run in the background: the panel closes, a small counter in the corner of the page counts them through while you get on with something else, and View on it opens what merged and what did not. Each merge still happens in one step of its own, so if one is refused, nothing of it moves, the rest still go through, and the refused one stays in the batch with the reason.

How the ticks work

• Email: every ticked address is kept, together in the email field.
• Billing address: the kept card's address is the billing address. Every other ticked address becomes a property.
• Name, contact, company, phone: a customer holds one of each, so the kept card's goes on the customer. Every other ticked value is saved as a contact of that customer instead of being dropped.
• What starts ticked: emails, addresses and phone numbers, so nothing is left behind unless you untick it. Names start with only the kept card's, because a misspelled duplicate name is rarely wanted. Every pill shows a small tag saying where it will go.
• Choosing a different main value: untick the kept card's and tick the other one. The last tick on a row can't come off.
• Phone formats: a number written different ways keeps the (704) 654-1234 spelling.
• Properties can't be unticked. They always move to the customer you keep, because tickets and equipment are attached to them.
• Kept as contacts: each person kept as a contact is listed by name with their number. Choose what they are to the customer: Tenant, Property manager, Site contact, Billing or After hours. The contact notes the address it came from.
• A tenant and a landlord: tap the landlord's card to keep it and leave the tenant's record ticked to merge in. The tenant's property moves to the landlord, her number stays ticked in Phone, and she is kept as a contact; set her to Tenant.

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 finished work, newest first: every Atlas service ticket marked Complete and every install or site visit marked Done, alongside the records imported from Legacy for the years before Atlas. It is where you look when a customer says "you were here last spring" — search it before assuming a call is a first visit.

• Search by ticket or job number, customer, address or technician. Type narrows to Atlas tickets, Installs, Site visits or one kind of Legacy record; Year and Technician narrow both.
• Press an Atlas row to open the ticket or job itself. A Legacy row opens its record, with its notes and photographs.
• Owners and administrators also have Import Legacy notes and photos above the list. When a run ends it says how many open tickets are a Legacy job (Matched, by job number or by customer, place and day), how many fit more than one (Unclear, listed by ticket with the jobs that fit) and how many have none. Check open tickets asks the same at any time, with no token and no run. It only reads: nothing on a ticket or a job changes.
• To correct a Legacy record's notes, press Edit notes under Job notes: the request details, visit notes, internal notes, customer notes and completed visit summary each get a box. Change what is wrong and press Save, or Cancel to leave it as it was. The same Edit notes is on a Legacy job in a property's past activity on Service Locations. A note somebody added in Atlas has its own Edit; a note imported from Legacy does not. The job's number, dates, amounts and line items cannot be changed. Owners, administrators and the office can edit; Atlas records who changed which fields.

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.
• On a phone the page opens on Recent: the addresses worked lately, newest first, under This week and Earlier, each with its last job or visit. All is every address and PMA those with an agreement; typing searches them all. The round + at the end of the search box is New Service Location.
• 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.
• The property's actions are the round buttons in the drawer's head, beside the close; rest on one, or tab to it, and its name appears. Verify Location looks up this one address and pins it on the map, and says under the address what it found or why it could not. Once it is pinned, the property carries a green Verified location badge beside the others under the address, every time it opens, until the address is edited. Open Customer goes to the account, Edit Property changes its name, address, site / access notes and known filters (press Save property; who owns it is changed with Transfer to New Owner), Open in Maps hands the address to your phone or computer's maps app.
• Photos in the property's drawer are the pictures of that address. + Add photos uploads several at once — on a computer it first offers the customer's other photos and those on their tickets, with Upload from computer beside them; on a phone it opens the phone's own menu, and Take photo goes straight to the camera. Type a caption first and the photos you add next carry it. The newest is first, with when and who; tap one to see it large and step through the rest. The office can Delete one from there. Photos from a site visit at the address show here too, and every one shows on the customer's profile under Photos & notes, labelled with the property.

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. A customer Atlas has never heard of is made right there: press + New customer under the list, give the name (what you typed is already in the box) and the service address, and Create customer makes the customer and their first service location and picks both.

• 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.

On a service ticket, EQ Pulse sits under the Equipment tile. It opens the photos already on file, this ticket’s first, with Take photo beside them on a phone. Atlas finds the unit at that property by its serial, or makes it, and links it to the ticket. What the plate said, and EQ Pulse’s reading of the unit, then show under the button. A photo taken for EQ Pulse is added to the ticket’s Photos. A plate it cannot read links nothing; retake it.

• 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.

Attachments

Add photos from the unit's Attachments section. 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.

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.

Takeoff

Counting and measuring off a plan set on screen, and pricing what you counted.

Takeoff is for the office and up: owner, administrator, office and accounting accounts see it in the side menu and can open it. Technicians and installers do not see it, and a link to it tells them it is for office staff.

Takeoff in the side menu opens a plan set and lets you mark it up. The toolbar carries what you touch while marking up — what you are measuring, the hand, and the zoom. Everything else is behind the takeoff’s name at the left of the bar: press it and a menu drops down with the title and Save, a box that opens any of your other takeoffs, New, Open plan and the scale. Press Open plan there and choose the PDF the general contractor sent. Under the plan is a thin strip with the sheet you are on at the left and the zoom at the right: page through the sheets with the arrows, or type the sheet number. Drag the line between the plan and the cards on the right to make either wider; a double-click puts it back.

The scale, first, on every sheet

Nothing measures in feet until Atlas knows the scale, and a plan set mixes scales, so it is set per sheet, two ways.

The takeoff opens on the takeoff you last had open here, on the sheet, at the zoom and at the place on the sheet you left it; the Bid Board can also send you to a bid’s own takeoff. Under Reconcile in the takeoff menu, Merge brings another takeoff’s mark types and marks onto this one — a type is the same type only when it prices the same (kind, name, unit, price, waste, price-book line and description), so a same-named type priced differently comes in beside the one here and the message says so; every mark keeps who placed it, and a sheet’s scale or the plan is taken only where this takeoff has none — and removes the other, so two people who each counted part of a job end with one takeoff. Pick a mark with Select and the toolbar shows its Mark type beside its Mark size: choose another type of the same kind and the mark moves to it, the legend totals and estimate lines following, which is how a mark placed under the wrong type, or a leftover mark whose type was removed, is put right. Delete takeoff removes this takeoff with its plan and every mark, for everyone, after asking. The column of cards beside the plan (Legend, Schedule, Estimate lines) ends where the plan ends and scrolls on its own. Click a card’s heading to fold it down to just the heading, and again to open it; each card stays the way you left it the next time you open a takeoff.

A takeoff that belongs to a bid whose plan Claude has read has a Schedule card under the legend: every row of every HVAC schedule on the set, with the count the schedule states beside what has been counted here — green when they agree, red when the plan is short, amber when it is over. A row is matched to a mark type by its tag in the type’s name (CD-1, RTU-2); a row nothing counts yet offers Add mark type with the tag and description filled in. The same card names the scale the sheet’s title block states, and on a sheet with no scale yet Use the title block scale sets it in one press. A row that calls for a part on Extra Stock has a green edge and In stock with how many are in the warehouse; press it to see which part and the word that matched.

The Keynotes card at the top of the side column shows the notes printed on the sheet you are on, numbered as they are on the drawing (1, 02, or D1 and D13 on a demolition sheet), and changes to the next sheet’s notes when you change sheets. A sheet with more than one notes table (keynotes and general notes) gets a button for each. The card's heading shows how many notes the sheet on screen has, so you can see there are some with the card folded. Point at a note and its numbered bubbles on the plan are ringed in a bold, gently pulsing yellow, wide enough to show round a mark already counted on the bubble; click it and they stay ringed until you click it again or leave the sheet. A sheet always opens with nothing ringed. Hold Ctrl and turn the wheel over the notes to make the text bigger or smaller; Atlas remembers the size. The + at the right of a note makes it an estimate line: the Mark Type box opens filled in from the note, with its number and words as the name, the whole note as the description and the number as the tag. Set the price and press Add to this takeoff, and every bubble of that number on the sheet is counted. The note then takes the mark type’s colour, and its + becomes a dot in that colour that picks the type up to count more. The ✓ beside it marks a note done without making a mark type: the note turns green, the tick is kept with the sheet for everyone on the takeoff, and pressing it again takes it off. The ! beside it flags a note red — something to settle — kept the same way; press it again to take the flag off. Once every note on the sheet is made into a line or ticked done, the count on the card’s heading turns green with a ✓; while any note is flagged it is red with a !. On the plan, hovering a note puts a soft yellow glow behind its bubbles, and a pinned note keeps that same glow after the pointer leaves. A note made into a line on one sheet is counted on every other sheet it appears on, as soon as that sheet opens: a mark of its type goes on each of its bubbles there, once. Take one off by hand and it stays off. It folds and moves like the other cards. The notes are read from the sheet’s own text, so a scanned sheet has none to show.

Find tags on the plans, on the same card, looks for every tag the schedules list (EF-01-01, GUH-01-01) in the text of every drawing, and draws a dashed outline round each place a tag is printed, the size of the tag itself (hover over one to see which tag it is). It skips the schedule’s own sheet. A suggestion is not a mark: nothing is counted, priced or saved until you use it. Each row with suggestions says how many and on which sheets. Nothing is drawn on the plans until you ask: Show goes to one and draws that row’s tags alone, and the same button, now Hide, clears them again; Use turns that row’s suggestions into count marks of its mark type (making the type from the row if there is none yet), and Dismiss takes them away for the rest of the visit. Click a suggestion on the sheet for the same two buttons in the toolbar, or use Dismiss all and Use all on the card. A sheet that is a scan has no text to search, and the card names it.

A strip across the top of the plan names the sheet on screen as its title block prints it — the sheet number and title, such as MD1.03 Demolition Floor Plan – Ductwork – Alternate 3 — with the alternate the title names, and which sheet of the set it is. A long title is cut short; hold the pointer on it to read it whole. A scanned sheet, or one whose title block cannot be read, shows only its place in the set.

The Scale box in the takeoff menu both shows the scale in force on this sheet and sets it. If the title block states the scale, choose it from the box — the standard architectural and engineering scales, 1/16" up to 1"=50'. If it does not, or the sheet has been reduced, press Find Scale, click the two ends of a dimension you already know — a gridline, a wall, the scale bar — and type how many feet that is. The line you measured turns green, drawn fine and at the size your mark types draw at so it does not cover the dimension under it, and the box then reads that scale, named if it lands on a standard one, so you can see at a glance whether the sheet is what you expected. Until a sheet has a scale, a length or an area measures nothing and the page says so rather than pretending.

How do you know a scale you picked is right? Picking 1/4" = 1' tells Atlas there are 18 points to the foot, which is only true if the PDF page is the size the drawing was drawn at. The page size is in the takeoff menu under Plan — 24 × 36 in, 11 × 17 in — so a reduced print is visible at a glance: a 24 × 36 plotted onto 11 × 17 is half size, and a picked scale then measures everything double.

To be sure, press Find Scale and click the two ends of a dimension the drawing already calls out. If the sheet already had a scale, Atlas says what that scale read against the figure you give it — 1/4"=1' read 40.0 ft where you said 20 ft — 50.0% out — and then sets the scale from your measurement, because your measurement is the one that came off a dimension the drawing states. Fifty percent out means the sheet is not the size the old scale assumed, and Atlas says so.

Measure long and zoom in first. Clicking two ends of a ten-foot dimension at 100% is good to about 3%; the same clicks on a fifty-foot gridline at 200% are good to a third of a percent. A few percent is nothing on a count and about fifteen feet on a four-hundred-foot duct run.

Taking a mark back

The arrow beside the hand undoes, and so does Ctrl Z. Part way through a run it takes back the last point you clicked; otherwise it takes back the last thing that changed — a mark, a mark you deleted, a scale you set. It goes back fifty steps and covers every sheet, so if the change was on a sheet you have since paged away from, Atlas takes you back to that sheet rather than undoing something off screen. It takes back only what you did: a save, someone else’s marks arriving, and the bubbles Atlas counts on its own when a sheet opens are not steps, so Undo never jumps to another sheet for them or takes them away.

Printing a sheet

Print sheet in the takeoff menu prints the sheet on screen with your marks over it, headed with the takeoff name, the sheet number and the scale, and followed by the quantities marked on that sheet. It prints one sheet — the one you are looking at.

Print bid form, under it, prints the takeoff’s bid form for the company’s own records: the base bid and each alternate, the ticked lines behind each figure with their counts and prices and the sheets they came from, and a place to sign and date. It needs no estimate and no bid record; with nothing ticked it says so instead of printing an empty form.

Removing sheets you do not need

A plan set usually comes with sheets nobody takes off from — the cover, the civil, the electrical. Remove sheet in the takeoff menu, under Plan, takes the sheet on screen out of the takeoff: the arrows skip it, the sheet count says how many are removed, and any marks on it drop out of the totals (the button asks once more when there are marks). The plan file itself is not changed. Each removed sheet is listed under the button with Put back, which returns it with its marks.

Mark types, and the company library of them

Every mark belongs to a type: a name, whether it is counted, measured along a line or measured as an area, a colour, an optional waste percentage added before the quantity is rounded up, and a Mark size — how big every mark of that type draws on the plan, half to treble, a big fan at 200% and a thermostat at 60%. A new mark type starts at 50%, the smallest, so its marks sit on a drawing’s small symbols without covering them; types already on a takeoff, and a library type added as it was kept, keep their own size. The slider’s thumb is the mark itself, in the colour you picked, and it grows and shrinks as you slide; the percentage beside it can be typed into, any whole number from 50 to 300. A mark sized on its own with Select keeps its own size when the type’s changes.

Press Add mark type and start typing the name. The company library — every type anyone here has kept — is searched as you type, and the matches drop down under the box with their colour, price and how many takeoffs use them. Pick one and the whole form fills in from it: kind, price, colour, size. A name the library knows, typed out in full, fills in on its own. If nothing matches, keep typing: it is a new type, kept in the library by default so the next takeoff can add it in one press. Untick Add to Library for a one-off. Each legend row says where its type came from, library or this takeoff only, and after it p. and the sheets the type is marked on: press a number to go to that sheet with the type picked, so its marks are the ones lit. The sheet on screen is the number in plain text. Library, beside Add mark type, opens the whole library: every type kept, searchable, with Add to put one on this takeoff and the × to remove it from the library. Pick a row and a pencil and a trashcan appear under it: the pencil opens the type to edit, the trashcan takes it off this takeoff. The legend is in the order you want it: drag a row by the ≡ at its left edge above or below another, or put the keyboard on that handle and press the arrow keys. The order is saved with the takeoff, and Undo takes a move back.

In the Library, a type already on this takeoff reads On this takeoff and has Use: press it, or the type’s name, to pick it up and count with it, and the library closes. Above the company’s entries, This project lists the mark types made for this takeoff alone and not saved to the library: Use counts with one, and Save to library keeps it for the company, moving it down into the library. A click beside the Library closes it. Fold all, above the side cards, folds every card to its heading at once; it then reads Open all.

Two count types in the same colour are easy to mix up, so a count type has a shape and a tag as well. In the type’s box, Shape on the plan picks a circle, square, triangle, diamond, hexagon or star, and Tag on each mark takes up to three letters or numbers (DD, DU, D10) printed inside every mark (in dark ink on a light colour such as the yellow). The legend row and the printed sheet’s legend draw the same shape with the same tag, so demolition of duct and demolition of a unit heater read apart at a glance. A type kept in the library keeps its shape and tag. One mark can have a shape of its own: pick it with Select and choose a Shape in the bar above the plan. Choosing its type’s shape again puts it back with the others.

A type on a takeoff is a copy. Editing it with Edit changes this takeoff; the box opens ticked for a type that is in the library, and saved ticked the library entry follows, for the next takeoff to add it. Untick it and this takeoff lets go of the entry, which is left as it is. The takeoffs that already use a type are never touched, and the × beside a type removes the entry from the library and touches no takeoff.

Marking the plan

• Count — one click, one mark. Diffusers, grilles, thermostats, rooftop units.
• Length — click each turn along a duct or pipe run, then double-click the last one (or press Finish run in the toolbar) to end it and begin the next one. Until a run is finished, every click adds another turn to it.
• Area — click each corner of a room or a roof, then Finish shape; it closes itself.
• Measure — click two points and double-click (or press Finish) and the length is stamped on the drawing in feet and inches, turned along the line. Keep clicking instead and it is a run: every leg is labelled and the total is stamped at the end. Hold Shift to keep a leg level or plumb. A measure reads from the sheet's scale, so re-scaling the sheet corrects it; it saves and prints with the takeoff and is never counted in the quantities or the estimate. Every measure is listed under one Measurements row in the Legend, which adds up their total length, each read by its own sheet’s scale (the sheet on screen’s when the Legend counts one sheet); its eye hides them all without hiding your counted marks, and its swatch picks the color they are stamped in. Removing a mark type never takes the measurements with it; Remove measurements under the Legend takes every one, on every sheet, after asking, and Undo brings them back. Click the row itself to price them: the Mark Type box opens as Length (Generic) (the library’s own, if it keeps one); set the price and Add, and the measurements the Legend is showing — this sheet’s or every sheet’s — become length marks of it, counted and priced, and one Undo makes them measurements again. Pick one measure and the toolbar offers its own Color, a Mark size to make it smaller, and Delete mark.
• Select — click a mark to pick it, or press on one and drag it to move it; marks picked together move together, and one Undo puts them back. Its mark type’s row in the Legend lights up in the same yellow as the ring round the mark, and the Legend scrolls to it. The status line then reads what it measures and who placed it; Delete mark in the toolbar removes it. Hold Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) and click more marks to pick several at once, or click a picked one again to leave it out; the button then reads Delete 3 marks and takes them all, and one Undo brings them back. A plain click picks one again. Mark size beside that draws it from half to treble size. It opens at the size its type draws at; move it and the size belongs to that one mark, saved with the takeoff, so it is the same for everyone who opens it. Size changes nothing about what is counted or measured.
• Select text — the sheet’s own words, such as its key notes, can be highlighted: drag across them and Ctrl C (⌘ C on a Mac) copies them, and the Read aloud pill comes up under them as it does anywhere in Atlas. On a phone, hold a finger on a word. Nothing is marked while it is in hand, and the plan does not move under the drag. Pick any marking tool, or press Esc, to put it down. A sheet that is a scan has no words to select, and the toolbar says No text on this sheet.

A mark stays where you put it on the drawing whatever the zoom.

Hiding marks to read the plan

A marked-up sheet is hard to read as a drawing, because the marks sit on the very lines you are tracing. Under the plan, the eye — Hide marks — takes every mark off the drawing and puts them back; M does the same from the keyboard. The eye on a legend row hides that one type, and the row dims while it is off.

The two kinds of eye always agree. With everything off, every row reads off; press a row’s eye then and just that type comes back. Hide every row one by one and the eye under the plan reads off too; press it then and everything comes back. Picking a type to mark with shows it again, and so does placing a new mark of any kind, so the eye can never hide the mark you are putting down. Hiding changes nothing about what is counted or priced, and a printed sheet carries every mark whatever is hidden on screen.

Leftover marks

Removing a mark type leaves its marks on the plan, drawn in a red no type owns. They appear at the foot of the legend as Leftover marks, with their count and their own eye, and are neither counted nor priced. Remove leftover marks beside the row clears them from every sheet at once; until you press it they stay, so nothing is thrown away by accident.

Who marked what

Every mark carries who placed it and when. Atlas stamps that at the moment the save arrives, from the account that is signed in, so nobody can sign another person’s work and nothing has to be typed. Pick a mark and the status line says so — 8" Diffuser: one count · placed by Seth Poplin Sep 19, 10:12 AM — and, if somebody later moved or resized it, who and when. Marks from before this existed read placed before Sep 2026.

The people icon in the toolbar, beside the measuring tools, with the count on its shoulder, opens a menu that lists everyone with marks on the takeoff and how many each placed. Press a name and only their marks draw in full, everyone else’s faint, so you can see at a glance what one person did; press it again to see everyone. Nothing is ever uncounted by that — the quantities and the estimate lines are the same whoever is picked. Once more than one person has marked the takeoff, each legend row also splits its count by person. Under the names, History reads the stamps off every mark, newest first: who placed what on which sheet, and when.

The legend shows six mark types; past that the list scrolls inside its card, so the estimate lines under it stay in reach.

While you are the only person on the takeoff there is no card at all; it appears the moment a second person’s marks are on it. The arrow at its right folds it to its heading, and it stays folded until you open it again, on that computer.

Two people on one takeoff

Two people can work the same takeoff at once, and neither can erase the other. If somebody saves while you are on it, Atlas takes their copy and lays your changes back over it mark by mark: both people’s new marks survive, a mark you removed stays removed, and a mark you both changed keeps theirs. Their marks ring for a moment as they arrive, and a card under the plan says who changed what and that nothing of yours was lost; OK takes it away. While the page is open Atlas also looks every minute and a half for a save by somebody else, so their marks arrive without your having to save.

The one thing Atlas asks you to decide is a sheet’s scale that you both set. A card at the top of the panel shows both scales and who set the other; Keep mine or Use theirs settles it, and lengths and areas on that sheet measure by whichever you keep. Until you choose, yours stands.

Keyboard shortcuts

All of these work while the plan has the focus — that is, any time you are not typing in a box. They are the whole list; nothing else in Atlas has a shortcut.

Moving around the plan

Press and hold the left mouse button and the plan follows your hand, whatever tool you are holding but Select text, where the press highlights words instead. A click still counts, measures or picks — Atlas tells the two apart by whether the pointer moved, so a press that stays put places a mark and a press that travels moves the plan. Dragging part way through a run is safe: it adds no corner.

The right mouse button drags the plan too, from the first pixel. So does the Grab and drag button beside the measurements, which gives back whatever you were measuring with when you switch it off; H picks it up from the keyboard.

On a trackpad, two fingers scroll the plan the way they scroll any page, and pinching and spreading zooms. With a mouse, the wheel zooms — a notch is a tenth, so seven of them double the plan. The two zoom buttons take a bigger bite, a quarter each, for when you want to get there in three. Zooming works around the pointer, so whatever you are looking at stays where it is. On a phone or a tablet, two fingers spreading zoom the plan about the point between them and two fingers moving together move it; one finger still taps to place a mark.

A run you have not finished is not lost if you move on: changing the sheet, the tool or the mark type ends it and keeps it, on the sheet it was drawn on.

The box between the zoom buttons takes a percentage you type, from 25 to 400, and the sheet number beside the arrows takes a sheet number, which matters on a plan set of twenty. Clicking into either picks the whole number, so you can type straight over it. Fit, beside them, sizes the whole sheet to the window — the way a plan opens the first time you look at it — so after reading a detail at 300% one press brings the sheet back.

The Title box names the takeoff, and Save writes it and everything else down. Atlas also saves on its own a moment after every change.

The line beside the tools reads out what you are drawing as you draw it — the feet in a run, the square feet in a shape — and what a mark you have picked measures. The legend on the right totals each mark type across the whole plan set. A count type’s number on its row is a box: click into it and type the count you want, and marks are added on the sheet on screen (in a row beside the last one) or taken off it, newest first, to match; one Undo puts it back. The Mark Type box of a count type has the same box, Count on this sheet. Press Sheet with the sheet's number above it to count only the sheet on screen, as you page through, and All sheets to go back. Atlas remembers which. Counting one sheet, the legend lists only the mark types marked on that sheet; the rest are folded under Not on this sheet, and one picked from there stays in the list until you leave the sheet, so you can count with it or click it again to edit it. Estimate lines follows the same choice: it lists and totals that sheet’s lines, and says what Add to an estimate will send, which is always every sheet. The card’s heading carries the running total of the ticked lines, for the sheet or for every sheet as the legend is set, so it shows with the card folded.

Under the plan, beside the sheet number, is the total of the ticked estimate lines: the sheet on screen’s when the legend counts one sheet, every sheet’s when it counts all, the same figure Estimate lines shows (a ✎ beside it means the sheet has notes). Click it and the rest opens over the plan: the sheet’s number and title, as its title block prints them and yours to retype; what the sheet is worth — its ticked lines — and its share of the takeoff; Prices into, the base bid or the alternate the whole sheet prices into; a Notes box for that sheet alone; and every sheet with marks or notes listed by name with its worth and its alternate, a click away; the pencil on a row edits that sheet’s number, title and alternate in place. Notes and names save on their own and everyone on the takeoff sees them; Undo takes back marks, not notes. Escape or a click elsewhere closes it.

Onto the estimate

The panel on the right totals every mark type and shows the estimate lines they make. Each line has a tick: a ticked line goes onto the estimate, an unticked one does not and is left out of the total. Priced lines start ticked and $0 lines unticked; tick or untick any of them, and the takeoff keeps it. Click a line to change its mark type's name or price. To take a line away with its marks, remove the mark type in the legend. The whole sheet is the alternate: a sheet whose title names one (“Demolition Floor Plan – Ductwork – Alternate 3”) prices every mark on it into Alternate 3, whatever its mark type, and the strip over the plan says so. Atlas reads that off the title block; Prices into in the sheet’s popover under the plan corrects it, and that is how the takeoff’s alternates meet the equipment quotes’: the same names. A mark type marked on a base sheet and on an Alternate 3 sheet makes two lines. On a sheet with no alternate of its own, a mark type prices the base bid unless its box says otherwise: Part of the bid puts it in an alternate, offering first the alternates the bid’s equipment quotes name. Price covers says whether the price is Material and labor together, which every type is unless told otherwise, Material only, or Labor only when the material is a quote’s; on the bid sheet a material-and-labor type is filed under Material & labor and takes no labor hours, a material-only type is filed under Material and does, and a labor-only type is filed under Labor at its price. When the takeoff belongs to a bid, the box says when one of the bid’s quotes already prices what you are naming, by the plan’s tag or by the words, and Material from the quote makes the type labor only so the sheet never counts it twice. An alternate’s line reads “Alternate 2 · …” the way the quote’s do, and goes onto the estimate as an optional line right after the quote’s Alternate 2 lines. The card’s total is everything ticked, the same figure the chip under the plan shows, with Base bid and Alternates, optional broken out under it when there are alternates. On the bid sheet it prices the Alternate 2 column. Add to an estimate asks which estimate, then adds the ticked lines to it and changes nothing already on it. A new estimate is made as a Commercial Bid, and whichever estimate the lines go onto opens on its letterhead, ready to finish and send. When the lines carry alternates and the estimate is new, an Alternates box says how they go: as estimate options, one per alternate, so the customer picks one the way they pick Repair or Replacement — Option 1 · Base bid, then Option 2 · Alternate 1 and so on, each alternate’s option holding either the base bid with that alternate or the alternate’s lines alone — or as optional lines under the base bid on one Commercial Bid. An estimate with options is an Estimate, since a bid carries one price; options need two to four of them and fifty lines at most, and past that the alternates go on as optional lines. Press it again after more marking and a line the estimate already carries is not added twice: one that is behind the takeoff gets its count and the words under it brought up to date, with its price and anything typed on it untouched; one already at the takeoff’s count is left alone; only the new ones are added. The dialog says which is which before you press, and when nothing would change it says so and sends nothing. Once a takeoff has an estimate, View estimate beside it opens that estimate for editing. Your marks are saved as you work; the plan and the marks stay with the takeoff so you can open it again and adjust.

A plan set with several houses. When one set of prints holds several designs, such as three residential plans, price each one on its own. Open the sheet’s popover under the plan and type the design’s name in Design, for example Plan A. Type its sheets in the box under it, like 1-6, 9, and press Apply to sheets (or press Enter). With the sheets box empty, the name goes on the sheet on screen. Do the same for each design. The strip over the plan and the list of sheets show each sheet’s design. A mark type counted on two houses makes two lines, “Plan A · …” and “Plan B · …”. A design can’t be called Base or an alternate’s name, because those already mean something on a bid. On the Bid Board, Build the bid gives each design its own column. Each column is priced whole, with its own equipment, material, labor and markups, not added to a base. An equipment quote whose sections are named for the designs (Plan A, Plan B) lands in the matching columns. The proposal lists one price per design, and work on sheets with no design is shown as work common to every design. Add to an estimate can make each design an option of its own. You can also ask the Assistant to split the plans by design; it reads the drawings to find which sheets belong to which house.

Messages

Texts with customers, one conversation a number, and who is waiting on an answer.

Messages in the side menu, under Service Tickets, is every text Atlas has sent or received, as conversations. The number on the menu entry is how many conversations are waiting on us: a customer’s text nobody has opened or answered yet. Who has the page is the Messages permission on each person’s card in the Employee Bank: on for the office and accounting, off for a technician or an installer until you tick it. A technician or installer with it reads every conversation, replies and calls; starting a new text, tying a number to a customer, deleting and editing quick replies stay the office’s, and accounting reads without texting. A customer’s reply rings the bell for whoever has Messages. Without it, a call’s own customer can still be texted from its ticket with On my way — by a technician or installer only on their own calls.

• On a computer the page is three columns. The left is the conversations: the search box, which finds names, numbers and the words in the texts, with the pencil, New text, beside it; then All, where the list opens, Waiting with its count, and Mine (the ones you have texted in). Each row is the customer’s initials (a # for a number on no customer), their name or the number, the last text, how long ago, and a blue dot while it waits on us; a number that replied STOP is marked. The open conversation is lit along its left edge.
• The middle is the thread. At the top, the name and the number, with Call, which rings your own work phone from the company’s after-hours line and, when you answer, dials the customer and joins you; the customer sees the company line, never your number. The call sits in the thread like a text (calling, ringing, how long it lasted, or no answer). Open customer opens their record. Your texts sit on the right with who sent them (an invoice or estimate just says Office) and what the carrier said (sending, sent, delivered, not delivered) — that word under the text is its status, and it changes on its own as the carrier reports, a few seconds after you send. The customer’s texts sit on the left, and a reply shows up in the open conversation by itself, within about fifteen seconds. Opening a conversation counts it as answered and clears its lines in the bell.
• Under the thread is one row of quick replies; when there are more than fit, it slides sideways (drag, or turn the mouse wheel over it). Click one and it fills the box with the customer’s first name, your name and the company. For the minutes, hold the send arrow: 10m to 60m pop up above it, for the text in the box or for each reply that asks for minutes; let go, then click one and it sends with those minutes in. Edit… at the end of the row opens the list itself. Under it is the bar: Photo or video, the box with Emoji and Rewrite (the spark) inside its right end, and Send, the blue arrow — or Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Enter on a Mac). Nothing is sent until you do.
• Talk to type, the microphone inside the text field on a computer (a phone uses its keyboard’s own microphone), puts what you say into the box after what is already typed. Press it again, or stop talking for a few seconds, and it stops. It never sends; read the words and press Send.
• Rewrite inside the text field (the spark on a computer, the word on the phone) retones what you typed: Cheerful, Casual, Professional or Shorter. The rewrite replaces the box for you to read and change; Undo puts your own words back exactly. Only your words and the tone go to Claude, never the customer, and links, phone numbers, amounts and invoice or estimate numbers come back unchanged. A text stays under 320 characters. Nothing is sent until you press Send. The same Rewrite sits under the message when you text or email an invoice or an estimate, and the Assistant can do it too.
• On the phone, Messages is in the drawer for whoever has it, and the page is built for a thumb: one search field at the top, with the pencil, Compose, inside its right end, and no filter buttons. The conversations are in two groups: Waiting on us, with its count, and then Everyone else. Each row is the customer’s initials, their name, the last text (“You:” when it was ours), how long ago, a blue dot while it waits on us, and otherwise the initial of whoever of us texted last. Mine is a switch on the first group’s header and narrows both groups to the conversations you have texted in. With nothing waiting, the first group is one quiet line, “Nothing waiting on us”, and Everyone else is still under it. The pencil starts a conversation with a customer picked by name, or with a number typed in. Tapping a conversation opens it as its own screen, with nothing else on it: the person’s name (or the number) at the top, their number under Back, the texts, and the box at the bottom. Back — or the phone’s own back swipe — returns to the list. A conversation opened from the bell or a customer’s record opens straight onto its own screen. The box is one row: From, the text field, and Send as a blue arrow. Hold the arrow and the tools rise over the box: Quick replies, Rewrite and Photo or video. Let go, then tap one; a tap anywhere else puts them away. Quick replies come up as a sheet, each with what it will say filled in; tap one and it lands in the field, and nothing is sent until you tap the arrow. Tap the arrow with nothing typed and no photo waiting and the same sheet comes up. Edit quick replies at the top of the sheet opens the list itself: a name and the words for each, Add reply, and Save. Words in braces, like {customer} or {minutes}, are filled in when one is picked. A reply with {minutes} in it carries a row of minute chips (10m to 60m) beside it; one tap on a chip sends the reply with those minutes in, no typing. The From disc is your choice and stays on your phone: the building means the company number, sent through Atlas and shown in the thread; the handset means My phone, which opens your phone’s own Messages app with the number and the text, so the reply comes to your phone and not to Atlas.
• Photos and videos: Photo or video, the picture frame (behind the held arrow on the phone, at the start of the bar on a computer), picks them from the device — on an iPhone, from the library or the camera. Each shows small above the box with × to take it back out. Send them with words or on their own: up to 10 a text and about 5 MB in all. Photos are shrunk for you; a video has to be short. They show in the conversation — tap a photo for full size, a video plays where it is — and a customer’s photos and videos show the same way. A text with no words reads “Photo” or “Video” in the list. They go from the company number only, so with From set to My phone it is left out. Rewrite never sends a photo to Claude.
• PDFs: a letter sent with the Letterhead page’s Text arrives in the tray as a chip — the page icon and the file’s name — with × to take it out. It goes with the text, inside the same 5 MB. In the conversation a PDF is the same chip with Open, which opens it in a new tab; a customer’s PDF shows the same way, and a text that is only a PDF reads “PDF” in the list.
• Deleting a conversation: Delete, the red button at the top of the conversation beside Call and Open customer (on the phone, the bin at the end of the line with Back; hold any of those round buttons to see its name). It asks first, on the page: “Delete the conversation with …? = gone from Messages for everyone”, with Delete and Cancel. Once deleted, the conversation leaves the list for the whole office, along with its texts on the customer’s estimates and invoices and its lines in the bell, and the list says “Conversation deleted”. If the customer texts again, or you text them, the conversation starts over with just the new texts. A number that replied STOP stays opted out. Owner, Admin and Office can delete; accounting and technicians cannot.
• Deleting one text: on a computer, point at the text and a small red × appears at its edge; on a phone, tap the text (or press and hold it) and Delete comes up under it. Either asks first, under the text: “Delete this text? = gone from Atlas · still on their phone”, with Delete and Cancel. Once deleted, the text leaves the conversation for the whole office, and the list shows the text before it. The customer’s phone keeps its copy. A call’s line in the conversation is deleted the same way. Owner, Admin and Office can delete; accounting and technicians cannot.
• Emoji: on a computer, Emoji inside the box opens a small grid and puts the one you click where the cursor is; Esc or a click elsewhere closes it. On a phone use the keyboard’s own.
• The right column, on a computer, is the customer: their address, phone and email with Open customer; their open estimates and calls under Open work, each with Open; New ticket and New estimate, which open the form with the customer already chosen, for you to finish and save; and their last visit. A number on no customer record shows “No customer on this number” with Tie it to a customer. On a narrow window the column is left out, and Call and Open customer stay at the top of the thread.
• New text starts a conversation with a customer picked by name, or with a number typed in. A customer’s record has a Text button that opens the conversation already going with them, whichever of their numbers it is on. On a phone, the customer’s name at the top of a conversation opens their record.
• A text from a number that is not on any customer record shows under its number, with “Not on a customer record” at the top of the conversation, until you press Tie it to a customer beside it; then every text from it carries that customer.
• A number that replied STOP gets no box: Atlas will not text it until they reply START. A text sent from an estimate, an invoice or a call shows in the same conversation, with a link cut to its hint.

Morning brief

The owner’s weekday brief, written at 7:47 from the morning’s email.

The first time an owner opens Atlas on a day with a new brief, it opens over the page: the headline, Atlas’s own day (tickets today, unassigned, collected yesterday, estimates waiting) and what needs you. Got it puts it away; Open brief opens the Brief page, which has all of it: the shape of the day, each item with Open email and Done, and what got resolved. Each line leads with when its email was sent. Once it has been seen it clears; the Morning brief row at the top of the Billboard, and at the foot of its alert pop-up, opens the Brief page again, amber with the count while items are left. Done and seen are kept on the brief, so the phone and the computer agree. Only owners see it.

Billboard

Pinned notes and alerts for everyone.

On a computer the Billboard is the tile at the top of the side menu, under the Atlas logo: the newest post with who posted it and when, how many alerts and pinned notes are up, and “3 new” in amber, with an amber edge, when something was posted since you last opened it (the last three days, the first time). Once you have read it, the tile folds to a slim bar with two chips, the alerts and the other posts, until something new comes in. On a computer, point at the slim bar and it pops open to the full card over the menu. Press the tile to open the board. On a phone the Billboard is a tab in the bell: the bell opens with two tabs, Notifications and Billboard, each with an amber count of what is new, and the bell’s red count adds the new posts to the unread notifications. The Billboard tab shows the alerts and the pinned notes, each marked NEW when it is, with Open Billboard at the foot. The bell opens on the Billboard when something there is new and nothing is unread. Press any post, or Open Billboard, to open the board. Looking at the Billboard tab, or opening the Billboard, clears its count; Mark unread beside a post puts it back as new until the Billboard is opened again. It is also Billboard in the phone’s side menu, under Messages, and in the rail.

On a computer the board is two columns, Pinned and Alerts; on a phone they stack. Needed Materials, the board’s third column until October 15, is a page of its own in the side menu’s Inventory folder (see Needed Materials).

Notes and alerts (office)

Only the office posts: owners, admins and office staff see + Note and + Alert at the top. On a phone there is one + New button instead, bottom right, which opens the three: Alert, Note and Office note; and each post has one ••• holding Mute, Edit, Pin and Take down. Technicians read the board but cannot post, and Atlas refuses them if they try.

• + Note opens the form; Pin note puts it up, and it stays until someone presses Take down.
• + Alert — Send alert rings every employee’s bell once, office and field alike. The alert shows who has seen it, as initials, and how many of everyone (“3 of 4”). Opening the Billboard or the bell counts as seen.
• Past alerts, under the alerts, lists the ones taken down, newest first: each in its colour, who saw it, and when and by whom it came down. Hide past alerts folds them away.
• Each alert has a colour, picked on the form: Blue for news, Amber for a heads-up (the default) and Red for something urgent. The board shows each alert in its colour.
• A new Amber or Red alert pops up on everyone’s screen, phone or computer, with a chime and a buzz, whatever page they are on; a Red one keeps ringing every few seconds until it is answered. A Blue one never pops up or rings. Got it counts as seen; Open Billboard goes to the board. A phone that was locked shows it as soon as Atlas is opened.
• A call put on you pops up the same way, with one chime and a buzz, beside the text to your work phone: New call, the number, then the job, the street and the time. Open call opens it; Got it puts it away. It is also a line in your bell. A call booked for a later day comes as the text only, with no pop-up and no bell line.
• While an alert is up — until it is taken down, for up to three days — a thin line in its colour glows along the bottom of the top bar on every page, and a chip with its title sits beside the date and time (on a phone, under the page name). The line stops pulsing once you have seen it. Press the chip or the line for the alert card: what it says, who sent it and when, with Mute, Open Billboard and Got it. With several up, the most urgent is first. Mute takes that alert’s line and chip off your top bar on this device; it stays on the Billboard, where Unmute top line puts it back.
• Each note shows who wrote it and when, and “edited by” whoever last changed it with Edit.
• + Photo on the form adds photos to a note, an office note or an alert, up to six: on a phone it offers the camera or your photo library, and you can pick several at once. Each shows as a small picture with a red × that takes it off before you save; on Edit the × takes a photo off the note. On the board a note’s photos sit under its words (open a folded note to see them), and an alert’s are on its card under the top bar too. Press one to see it full size: Prev and Next, the arrow keys or a swipe go through that note’s photos, and ×, Escape or a press beside the photo closes it. A note taken down keeps its photos, so Past alerts still shows them. An office note’s photos are the office’s only, like the note.
• An alert can also be emailed: on Admin Settings, Email Alerts, the Billboard alert chip picks who gets an email. It starts Off.

Office notes (office only)

At the top of Pinned, in a blue Office only tag, are the office’s own internal notes. Owners, admins, office staff and accounting see them; technicians and installers never do, and Atlas refuses them if they try. + Office note opens the form and Post note puts it up. Any office person can Edit one, Pin it to the top of the area (or Unpin it) and Take down it. Create makes the note into work: it opens New Job with the note’s title and words filled in and no day, so pick Install job, Site visit or Service ticket, then save. A note makes one: once saved, Create becomes Open and the ticket or job’s name (Open Ticket #212), which opens it. Each shows who wrote it and when, and who last edited it. Office notes never ring the bell or pop up. Pinned notes and office notes sit folded to one line, their title and who and when; press one to open it to the note and its buttons.

Office notes wear up to three colours. The stripe down the left is who wrote it, the same colour as their lines on Needed Materials, with their initials beside their name. That colour is the person's dispatch color on their Employee Bank card, the one the calendar uses for them, so changing it there changes it here. On the form, Topic picks one of Money, Jobs, Trucks & shop, Vendors or People (or None), shown as a small chip on the note; Tint picks a colour that washes the note so it stands out. Press a topic chip, or a topic in the row over the notes, to see that topic only; All shows them all again. On a computer, when the newest post is an office note, the Billboard tile in the side menu wears its stripe.

Needed Materials

The company’s shared list of what the trucks and the shop need, urgent first.

Needed Materials is in the side menu’s Inventory folder, between Truck Stock and Supply Houses, on a phone and a computer, for technicians and installers as well as the office. It was a column on the Billboard until October 15; the list and everything on it came with it.

Everyone adds to and edits the list. Type what is needed and how many in the box at the top and press Add, or Enter: the box empties and is ready for the next line straight away. A number first is the count when Qty is empty (“3 16x25x1 filters” adds 3 of 16x25x1 filters); “1/2 copper” stays as words. Paste a list with one item per line and each goes on the list as its own line (a “-” or “1.” in front comes off). A line that runs several items together, added or saved again from Edit, is split into one line per item in the same words, and the status under the box says how many; one that cannot be split cleanly stays exactly as typed. Under the box, Often needed shows what goes on the list most, once a line has gone on it three times, leaving out what is already on it: tap one to pick it, tap again for one more, then Add puts every pick on the list with its count (Clear drops the picks). The office has Edit beside Often needed: × takes a line off for good, ↑ ↓ or a drag change the order, the box adds a line of your own, and Save keeps it. Your own lines always come first, in your order; Atlas fills the rest with what goes on the list most. The list itself and its history are not changed. Each line is tinted by who wrote it; Highlights turns the tints off and on. Tick a line when you have it: it says who got it and folds to the bottom, and it clears off the list a week later. Edit on a line changes the words or the count (“changed 2 → 3” shows on the line) or Removes it. Activity shows every change, newest first: who added, changed, checked, removed or marked urgent each line, and when, by Atlas’s own clock. A removed line stays in the history. The office also has Alert everyone, which opens the Billboard’s alert with the open lines in it. On a phone the summary is one line, the three buttons are one row, and Often needed’s picks are one row that swipes.

Urgent

Press Urgent on the add row before Add and the line goes up urgent; it lets go after that line. On a line already there, the flag beside Edit marks it urgent and takes it off again, and Edit has Urgent too. Urgent lines sit at the top of the list in red with an Urgent tag. Once a line is ticked it is not urgent any more. The Needed Materials row in the side menu shows how many urgent lines are open as a small red number, for everyone; with the Inventory folder shut, the number is on the folder. Marking a line urgent does not ring anyone’s bell.

The Assistant reads the list (“what’s on the materials list”) and adds to it (“add two float switches to needed materials”, or “… urgent”).

Bid Board

Invitations from general contractors, on one board, with the plan set on the takeoff and the due date on the calendar.

Bid Board in the side menu, beside Takeoff, is where bids live: every invitation you are looking at, bidding, have sent or have decided on, one row each with the general contractor, the building’s floor area once its plans have been read (“24,500 SF”), the job site, when it is due and its status. It is open to office staff and up, the same as Takeoff; accounting can read it and not change it. The box above the list searches the rows and the list beside it narrows them — Open bids, Due within 3 days, Every bid, or one status. A bid due within three days is red in its row and counted in Bids Due on HQ’s Office Operations Inbox, the way overdue calls are.

Invitations to review

Scan email searches the Gmail mailbox your invitations land in for the last 30 days — Procore, iSqFt, PlanHub, SmartBidNet, BuildingConnected, a general contractor’s own email, and ones the office forwarded — and lists each one under Invitations to review at the top of the board: a tick box, the project, the job’s square footage when the email gives one (read before any Analyze, so you can skip the small ones), the contractor (or who sent it), when bids are due, and the platform it came through. It only gathers them: nothing is read by Claude yet, an addendum or a bid-status email is left out, and scanning again never lists the same invitation twice, even when the office forwarded a copy. What it brings in follows the Scan rules (below); out of the box, only North Carolina jobs come in: an invitation whose subject or job site names another state, such as South Carolina, is skipped, and one already on the list from another state is taken off. One that names no state comes in, so you can judge it. Lancaire does not do electrical work, so an invitation for electrical alone is skipped too, “Electrical, not our trade”; one that names HVAC, mechanical or plumbing beside it still comes in. Once the list is saved, each email it gathered — and each one skipped as out of state — is moved to Gmail’s Trash, so your inbox clears as you go; Gmail keeps them there for 30 days. An addendum, a status email, a reply on the thread or a forwarded copy stays in the inbox. It then says which mailbox it searched, how many it found, how many were out of state and how many went to the Trash. If the mailbox is not connected, or Gmail refuses the sign-in, it says exactly that instead. An invitation forwarded to the purchasing address is gathered onto the same list as it arrives, and the bell says one came.

The same job reaching you two ways — the GC’s own email and BuildingConnected, say — is one row, naming both (“BuildingConnected + Email”), with anything one copy lacked filled in from the other. Rows count as one job when the project matches, the GC is the same company and the due date agrees. Two different GCs inviting you to the same project stay two rows, since each is its own bid.

Tick the ones worth a look and press Analyze selected: Claude reads only those emails and fills in the job site, the pre-bid, the bond, the contact and the scope; the rest stay on the list as they were. One the reading shows is electrical alone comes off the list then, with no Start the bid. An analyzed row gets a blue + (Start the bid), which opens the New bid form filled from it with the email kept beside the bid; Create bid takes it off the list. The red × on a row sets it aside for good; tick several and press Delete selected to set them all aside at once (it asks first). Either way the row is kept out of sight, so a later scan never lists it again, and its email goes to Gmail’s Trash on the next scan. An invitation whose bid date has passed comes off the list by itself the next time the list is opened, and a scan does not list one that is already past due. Ask the Assistant to scan the email for bid invites and it runs the same scan, or to list the invitations waiting. Nothing becomes a bid until a person presses Create bid.

Scan rules, beside Scan email, is the rule book the scan follows, and every rule in it can be changed by an Owner or Admin (the office can open it and read it). Each list is a row of chips: type in the box under it and press Add (commas add several), and the × on a chip removes it. States in are the states whose jobs come in, with a switch for an invitation that names no state; Skip past due leaves out one whose bid date has passed. Always in takes a sender (a whole address, or a domain such as gc.com) whatever its email says, and Never in keeps one out. Bid networks are the senders whose email counts as an invitation unless a not-invitation word says otherwise. Invitation words are the phrases that make an email an invitation, in its subject or first lines, and Not-invitation words are the ones in a subject that mean it is not (an addendum, a bid result); removing a phrase removes what it did. Skip project words leaves out a job with that word in its subject, such as residential. Trades out (Electrical, out of the box) skips an invitation whose trade or scope names one of them and none of Our trades (Mechanical, HVAC, Plumbing and the like); add Roofing to Trades out and roofing jobs are skipped too. Electrical also covers Electric and Electricians. Under Clear from Gmail, Gathered sends what was listed to Gmail’s Trash and Skipped sends what the rules turned away; an email that is no invitation at all is never cleared. Save rules keeps them and shows the rules as Atlas kept them; Defaults puts back the rules Atlas came with, to save or not.

Setting it up (once, by the owner): in the Google account the invitations reach, turn on 2-Step Verification and make an app password; then in Vercel add BID_INVITES_GMAIL_USER (that Gmail address) and BID_INVITES_GMAIL_APP_PASSWORD (the app password) and redeploy.

Starting from the email

Most invitations arrive as an email. Press Analyze: one box, Drop File Here with Choose file under it. Files chosen or dropped are listed under the box first, so files from several folders can be gathered: Add more files adds another, the × on a row takes it off, and Clear empties the list. Press the Read button under the list and they are read together. While a reading runs, a see-through card at the top of the page says so; drag it anywhere out of the way and it stays there. It takes the email saved from Gmail (its menu’s Download message writes the file), the plan set PDF, or a text file; an email pasted while the box is open is read too. An email is read for its labelled lines — project, general contractor, bid due, pre-bid, addenda, plans, bond, contact — each shown with the line it was taken from; a field the email never states reads not in the email and stays blank for you. Nothing is guessed: a date with no label is not a due date, and a company name in the signature is not the contractor. A date written without a year is read as the next such date and says year assumed. A plan set is read by Claude — the title block, the sheet index and the HVAC schedules, a minute or two for a full set — and shown the same way, saved nowhere. Press Create bid from this and the form opens filled in, with the email kept beside it or the PDF already chosen as the bid’s plan. + New bid opens the same form blank. The form’s Plans box takes a dropped PDF too.

The box takes a whole folder too: drop the folder the plans came in, or choose several files at once. While the box is open the whole screen takes the drop, so the folder window you drag from can sit right over it. A reading takes a few minutes and nothing waits on it: close the box and keep working anywhere in Atlas, and a note in the bottom corner says how it is going. When it is done the note says so, and its Open brings the reading back to the Bid Board. Every PDF in it — drawings, the project manual, an energy compliance form — is read together, up to 20 files. It reads more than PDFs: a photo of a sheet or a schedule (shrunk before it is sent), a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file (opened on your screen and only its text sent), a saved email, a web page or a text file all go into the same reading beside the plans. A photo or an Office file is read, not kept: only a PDF goes onto the takeoff. Old .doc and .xls files, CAD drawings and anything else Atlas cannot open are named and left out; save them as PDF. What comes back starts with a short written summary of the job, then the building: gross and conditioned area, the area of each floor or addition, stories, construction type, occupancy, climate zone and energy code. Then the envelope, meaning the insulation and glazing values for the roof, walls, slab, windows and doors, each with where it was printed. A set with no HVAC equipment schedule still gets these, and the summary says the schedule is missing. When the folder holds several sets, the one with the mechanical sheets is the one that goes onto the bid’s takeoff.

Analyze is in every bid as well, under More at the top. There the box ends with Fill this bid: the bid’s blank fields fill from what was read, nothing you typed is changed, and the reading shows on the bid’s Plan reading card until Save bid keeps it. Inside a bid that box takes everything for the job in one drop: Atlas reads the first pages of each PDF and sorts it — a supplier’s quote goes to the Quotes card, a submittal package to Submittals, an addendum to Addenda with the number read off its first page, and the drawings, specifications and an invitation to the reading. A file it cannot place is asked about, with a button for each, rather than guessed.

Starting from the drawings

Every bid’s form starts with the Plans box, tinted blue, at the top. With a plan link on the bid it says where the plans are — SmartBidNet, PlanHub, BuildingConnected, Procore, Dropbox and the like, or the web address when it is none of those — with the link beside it; press the link to open them in a new tab. Change brings back the Plan link box to type a different one. With no link yet, the box is there to type or paste it into. On a new bid, under the link, is Drop the downloaded PDF here: drop the plan set you downloaded, or press Choose file, and Atlas reads the title block off the first sheets into whatever is still blank — the project name, the job site address, the general contractor named on the sheet (dropped into the search box for you to pick), and the owner, architect, engineer and plan date into the notes — and says what it read and what the sheets did not carry. Nothing already typed is changed. When you press Create bid the PDF goes onto the bid’s takeoff, so the bid opens on its plan. Under it, still in the Plans box, Takeoff is where a takeoff you have already started joins the bid: Make a new takeoff with this bid is the default, and picking one of your own makes it the bid’s, plan and marks included. A picked takeoff with a plan on it offers Read the plan, which sends that plan set to Claude. Once the PDF is on the takeoff — after Create bid, or on any bid whose takeoff has a plan — Claude reads the whole set: the title block, every sheet’s number, title and scale, and every HVAC schedule on the mechanical sheets. The blank fields fill from it, the Plan reading card shows what was read, and the schedules go to the takeoff’s Schedule card. A full set takes a minute or two; you can keep working. Nothing already typed is changed, and nothing is saved until you save.

The bid

At the top of an open bid is its name in full, and under it the status, who the bid goes to, the building’s floor area as the plans print it, and when it was sent or is due. Build the bid is the main button, beside Open takeoff and More, which holds Analyze and Delete bid. Save bid shows at the foot of the screen once something on the bid has changed, and Undo beside it puts the bid back as it was saved.

On a phone the bid is in tabs under its name: Details (the form and the go or no-go card), Plans (the plan link and the plan reading), Quotes, Addenda and Takeoff, and Submittals once it is awarded. Each group of the form is its own card and reads as lines, the field’s name on the left and what it says on the right; tap a line to change it. A computer shows the form with the cards in a column beside it.

Under the Plans box the form is in four short groups, each under a small heading: The job (the project, the general contractors and the job site), Dates (bid due and the pre-bid walk, each a date with its time under it, addenda expected and the status, side by side on a computer), Scope (the scope of work, trade fit, the bid bond and the insurance requirements) and Contact (the contact, their email and the notes). A new bid and a saved one are laid out the same way.

A bid goes to every general contractor bidding the job, and often to none yet. Type a few letters under General contractors and pick each one from the customers on file — each becomes a chip, and the × on a chip takes them off — or press + New contractor to add one as a commercial customer; the person to reach there, a phone and an email go with it when you have them, and the company name alone is enough for Add contractor. The job site is typed on the bid itself: start the street and the address lookup offers matches, and picking one fills the city, state and ZIP and locates the site for the distance on the go or no-go card. An address typed without a pick is looked up once when the bid is saved and kept as typed either way. Then the bid due date and time, the pre-bid walk, whether a bid bond is required and how much, the insurance requirements, the scope of work, how many addenda have been issued, the contact, and the status. Create bid makes the bid and its takeoff; Save bid keeps changes. Either way the due date and the pre-bid walk go on the company calendar as bid chips: move the date here and the chip moves, clear it and the chip comes off, and once a bid is submitted, awarded, lost or declined its dates come off too. Pressing a bid chip on the calendar opens the bid. A bid due within the week is announced in red across the top of the calendar and its chip pulses; the bell beside it silences that bid, and the Go or no-go card on the bid says so and offers Sound the calendar alarm again (or Silence the calendar alarm from there). A silenced alarm comes back on its own if the due date moves. Delete bid, under More, removes the bid and its addenda; the takeoff stays.

Contractors

Contractors in the Bid Board's toolbar lists every general contractor a bid has gone to, newest bid first, with how many bids went to them, how many were won and the hit rate, and when the last one was due. Type in the search box to find one by name, city or one of their people. Press a contractor to see their office, main line and email, their paperwork, and every bid they were on — press a bid to open it. Underneath is what a customer record has no room for: the address bids go to, their license, whether their W-9 is on file, when their insurance certificate and your prequalification with them run out, how they pay and the retainage they hold, their people, and notes. + Person adds a row for a name, title, phone and email, and the × takes one off; Save contractor keeps it all. Paperwork shows as a green pill while it is good, amber in its last 30 days, and red once it has run out. + New contractor adds one here the same way it does on a bid.

Picking a contractor on a bid fills the bid's contact from their first person, and the contact email from where their bids go, when those boxes are still empty; a contact already typed is left alone.

Once a bid is marked awarded, a green strip across the top says so, with two buttons. Create customer makes the job site a property under the general contractor — they are already a customer — points the bid at it, and opens the contractor on the Customers page. If that street and city are already on file for them, that property is used rather than a copy, and the button reads Open the customer once the bid has its property. Create job does the same and then opens a new install job on that customer and property, named for the bid, with the bid's scope in its notes, for you to schedule and save. The bid needs its general contractor and the site's street, city, state and ZIP first.

A bid that calls for parts on Extra Stock has a From the warehouse card naming each one. When it is marked Awarded, the owner is told in the bell and by email (Extras called for), once for each part.

The cards down the right of a bid — Go or no-go, Plan reading, Addenda, Takeoff — each fold to their heading with the arrow beside it, and move with the three-line grip on the left of the heading: drag it above or below another card, or press it and use the up and down arrow keys. Atlas remembers the order and what is folded on this computer. The side cards on the Takeoff page have the same grip.

When Claude reads an addendum and marks it Affects HVAC, it also copies out, word for word, the printed passages that show it. They are listed highlighted under Evidence in the addendum's “What it changes”, each with the page it is on — press the page to open the addendum there — and pressing the Affects HVAC badge takes you straight to them. An addendum read before this shows no evidence until it is read again.

The highlighter

The Highlighter card at the top of a bid's side column keeps a list of words — it starts with HVAC, mechanical and Division 23. Type a word or phrase and press the round +; each word is marked in its own colour everywhere on the bid, with the number of times it appears beside it. Press the word to go to the next place it appears, opening a folded card or a closed “What it changes” on the way; a word that is off turns back on when you press it. Press a word's coloured dot for its menu: switch it on or off, choose its colour from the highlighter colours or a custom one, or Take off the list. The eye switch beside the card's name hides every mark on the bid at once and brings them back.

To mark a passage by hand, select it in the plan reading or an addendum. A bar appears over it: press the marker to highlight in the colour shown under it, or press one of the six colours to highlight in that one — the marker keeps it for next time. Words puts the selection on the word list instead. Press a highlight to change its colour or Remove it. Highlights are kept on the bid, so everyone who opens it sees the same marks; your word list is kept on your account and follows you to any computer.

Every passage you highlight by hand is also listed under Important details, right under Scope of work on the bid form: one bullet each, the plan reading first and then each addendum, with where it came from. Press a bullet to go to the passage.

Go or no-go

The card beside the form is what the decision is made from: the distance from the shop to the job site (the typed address as the lookup located it, against the company address), each contractor’s record with you — bids sent, won, lost and declined, and the hit rate with them — the trade fit you typed, the bond, and the last bids to them with how each came out. Write the reason and press Go or No-go. A go moves the bid to bidding; a no-go declines it. Both keep the reason on the bid, and a declined invitation is what the next one from that contractor is read against.

Addenda and the takeoff

Every bid owns a takeoff, made with it or picked when it was made. Open takeoff opens it — with no plan yet, it shows the takeoff’s own Open plan; the takeoff menu names the bid under Bid and Open bid comes back here. On a bid whose takeoff has a plan, Read the plan on the Takeoff card sends the plan set to Claude and fills the bid’s blank fields from what it read, for you to check and Save bid; the Plan reading card beside it then shows the summary, the building and envelope, when the plan was read, and which schedules were found. Use another takeoff on the same card lists every takeoff no bid owns; pick one and it becomes this bid’s, and the one it replaces is released for the Takeoff page to merge or delete. Addenda are PDFs kept with the bid: give the addendum its number and issue date, press Add addendum and choose the file. Claude reads each addendum as it is added (Read reads one added before). Under What it changes you'll find a short summary, what it changes for the HVAC scope, any new bid or pre-bid date, and the sheets, specification sections and questions it covers. Each addendum is marked Affects HVAC or No HVAC change. The top of the card tracks the bid's addenda: how many are in against Addenda expected, a number that was skipped, how many touch HVAC, and how many are not yet ticked Acknowledged on the bid form. When an addendum moves the bid due date, the card says so and Use this date puts it on the form for you to save. Registering one stamps every sheet of the takeoff that has been counted, so that sheet reads Counted before Addendum under the plan until a mark is placed or moved on it, and the Takeoff card on the bid lists which sheets were counted before which addendum. Open beside an addendum opens the PDF; the trashcan removes it.

Quotes on a bid takes a supplier's quote PDF, for equipment or for material (duct, pipe, grilles and fittings from a supply house): drop it on the card, or click the box or Add quote to choose it. The card says it is reading, and then what it read. Claude reads it and the card shows the cost of the base bid and of each alternate, with the quote's total, and whether it is an equipment or a material quote. Open one to see its sections, their tags and lead times. A total the quote prints that its sections don't add up to is flagged, and so is any tag that isn't on the plan's schedules. Under each part of the quote a line says where its total comes from: the total the quote prints, or Atlas adding up the sections filed under it when the quote prints none — that one is worth checking against the quote itself with Open. Type a Markup % — the line above the box shows, as you type, what the base and each alternate sell for at it, the markup in dollars and all of it — and press Add to estimate. The box that opens shows what goes in beside where it lands: on the left, the base and each alternate with their sections and what each sells for at the markup, a markup box that moves every figure as you type, the markup in dollars and all of it; on the right, A new Commercial Bid made out to the contractor with a title, or One already on file with this bid's own estimate first and the newest after it. The button says what it does with the figure on it — Add 10 lines · $123,959 · to a new estimate — and puts one line per section on that estimate: the base as lines, each alternate as optional lines the customer can take or leave. The card then says which estimate it went into, and the markup stays in its box: change it and press Update estimate, with the estimate's number after it, to put the new prices on those lines (a line reworded on the estimate is left alone, and the card says so). View estimate opens that estimate. Add again puts the lines in a second time. Open shows the PDF and the trashcan removes the quote (lines already on an estimate stay). Under the sections the card says plainly This quote does not include — the quote’s own exclusions, read off its cover, its sections and its terms. They are between you and the supplier: buy it, do it, or leave it out of your bid yourself. They never go on the bid letter, the bid form or an estimate; the bid sheet repeats them beside the quote’s row as a reminder.

Submittals is on an awarded bid. It takes each package the supplier or a sub sends — drop the PDF on the card or press Add submittal, drop it on the bid’s Analyze, or forward the email to the purchasing address with the job’s name in the subject and it lands there on its own. Claude reads the package into its items, and Atlas checks every one against what the plans asked for: the schedules read off the set, the takeoff’s mark types and the quotes’ lines. The row shows the score, and under Check against the plans every tag: Match, Differs with what the plans ask for beside what the submittal says and the difference marked, Missing from this package, Covered elsewhere when another package on the bid carries it, or Not asked for. Press Approve or Revise on an item (OK on one not asked for); press it again to take the call back. Nothing is decided for you. Write the response puts the review on the letterhead — the approvals, each revision with the plans’ words, what is missing — for you to send. Open shows the PDF and the trashcan removes the package.

Build the bid at the top of a bid opens a sheet that prices it in columns: the base and each alternate. The Bid sheet tab starts from the bid's equipment quotes and its takeoff: each quote where it belongs (an equipment quote under Equipment, a material quote under Material, or moved to a sub's or left off — a quote left off stays listed under Left off, greyed, and its box brings it back; a quote filed as Equipment by its reading has its material sections — air devices, ductwork, fittings — on a row of their own under Material, and a quote you file yourself goes whole where you put it), the takeoff's priced lines as material — click a takeoff line’s words and the takeoff opens on the sheet its marks are on with the Mark Type box open on that type, its price ready to change; its tag names the sheet — and labor from the takeoff's counts times the hours per unit you type under Labor from the takeoff (one row per mark type: a type counted in the base and in three alternates is one row naming each count, with one box, since the hours and the price are the type’s; a mark type whose price covers material and labor takes no hours there; each line’s box says Labor in the price or asks for hours, and changing it there changes the mark type on the takeoff; the line’s words open the takeoff on the lowest sheet its marks are on, with the Mark Type box open to adjust the price), at your Labor rate. Counted twice, above the labor card, lists every mark type that a quote section also prices, matched by the plan’s tags or by the words. The quote is the real number, so Atlas keeps the quote’s price and makes the takeoff line labor only: type its labor price per unit on the row, and the line files under Labor at that price with no hours. Until you type one the line stays at its takeoff price, so the bid never drops on its own. Change on a row offers Takeoff's price counts (the quote’s section is left off the sheet) and Both are right. Before you send counts the rows still waiting for a labor price. A line of your own has a box beside its name that moves it to another section, or down into the markups as a percentage: its name stays, its percent starts blank, and its amounts go. Under Labor on the quotes every quote section has an hours box of its own, empty until you type in it: Atlas never adds labor to a quote’s items on its own, and the hours you type price at the labor rate in that section’s column. The sheet’s commands are under Bid actions. Add a line puts in a line of your own (a sub, a crane, permits) with an amount in any column, and Add a markup adds one more percentage; each markup is taken on everything above it, so profit is on cost plus overhead. To add up a few lines on their own, tick the box at the start of each: a strip under the sheet totals just those, per column, as cost and with your markups. It is a tally only — the bid does not change and the ticks are not saved — and Clear empties it. The Coverage tab lists every tag on the plan's schedules and what prices it: a quote that names the tag however it writes it (EX - CD-1 is CD-1, HR-01 is HR-1), an untagged quote line that says the same thing as the schedule row (that row says so and offers Not it), a takeoff mark type, or a line of yours; a tag nothing prices can be marked Exclude, By others, or Allowance (type the amount and press Add). Rebuild bid starts the sheet over from the quotes and the takeoff after asking: every quote back where it belongs, your own lines, coverage marks and quote choices cleared, the labor units, rate, markups and exclusions kept. Ask Claude what to bid sends what is on the bid — the plan reading, the quotes, the takeoff, the addenda, the sheet and how past bids went — to Claude, without the contractor’s, the customer’s or anyone’s name, and he answers with his own number for each column: a Claude row under Bid with the gap to yours, and a card under the sheet with his range and his reasons. Press a gap to see only that column’s reasons (Every reason brings them all back), and type in the card’s box and press Ask to answer him — the crane is by others, say — and he revises his number in place. It is a second opinion: it changes nothing on the sheet, and when there is not enough to go on he says what is missing instead of guessing. Bid form & letter shows the numbers for the bid form — open a figure to see the cost behind it: each quote, the takeoff’s material, labor with its hours, your own lines, then cost and each markup; only Atlas shows that, never the letter — and writes the proposal: the prices, the addenda, what is included and what is excluded, with your exclusions, one to a line. Open on the letterhead puts it on the company letterhead, Copy copies it, and Mark submitted moves the bid to Submitted and the calendar's due date to Bid sent. Before you send on the right lists what is still open, and each line is a link to the thing it names: the Counted twice card, the tag on Coverage, the letter, or the quotes or addenda on the bid page. Atlas saves the sheet as you go, and a new bid starts from the last one's labor units, rate, markups and exclusions.

After Hours

What the phone operator left for the office overnight, every call it took, and the rules it follows.

After Hours is where the after-hours phone operator reports to the office. An owner or admin opens it with Open Auto Receptionist on the Auto Receptionist card on Admin Settings; the office reaches the morning queue from the HQ inbox. It is not in the side menu. The operator answers the line when the office is closed, asks the caller what is wrong, checks the outdoor temperature at the address itself, and decides one of three things by the rules on the Settings tab: page the on-call technician now, put a request in the morning queue, or take a message. It never puts a call on the schedule. A number on file is greeted "Thanks for calling Lancaire Mechanical Services. This call is recorded. I recognize your number. Is this Jon?" and, on a yes, asked to confirm the street and town on file; a caller who confirmed within the last eight hours is welcomed back instead: "Good evening, Jon! Good to hear from you again. What can I do for you tonight?"; a name given on a new number finds the record the same way; a stranger is asked the problem first and the address only after saying yes to a visit.

The morning queue

Morning queue is the first tab: one row a call, newest at the top, with who called, the problem, the place, its tag and the time. Press a row to open the call: caller, callback number (tap to call), address, the problem in their words, the outside temperature and the fee quoted, the summary, and why the operator decided what it did. A row marked Needs a ticket is a call the operator judged could wait for morning: Make ticket makes the ticket from the call on the spot, open and unassigned, with the customer, the place, the problem and the recording on it (a caller not on file gets a customer and a location made from what they said), takes the row off the queue and opens the board so you can place it. Beside it, Maintenance offers two choices, and leads the row when the operator marked the call as maintenance. Maintenance visit makes the same ticket titled as a maintenance visit, at normal priority, and opens the board the same way. PMA customer opens the PMA page with Add maintenance agreement open and the caller's customer and property already in it; for a caller not on file, the customer search holds their name, so pick them or press + New customer, which starts with their name and number. Saving the agreement takes the row off the queue. Only Owner, Admin and Office accounts see PMA customer. A ticket you made yourself another way is linked instead: type its number in the call and press Link ticket, and the row leaves the queue with that ticket recorded as the one that came of it. A row marked Message has nothing to schedule; Dismiss it once someone has called back; Clear all above the list dismisses every row at once, after one press to confirm. A row marked Emergency is a call a technician was paged for; it is here so the office follows up in the morning.

The call log

Call log is every after-hours call, newest first: the decision and its reasons, the temperature Atlas looked up, the trip charge quoted and whether it was accepted, and under an emergency, each page that went out — who, by text or call, and who accepted. Every call carries Listen, which plays its recording; the recording is kept at the phone service for 90 days. Under each call a Rules line says whether the operator kept to its rules on that call, or which it broke and what it said: night words in the daytime, "at least" on a price, a sentence cut in half by a lookup, a technician’s contact given out, gas without 9-1-1, the fee not said as written, a price Atlas did not give, "notified" with nobody paged, two questions asked at once, a house number read back. Each broken rule wears a severity, Critical, Major or Minor, and the line reads worst first with a count, so an audit fixes in that order. It stays on the call log; a broken rule rings no bell. Review on a call opens the recording as a wave with the transcript lined up by the second: press Play (or the space bar, which plays and pauses unless you are typing a note), click the wave or a line to jump, and where something should change, type what, pick how bad it is (Critical, Major or Minor) and press Mark here. The marks sit on the wave and in a list, worst first and then by the second, so the fixes go in that order; each has its severity to change, Done and Remove. A mark at a second where a rule broke teaches that rule the mark’s severity for every audit after, and the status line says so. Send to Claude under the marks packs the call as reviewed, who and when, what Atlas decided, the grader’s findings, your marks and the transcript, copies it, and hands it to the Assistant to audit; paste the copy to Claude in a session to have the fixes built.

When the office phones ring first, whoever picks up hears “Lancaire call from Dana Reyes. Press 1 to take it.” when Atlas knows the caller by their number, or plain “Lancaire call.” when it does not, and a key connects the caller. A phone that goes to its own voicemail is dropped, and the call goes on to the receptionist.

A caller who hangs up without leaving anything gets one text from the company: sorry we missed you, reply with your name and what you need. Replies land in Messages. One text per number in twelve hours, never to the company’s own phones or an employee’s, and Text back hang-ups under The line turns it off. Fee pay link under Fees is off until you turn it on: then, when a technician accepts a call whose caller agreed to the dispatch fee, the fee becomes its own invoice and the caller is texted its pay link, and the ticket says the fee was billed so it is not added to the job’s invoice.

A gap on tier 1 in the next two weeks rings the owner and admins once a day, with the gap’s dates, until a shift covers it; the Email Alerts card on Admin Settings decides who is emailed for it under On-call gap. A gap that is meant to be, a company trip or a holiday closing, is explained instead: type a few words in the box under the gap’s dates and press Save. The line goes calm and the bell leaves that gap alone. Change the words and save again to edit them; empty the box and save to take them off. The reason covers the stretch it was written over, so a gap that grows past it is a gap again.

A caller with nothing wrong, a seasonal changeover, a tune-up, scheduling, an estimate or a question, is not asked the emergency questions or quoted the fee: the operator takes the best number to reach them and files a service request for the office. A caller who says it is not an emergency, or that it can wait until the office opens, ends the questions the same way, whatever the weather.

The Rules block’s Holiday section takes two dates, Closed from and Through. While they cover today, every call on either number goes to the operator, who says the company is closed, reads the Notice if there is one, and takes a message: no questions, no fee, nobody paged. A gas smell or a CO alarm still pages the on-call technician. With the Notice box left blank, the closure announces itself from the day it is set through the last closed day, “We will be closed October 8 through October 11,” and a few words in the Why box beside the dates end the line, “for our annual company retreat.” The Notice box is only for a notice of another kind.

The Rules block’s Notice section is a box for anything the operator should tell every caller, a holiday closing or a reminder, with From and To dates beside it; blank dates mean while the text is there. The operator and the daytime receptionist each read it inside the greeting, word for word, before their first question; a date typed as 10/8 is read as October 8. The Read on boxes, After hours and Office hours, pick which of them reads it; untick one and that line leaves it out. She answers first, then rings the office has the receptionist pick up every office-hours call: she reads the greeting and the notice in her own voice, rings the first office phone and hands the caller over, and keeps the call herself if nobody picks up. Unticked, the office phones ring first and she takes only what nobody answers. Changing the words needs no new agents; adding the notice to an agent made before it existed does, with Create agents.

The Rules block’s Severity section is that list: every grader rule with its severity, Critical, Major or Minor, to change by hand and save with Save settings.

Settings

Settings holds the rules and the on-call rotation. The rules — the hours the emergency rules apply (Emergency rules from and Emergency rules to, local time; outside them, a weekend afternoon included, every service call is sent to on-call, with the fee still quoted), the freeze line, the trip charge (and a separate one for a commercial account, blank for the same), what counts as an emergency for a commercial account, what a non-customer gets, how to page (the ladder: for the tier 1 person a notification in Atlas, then a text, then a call, all the minutes between steps apart; then the tier 2 backup gets one text, then tier 3 one text, stopping at the first one accepted; when nobody answers, one bell goes to the owner and the admins saying who was paged and how, or that no one was on call) — are changed by an owner or admin with MFA and saved with Save settings. Accepting a page — the link in the text, the bell line, or telling the pager call yes — makes the service ticket on the spot: the caller’s customer and address, or a new customer and location from what they said, assigned to the technician who accepted, urgent, with the name and the callback number on it, so the ticket’s directions and call work. The morning queue shows that call as already converted, and the ticket’s description ends with a Recording line, the link to the call itself, so the technician can hear the caller in their own words when the summary misheard something; the same line is added when the office links a queue row to a ticket. The queue popup carries Listen to the call on every call with a recording, and so does the office’s email about the call: there it plays the recording with no sign-in, on a phone too, for 7 days, and Open in Atlas under the player opens the call here. The Calls tab shows each call’s paging trail, one line a rung with its verification: the bell and when it was seen, the text and when the carrier delivered it, the call and whether it was answered and for how long, and the accept. The rotation is the office’s: choose the person, the tier, the start, how it Ends, and press Add shift. One week ends it at 8 AM a week after it starts; Until… is a set end, and typing a date or time in To chooses it; a tier 2 or 3 backup can choose No end, since a backup stands for as long as they are the backup. Edit on a shift opens the form under that shift and Save shift writes it back. Over the shifts, a calendar draws three weeks with a lane per tier and a bar per person; red hatching is time nobody holds tier 1, and pressing a bar lights its shift below. Drag a bar onto another bar in its lane and the two trade weeks: the hours stay put and the people swap. When both are the rotation’s weeks, the two swap places in its order too, so the weeks after carry on in the new order. On a computer, Shift and an arrow key on a bar trades it with the one beside it. A paused shift or one that is over does not move. Remove shift takes one off. Pause shift keeps the shift but pages nobody on it, so a page goes straight to the next tier, until Resume shift; someone else can cover the gap meanwhile. Two people on the same tier at the same time is refused, because a page would go to one of them at random. The Rotation block over the shift form takes turns for you, one per tier: choose the tier, add people in the order they take turns with Add person (the arrows move one up or down, Remove takes one out), set the Handoff day and hours (5 PM to 8 AM a week later unless you change them), leave it switched on and press Save rotation. Atlas then writes one week each, in order, four weeks ahead, and keeps writing the next week as each one passes. Those shifts sit in the list marked Rotation and are edited, paused or removed like any other; one you edit is yours from then on, not the rotation’s. A week that would overlap a shift already on that tier is left to that shift, and nothing already there is changed; the turn passes to the next week. Taking someone out of the order removes their weeks still to come and leaves the week under way. Changing the order or the handoff applies to weeks not yet written. A red Gap line over the rotation names any stretch in the next two weeks when nobody is on tier 1 during the emergency rules’ hours. A shift with no phone on file cannot be paged; give the person a work phone on their employee record, or type the number to page on the shift. The two Retell agents that answer and page are made from the same tab: Load voices lists the account’s voices, and Create agents, with one chosen, builds both, points the dispatcher number at the answering one and fills in the two agent ids. Save the number and company name first, since the agents are built from them. The agents a press replaces are deleted from Retell once the new ones are in place, so its list stays at the ones in use.

The receptionist

The same operator can answer the office line in the daytime. Under Receptionist on the Settings tab, the top line reads the whole setup in words: the number, whether her agent is made, the days and hours, who answers first and how many are in the directory. Setup addresses opens the two addresses to paste into Twilio and Retell, each with a Copy button. On the left, Line and hours: the Office number (the dispatcher number itself is fine here, and then the hours decide whether the receptionist or the after-hours operator answers, with the office line forwarded to it), the Days the office is open as pills you tap, From and To (outside them the after-hours operator answers the office line too), Ring office first (how many seconds the Office phones ring together before she picks up; 0 and she always answers) and a Greeting. On the right, the Directory: switch on each person she may transfer a caller to, write how callers ask for them (blank saves as their name), and choose Announced (she tells the person who is calling and hands over if they take it) or Straight through. The number she transfers to is the work phone on the employee record, so someone without one cannot be switched on. Save receptionist writes it; then Create agents makes her beside the other two and points the office number at her. A caller she cannot transfer gets a request in the morning queue or a message, the same as at night; a gas smell is paged whatever the hour.

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.

Once the estimate has a customer, their photos sit beside it — the site-visit photos and those added to their properties, newest visit first, each visit's note under its photos. On a computer they are the Photos panel to the right of the sheet: press a photo to fill the panel, + and − or a tap to zoom, drag to look around, ‹ Prev and Next › for the others, ‹ All photos to go back. The › at its top folds it to a slim strip, and Atlas remembers that on the computer. On a phone they are a row along the top of the estimate; tap one to see it full screen.

Sort, beside Status on the Estimates list, orders it by date or by estimate number, either way round: Newest first, Oldest first, Number, highest first or Number, lowest first. Atlas remembers the choice on that computer.

An estimate for a Bid Board job shows when that bid is due under its status, such as “Bid due Oct 20 · in 5d”. It turns red when the bid is due within three days, and once the bid is submitted it shows just the date. The job counts as the estimate’s when its takeoff or one of its equipment quotes was added to it.

On a phone the list is in groups by status, Open, Draft, Accepted and Declined, each under a header that carries the group’s count and total and stays at the top while you scroll through it. The row of statuses above the list is an index: tap one to jump to its group, and the one you are in lights as you scroll. Under the index one line gives the open pipeline and Sort: (tap it to choose the order); the round + floating in the bottom corner starts a new estimate. To find one estimate, use the search at the top of the screen: it finds estimates by number, title, scope or customer.

Print, after Save and Send at the foot of the sheet, shows the customer's copy exactly as it will print or email, and as the customer's own page shows it — the letterhead, the customer and service location, every line and the totals, and the clarifications and terms under the totals. (On a Commercial Bid's panel, Print asks which page, and Bid page still prints the one-price bid page, for a contractor who wants that.) It saves nothing: close it and the estimate is still open, still unsaved. Until you save, the number on the preview reads EST-DRAFT, because the real number is assigned by Atlas on save. Cost, gross profit and margin never appear on it — that panel below the sheet is office-only and is not part of the document.

• Document chooses Estimate or Commercial Bid. Both print on the same record, so switching does not lose your work.
• There is no Follow-up or Equipment to fill in. Every estimate is given a follow-up date a week out when it is created, and an estimate that already has one keeps it.
• There is no Status to set. An estimate’s status follows what happens to it: it is Draft until you send it, Open once it is sent, and Accepted or Declined when the customer answers or the office records the answer on the Estimates page.
• An accepted estimate asks what kind of work it becomes. Service call keeps the schedule, length and technician (the time list starts with Anytime, for a day with no set time, and + Add tech under the technician adds helpers) and Convert to Job raises the ticket with the estimate’s accepted lines on it, at the prices the customer agreed to, so the ticket shows a Price and the invoice raised from it (Create Invoice at the office, or collecting at the door) bills the estimate’s total less any deposit already paid. Install job (where the estimate starts for an installation) and Make Install Job open the job form with the customer, place, title and scope already in it: pick the days, the crew and a day plan, and Save. After that the estimate reads Install job created with Open Job, and it cannot become a second job. An estimate written from a ticket offers that ticket as a third choice: Bill on Ticket makes the ticket it came from its job, so nothing new is raised and Send to Invoice bills it there.
• Once the job exists, Send to Invoice beside Go To Job puts the accepted lines and the discount on the job’s invoice, raising one if the job has none, and opens it. Use it for a job whose invoice came out without the estimate’s lines. A paid invoice is left alone. Anything added on the ticket in the field — extra refrigerant, a part, labor — stays on the job and is billed beside the accepted lines; only the estimate’s own lines are replaced.
• Letterhead chooses Classic or Signature artwork. Beside Classic, a second switch sets how the masthead looks on screen, for every estimate and bid: Steel is the steel masthead, still; Pulse is white beside the swoosh with dots pulsing out from it. An Owner or Admin sets it, and estimates and bids sent after that show it. Printed pages and PDFs are always the steel, still — nothing moving ever prints. A computer or phone set to reduce motion (Windows' Animation effects turned off, an iPhone's Reduce Motion) shows the masthead still, and the editor says so under the switch.
• Preview, just left of the letterhead, opens the estimate in a new tab exactly as the customer will see it, from what is on the sheet right now. Nothing is saved and nothing is sent.
• Minimize, the – beside the ×, puts the estimate away so you can use the rest of Atlas while you work on it — the menu, any page, the search, a customer or a ticket — and loses nothing you typed. A pill at the foot of the screen (bottom right on a computer) carries the estimate’s number and customer, with an amber dot while it has changes not yet saved; press it and the estimate comes back exactly as you left it. One estimate can be minimized at a time: starting another asks first, to open the minimized one or Discard it.
• Prepared for has two tabs. A customer picks an existing account and property: start typing and the best matches appear under the box; the arrow keys move through them and Enter takes one. A customer with several properties lists the one serviced most recently first, with its last service date. To give the customer a new property, type its street address in the service location box: the address lookup offers it under Add as a new service location, and choosing it adds it to the customer and selects it. A customer who is not in Atlas yet is added without leaving the sheet: when nothing matches, ＋ New customer & service location above the box opens the same panel the ticket form has, and Create & use puts them, and their first property, on the estimate. 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. Tick OPT on a line to make it one the customer can choose. It starts Recommended: in the total, and pre-ticked on the customer's page for them to take out if they do not want it. Untick Recommended for an option you want offered but not assumed; it is sent outside the total, unticked, and joins the total only if the customer ticks it.
• Under each description is a quiet box for details — the model, what is included and what is not, a warranty term. Keep the description to the one line the customer prices; put the rest here. On the customer's page the line shows a small Details toggle they tap to read it, so a long explanation never swamps the sheet. Paper and PDF copies print it open.
• To have a line's details already showing when the customer opens the estimate, press Open for customer — the small box with an arrow under the line's amount, first of the three marks there. It fills in and its arrow turns down once it is on; press it again to turn it off. Only that line opens. The customer can still fold it, and lines without it stay folded. Save the estimate to keep it; a link already sent picks it up too.
• The In total box on each line controls whether that line counts toward the price the customer sees.
• The grip at the left of each description puts the lines in the order the customer should read them — the equipment above the labor, the optional add-ons last. Drag it and the lines it passes move aside. On a trackpad it is easier to click the grip once and use the up and down arrow keys, which move the line one place per press. Its label is Reorder this line. A single line has nowhere to go, so its grip is greyed until there is a second one.
• A discount takes a label and a value, so the proposal can say Military Discount or PMA Discount in the customer's own language. Under the scope the sheet is two halves: the controls on the left, the totals as the customer reads them on the right. The discount's three icons choose its kind: none (the crossed circle), a percentage (%) or a dollar amount ($); its name goes on the line under them.
• The markup column, beside Cost, is office-only. Type a cost and a markup and Atlas prices the rate for you; price to a round number instead and the markup reports what that rate actually earns, and so does a cost typed under a rate that is already there. An empty markup shows a dash. It is never printed and never saved — cost and rate are the record.
• Deposit required asks the customer for money up front, as a Percentage or a Dollar amount — the % and $ icons beside it, the same three as the discount's. The figure appears in the totals on the right as you type, is taken after any discount, and prints on the proposal as its own line under the total. On the customer's copy it follows the optional lines they tick, so it is always the deposit on the estimate they are actually accepting, and a line under it says what is left on completion.
• Financing, under the deposit: a chip for each lender whose link is set on Admin Settings — Service Finance, Wisetack, Lendmark. Tick the ones this estimate offers; none ticked is no financing. The customer’s quote shows a card above where they sign, with only the lenders you ticked, where they Choose a lender and apply on the lender’s own site; Atlas never sees their financial details. A new estimate starts with every lender ticked when Financing on Quotes is on on Admin Settings, and none when it is off. Changing the lenders is not a revised quote: a sent link keeps working and a signature stands. Not printed.

A safety flag on a line

• Each line has a small flag between its OPT tick and its description, Safety flag. Press it for a recommendation that could be a safety risk: it turns brick red, the line takes a light red wash and a rule down its left edge, and a row opens under the line for an optional one-line reason (80 characters). Press the flag again to clear it and the reason.
• The customer sees it and it prints: a red rule down the line's edge, a small square Safety label with a triangle beside its name, the reason under the name, and its details open when the page opens so the photos are showing. It still reads on a black and white printer. The flag itself never prints. Flagging a line, clearing it or changing the reason on an estimate already sent counts as a revision, so send it again.
• If the customer unticks an optional safety line, a box opens under it: I understand this was recommended for safety and I am leaving it off. Approving stays off until they tick it, and the panel lists what they left off. Their acknowledgement is kept with the signature, prints word for word on the signed copy, shows on the estimate's signed record and is named in the notification.

Safety on a simple bid

• A simple bid has no lines to flag, so a Commercial Bid has a Safety note box under Scope / proposal notes. It stays closed until you press its flag; then type one line (160 characters). The simple bid prints it, on the customer's page and on paper, as an outlined Safety advisory directly above the price. Press the flag again to clear it. The itemized page does not show it.
• An alternate with a flagged line under it wears that line's mark on the simple bid: the red rule, the Safety label and the reason.
• On a simple bid both are there to be read. Leaving the alternate off asks the customer nothing and Approve never waits. Sent Itemized, the line asks for its acknowledgement as above.

Repair or Replacement: options on one estimate

When the customer has a choice to make, quote it on one estimate instead of two. Each option is its own set of lines with its own price, and the customer approves one. Their page opens with every option folded to its heading: the one they have picked shows its description and price, the others just their name. A tap opens an option to its lines, and the page keeps the heading under their finger while the rest slides.

1. Price the first option's lines as usual, then press + Add option above the lines. What is on the sheet becomes Option 1, named Repair, and an empty Option 2, named Replacement, opens with its name ready to type over.
2. Each option is a tab above the lines, with its total on it. Press a tab to work on that option; the sheet's Subtotal and Total are the open option's. + Add Line, a template and Draft Lines all add to the option that is open.
3. Each option keeps its own Department and its own Scope / proposal notes: a Repair can be Service and a Replacement Installation / Replacement. Switch tabs and both boxes change with it. The customer reads each option's scope under its heading. The Atlas Assistant bar says which option it is drafting for, and a draft's × puts it away.
4. Option name is the short name — Repair, Replacement — used on the tab and the customer's Approve button. Heading the customer reads is the longer line on the proposal, like Replace with a new 3-ton heat pump.
5. Mark recommended stars the option you would choose: the customer sees a lime star and the word Recommended beside its name. Their page opens with it picked, and until they decide, the estimate's value on the Estimates page is its price.
6. Combine with another estimate brings the lines of another open estimate in as a new option — the Replacement quote you already wrote, for instance — so one link goes to the customer instead of two. The other estimate is left as it was.
7. Each option keeps its own discount and deposit: open its tab and set them as usual, so a repair can ask for no deposit while the replacement asks for half. Tick Same discount and deposit for every option to have one pair apply to them all.
8. Remove option takes the open option and its lines off. Down to one option, the estimate is an ordinary one again.

On the customer's page each option is a heading in the estimate with its price. They tap a heading to choose it; only the chosen option opens to its lines, and tapping it again folds it. The total, the deposit and the button follow their choice — Approve Replacement — and what comes back to Atlas says which option they approved. Optional lines still work inside an option. Printed, each option has a box to mark and its own total, the recommended option is itemized, and the page ends with one place to choose and sign.

Templates: a set of lines you reuse

A template is a named set of line items — a system replacement, a standard PMA, a coil clean — with their descriptions, quantities, costs and rates. It is lines only: no customer, no scope text, no totals. Those belong to the estimate you drop the lines into.

On an estimate, choose one from + Add from template, just above the line items, and its lines go straight in, ready for the next one, and a note beside it says what was added. That is all an estimate can do with a template — building and changing them happens in Admin Settings, under Manage Estimate Templates.

Photos on a line

Every line on the sheet has a camera button beside its description. Press it and choose a picture — the failed flue, the panel that needs the new breaker — and it lands on the line as a thumbnail, up to four per line, each with an × to take it off. Atlas shrinks the picture before sending it, so a phone photo is fine. The photos are kept when you press Save; the customer sees them under that line on the proposal you send, behind the same Details tap as the line's detail text, and the print window shows them. The PDF does not carry them. The camera pulses while a picture is sending, turns green when it lands, and shows how many photos are on that line. On a computer you can also paste a picture straight onto a line: copy it (a screenshot, an image from an email), click into the line or rest the pointer on its camera, and press Ctrl+V.

Once the estimate has a customer, the camera opens that customer's photos first: the estimate's property's own photos, then the rest on the customer's profile, other properties and site visits (each marked Property or Profile), then the pictures on their service tickets, each marked with its ticket number; newest first within each. Press one and it goes on the line, the same as an upload; press another to add a second. Upload from computer at the bottom opens your files as before; on a phone it reads Add photo and opens the phone's camera or photo library. Without a customer, the camera goes straight to your files. Technicians the office has given Create estimates see the customer's photos here too, and in the estimate's Photos, so an estimate written in the field carries them.

The Cost Library: lines you reuse

The Cost Library keeps single estimate lines to use again, apart from the Price Book, which is the service catalogue. Under each line's amount is a bookmark, the last of its three marks. Press it to keep that line — its description, details, unit cost and rate — in the library. The bookmark fills in once the line is saved. If you change the line's prices later, a small dot appears on it; press it again to update the saved prices. Pressing a filled bookmark on an unchanged line takes that line back out.

A line priced with its labor included can be split into its parts and its labor. The two-arrow icon under the line's amount, between Open for customer and the bookmark, opens a small panel: the parts at the line's unit cost with the company's default markup, and the labor in hours at the default labor rate — with the hours set so the estimate's total stays where it was. Change any of the three and the total still stays: change the hours or the rate and the parts price follows; type a parts price and the hours follow, and the parts price settles to the exact cent when you leave the box. The panel shows the two lines and the total before anything moves. Split line turns the line into its parts, with the labor line under it, and takes “labor included” out of its details; nothing is saved until the estimate is.

To use a saved line, start typing its description on any line. Saved lines come up in the same list as Price Book items, marked Cost Library. Choose one and the line fills with its details, cost and rate. Only the office can save to the library; a technician does not see it.

To change or remove saved lines, go to Admin Settings and press Manage Cost Library. Every saved line is listed and can be edited in place. Save keeps an edit, a renamed line stays the same line, and Delete takes one out. Estimates that already use a line are not changed.

Adding a line to the Price Book

When a description you type matches nothing in the Price Book, the list offers + Add “…” to the Price Book. Price the line first, because the new item takes the line's rate and cost. You only see the offer if your role can edit the Price Book.

Reconciling the Price Book and the Cost Library

Reconcile with Price Book is on the Cost Library card in Admin Settings. It matches the two lists by name, ignoring capitals and extra spaces, and sorts what it finds into three groups:

• Priced differently. Choose Use Price Book price or Use Cost Library price. Only prices are copied; names are never changed.
• Only in the Cost Library. Add to Price Book creates the item.
• Only in the Price Book. Add to Cost Library saves it as a line.

Nothing changes until you press a button, and the buttons that change every line at once ask first.

Closing without saving

Press × or Cancel on an estimate you have changed and Atlas asks before it closes: Keep editing goes back to the sheet with everything as you left it, Discard changes closes it and drops what was not saved. An estimate you only looked at closes straight away, and so does one whose changes you have already saved or sent. Every other form in Atlas asks the same way.

Atlas Assistant: lines and scope from one sentence

Under + Add Line is the ✦ Atlas Assistant bar: one box and two buttons. Type what the job is in the box — what is being replaced, what is being removed, what is being added, anything the customer may choose — and both buttons work from that same sentence.

✦ Draft Lines lays the job out as line items. Each comes back with the description that prints on the row and, where it helps, the detail the customer can expand under it. Nothing is priced: rate and cost on every drafted line are yours to fill in. The lines appear in a panel first, every one ticked; untick any you do not want and press Add to sheet. They land underneath whatever is already on the sheet, the same way a template does; the one blank row a new estimate opens with is filled rather than left empty above them.

It lays the job out as separate items -- two outdoor units and five heads are two lines with 2 and 5 on them, not one line -- and never touches the lines already on the sheet.

✦ Draft Scope writes a first version of the paragraph the customer agrees to, from the lines you have priced and the same sentence. Read what comes back before you save: it is a draft, not an answer.

Words the customer reads

• To make words stand out, select them and press B for bold or I for italic, on the small bar that appears above the box while you type in it (or Ctrl+B / Ctrl+I; ⌘ on a Mac). The button lights while the cursor is in bold or italic words, and pressing it again takes the style off. This works in the scope, a line’s details, the heading on each option, and the clarifications and terms, and the customer’s copy, the PDF and the printout all show it.
• To mark a passage in a colour, select it and press Highlight, the marker beside B and I. A small row of colours opens under it: Red, the little flag beside it for Safety, Orange, Blue, Green and Yellow, and Clear (⊘) to take a colour off. Red is plain red; the flag marks a safety passage. Escape or a click elsewhere closes it. To change a passage already marked, click it: the whole passage is selected and the colours open. The customer’s copy, the PDF and the printout show the passage with a soft tint and a line under it in that colour; a Safety passage also starts with the small Safety label, so it still reads on a black and white printer. Search and the Assistant read the words without the colour.
• Scope / proposal notes is what the customer is agreeing to. On a bid it prints as the Scope of Work.
• Under the scope are Clarifications and exclusions (one per line) and Proposal terms. They print under the totals, on the printout, the PDF and the customer’s page.
• Each kind of document keeps its own wording, the way the Letterhead page keeps its letter. A new Commercial Bid arrives with the bid wording as it was last left on any bid, by anyone; a new Estimate with the estimate wording as it was last left on any estimate. Change either box and, a moment later, that is what the next one of that kind starts with. Neither kind’s wording ever fills the other.
• Until someone keeps bid wording, a bid starts with our standard wording. An estimate has no standard: until someone keeps estimate wording, its boxes start blank.
• Clearing a bid’s box back to blank prints the company’s bid wording, as last left, on the printed bid and the customer’s page. A blank box is not kept, so clearing one never wipes the wording the next bid starts with. On an estimate, a blank box prints nothing at all.

Getting it to the customer

1. Save the estimate and open it. The first card at the top is everything you do with it: the Customer decision stages on the left, Send to customer on the right, and Edit Estimate and Delete Estimate underneath. The numbers follow below it. Send to customer is one blue Send button and four round ones with their names under them: Preview, Link (Copy Link), Print and PDF (Download PDF). Saved as a PDF, an estimate is already named for its folder: the company, the number and the customer, such as Lancaire EST-24 Jeff & Michelle Binkley.
2. Preview opens the customer's page in a new tab, exactly as they will see it — letterhead, options, deposit and the Approve button with its wording — under an amber banner that says it is a preview. Nothing is sent and no link exists yet; approving is switched off on that page. If Send would be refused (no lines, nobody to send to, an estimate already decided) the banner says so and why, so you find out here rather than from the customer.
3. Send opens a short compose box — the customer's email address and a message — and Send email sends the proposal with a private link. Nothing is sent until you press it, so you can edit the note first, or Rewrite it in another tone (see Messages). Cancel closes the box.
4. On a Commercial Bid a Send as choice sits under the send row, on the desktop and on the phone. Simple bid, the first pick, sends the one-price bid page: the scope, the price band, each alternate as one row with what it adds and a tick, the clarifications and terms — no lines, no unit prices, no parts. Itemized sends the estimate sheet with every line. Send, the link, Preview and the PDF all go the way the choice says; Print keeps its own two pages. Each link remembers how it went — the list under the bar marks one sent simple — so when the contractor wants the breakdown, pick Itemized and send again; the simple link they hold keeps reading as it was sent. A contractor ticking an alternate on the simple page takes every line under it, and the acceptance records those lines. An estimate with options has no such choice: the options are chosen on the itemized page.
5. The email goes out under the company name and carries the office address as a link they can read and save, rather than telling them to press Reply. Pressing Reply still works — it reaches whoever sent the estimate.
6. To text it instead, press the message bubble (Text) beside the envelope (Email) at the top of the compose box. The mobile number fills in from the customer record, the note gets shorter, and Send text sends the private link from the office's texting number. The text never shows the price. Whatever you had typed for the email is still there if you switch back.
7. The link button (Copy Link) gives you the same link to paste into your own email or a text message if you would rather send it yourself.

On the phone, tap an estimate on the Estimates page to open it: every line and what it comes to, the total and the deposit, with Preview, Copy Link, and Text or Email to send it from where you stand. Its letterhead is picked the same way as on a computer: Classic or Signature for this estimate, and under Classic, Steel or Pulse for how the masthead looks on screen for the whole company. The back arrow at the left of the preview's amber banner brings you back to the app; on a computer it closes the preview tab.

A texted link shows Texted from Atlas on its card, with whether the text was delivered. If the customer texts back, their words appear under Text replies in the panel, and the office and whoever sent it are told in the bell and by email. A customer who replies STOP is not texted again until they reply START; the panel says so rather than trying.

Once it has gone, the panel shows one card — Out with the customer — with when it was sent, who it went to and when the link runs out, and whether they have opened it yet. The link lasts 30 days; on a Commercial Bid whose Proposal Terms say how long it is valid (“valid for 14 days”), it lasts exactly that long, so nobody signs a price after you have stopped standing behind it. Resend opens the compose again addressed where the last one went; Withdraw kills the link. Everything that already happened is folded under Earlier sends: one line per send, and a signature the estimate has moved past is one line too, with its record behind Details. When a customer signs, the panel shows the signature as a receipt — their name, what they took, what it came to — with Print signed copy.

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

Their button says Approve Estimate, and where the estimate requires a deposit it names the amount — Approve Estimate and Pay $6,052.72 Deposit — recalculated as they tick optional lines, so it always names the deposit on the estimate in front of them. They sign one of two ways, their choice: Type, which shows the typed name as a signature, or Draw, a pad they sign with a finger or the mouse, with Undo and Clear. A drawn signature is kept with the record and printed on the signed copy. Either way, the button stays grey until they type the name the proposal is addressed to — the customer's name or their company, spelled as it appears on the sheet; capitals and spacing do not matter — and the page tells them which name that is. A proposal addressed to two people — Jeff & Michelle Binkley — can be signed by either of them under their own name (Jeff Binkley or Michelle Binkley). A different name, a first name alone, or a spouse who is not named on the proposal will not approve it; that is the point of the signature. If a couple should both be able to sign, put both names on the customer. Approving records their signature and raises a deposit invoice for that amount, linked to the estimate — and the very next thing they see is a button to pay it by card, on the same secure page any invoice link opens. The button stays on their estimate page every time they come back to it until the deposit is paid; the pay link does not expire, and once it is paid the page shows a receipt instead. The office is notified when they approve and again when the deposit clears.

Under that button is a quieter one: Request a change. It is for the customer who wants the work but not quite this quote — a different unit, another option, the timing, the price. They type what they would like changed and send it. It is not a decision: their link stays live, so once you have revised the estimate they approve the new version on the same page. The estimate moves to Changes Requested on its Customer decision track and their words appear on it, so you can see what they asked for without ringing them back.

Optional lines carry a Tap to add tag and a short pulse until they choose one, because a tick box on a sheet that looks printed reads as decoration — without it a customer takes the total as the price and never learns there was a choice.

Knowing what happened

Atlas tells you rather than waiting to be asked. The bell beside your name in the top bar carries a count of anything you have not read; open it to see what happened and click a line to go to the record. On a phone the same menu opens on the screen under the bell, and a line about an estimate scrolls the Estimates list to that estimate and rings it for a moment. On a phone the bell also carries the Billboard: its Billboard tab beside Notifications, and its count includes new Billboard posts (see Billboard).

• When the customer first opens the proposal. The first time only — somebody who reads their estimate four times does not send you four emails.
• When they accept or decline. This one is worth acting on: open the estimate to see which options they chose, then schedule it.

Everyone in the office sees these in the bell. Whoever pressed Send email also gets an email, because they are the one waiting on the answer. If the person who sent it has since left the company, nobody is emailed and the bell still has it.

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. Press the Truck chip beside a part — its dot fills — and it is saved where you stand; there is no need to open the item.

• All shown above the table 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. Beside it, the count says how many of the rows shown are on the trucks.
• 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.

Service Tickets

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

Finding one

Search by ticket, customer, equipment, technician or issue, and use View to show open, today's, upcoming, overdue, urgent, unassigned, complete or all tickets. Open is what is on now: a call booked for a later day waits under Upcoming instead. A maintenance visit's ticket is never on this list — it is on PMA, Dispatch, the Calendar and My Day — though searching its number still finds it. Sort orders the list by ticket number (newest or oldest), scheduled date (soonest or latest), customer, technician or status. It starts on the newest ticket, and your choice is remembered on this computer.

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.
• Helpers are everyone else on the call. The technician is the lead, who starts and completes it; + Add tech adds a helper and × takes one off. Assign on the ticket has the same row. The Assistant can do it too: put Seth and Conrad on #68 makes the first name the lead and the rest helpers.
• Tick Anytime beside the time for a day with no set time. The call sits first in its day and in the Calendar’s All day row, and its length still counts.
• Arrival Time and duration are what put the call on the calendar and the dispatch board.

A call note the office wrote about this ticket (Customers, Calls) shows on the open ticket under What the office was told, read only, so the technician sees what the customer was told before they knock.

Customer notes & photos on the ticket opens everything on file for the call’s customer: on a phone it is at the top of the Notes tab, on a computer under the ticket’s details. Photos come first, newest first, each marked with its call (Call #71) or who added it; tap one to see it full screen. Under them are the notes: each call’s Diagnosis and Work Performed with its call number, and the notes filed on the customer with who added them and when. Technicians and installers see it on their own calls, as the lead or a helper. It is read only here; a customer’s own photo or note comes off on their profile.

More than one trip

A call keeps its one number however many trips it takes. Each trip has its own day, crew, note for the crew, timer and Work Performed, and its hours land on the day it was worked.

• ↻ Come back sits under Job complete while the timer runs. Pick why, write the Work Performed today, say when — Office picks, Tomorrow or A day — add a Note for the office and press End visit. The call leaves your day until the office schedules the return.
• After Job complete, + Follow-up on the done call (My Day, or the ticket) adds the next visit to the same ticket: why, when (In a week is one choice), a note, then Add follow-up.
• Both land on Return needed here, and in the office's bell. Schedule on a row opens the visit with its why on top: day, a time or Anytime, the lead, helpers and a Note for the crew, then Save visit. The lead is texted and rung as for any new call.
• On a finished call the office has Add visit among the ticket's actions, and + Add visit under the trips once there are two. One trip is open at a time.
• The Job tab lists the trips in order: a finished one is a line that opens to who, when, how long, why, its Work Performed and photos. The invoice lists each trip's Work Performed by date; once one invoice is paid, a later trip's charges go on a second invoice and the paid one is never changed.

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.

In the template editor (Manage Templates, then + New Template or Edit), each option is a chip under its group; a filled dot is in the template. Hover a chip to read the wording it puts on a ticket. The first Problem / Scope chip pressed names the template, unless you typed a name. Available in New Ticket is a chip too.

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.
• Labor 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. Hours save themselves a moment after each change, and one that did not go says so with Try again beside it. Crew Hours is the office’s; technicians and installers do not see it.
• On a phone the ticket is four tabs under its title: Job (where, what was sold, the unit and the crew), Notes (Diagnosis and Work Performed), Parts and Photos. The timer stays at the bottom on every tab. Priority, labor, price, the linked estimates and invoices, Edit Ticket and Ticket actions are under Details on the Job tab. The tabs fold away while you type and come back when the keyboard closes.
• On a phone, Edit Ticket is four tabs too: Job (customer, place, number, technician, kind, problem and the unit), Schedule (day, arrival time, priority, status and length), Notes and Parts. Short boxes sit two to a row, and Save Ticket stays at the bottom of every tab. A box that still needs something takes you to its tab.
• Diagnosis, Work Performed and Parts / Materials are typed on the ticket itself: tap a box and write, or add a part from the price book. Each saves itself a moment after you stop (it says Saved), and closing the ticket never asks. The technician on the call and its helpers can write these too; a part from the price book is charged at the book’s price and comes off the lead’s van. Draft write-up is in Edit Ticket. A ticket made from an approved estimate opens with Work Performed already holding the lines the customer accepted, one to a line; add to it or change it as the job goes.
• Create Estimate (under Ticket actions) starts the estimate from the ticket: the Problem / Scope is its title, the Work Performed its scope, and the ticket’s parts its lines at their price. Labor is never copied over; add it by hand if the quote needs it. The Diagnosis shows beside the scope for the office to price from — it is not on the estimate and the customer never sees it.
• From Legacy job sits under the write-up when the ticket is a job Legacy had: that job’s notes, photographs, invoice numbers and total, for owners, administrators, the office and accounting. A ticket brought across from Legacy matches by its job number; one made by hand matches only when exactly one Legacy job has the same customer, the same place and the same day, and the section says which. When two fit it names both, each a button to open and compare, and shows neither as the ticket’s own. New work has no section. Open job opens the Legacy job itself. Your own Diagnosis and Work Performed are never changed, and a Legacy invoice number is only a reference — it is not an Atlas invoice, so nothing is counted twice.

Photos on a call

Every call has a Photos card. Press the ＋: on a phone it opens the phone’s own menu — Photo Library, Take Photo or Choose Files, several at once; on a computer it opens the file picker. Keep working while they go:

• To take several in a row on a phone, press the camera beside the ＋, in the same square. The camera stays open: every press of the round shutter is a photo, sent while you line up the next, and the count at the top says how many. Done closes it. In the iPhone app until its next update, the phone’s own camera takes one, then Take another opens it again.
• Each photo is made smaller on the phone and sent one at a time. Its thumbnail fills a ring as it goes and gets a green tick when Atlas has it.
• A bar at the foot of the screen counts them through on every screen, so you can close the call or open another page and they keep going. Hide tucks it away.
• With no signal a photo says so. It goes again by itself when the signal comes back, or when you tap it. Photos still waiting are lost if the app itself is closed, so let the bar finish first.
• Tap any photo to see it full screen. The arrows either side step through every photo on the call (on a computer the arrow keys do too, on a phone swipe), and Open in new tab puts the one on screen in a tab of its own. Delete, at the foot, takes a photo off the call after asking once: the office can delete any photo, and anyone else the ones they took.

Marking up a photo

Open a photo and press Markup. Draw on it with a finger or the mouse: pick a tool (Pen, Marker, Arrow, Circle, Text, Eraser) and one of the six colours. Tap a quick label such as Leak, then tap the spot, and an arrow points at it with the words beside it. Undo takes back one mark at a time. Save adds the marked-up copy right after the original, with a small pen on it; the original is never changed. With Use on invoice ticked, the invoice and the customer’s copy show the marked-up copy instead. The quick labels are edited on Admin Settings, under Markup Labels.

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.

The Calendar

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

A technician’s or installer’s home is My Day: opening Atlas takes them there, and so does the top row of their side menu, which reads My Day where the office’s reads HQ. The rest of their side menu is their places — Tickets, Customers, Equipment, Job History, Messages and My Hours, each only if their permissions give them the page — and the Billboard, nothing of the office’s. Messages shows when the Messages permission is ticked on their card.

My Day is a technician’s and an installer’s own page. It opens on the call that matters now: who, what, the address (tap it for directions), and Start timer beside Open ticket, under Current call. Under it, Next up says how many calls are left today and this week; a technician sees one call at a time, so the next one shows when this one is done. With the View future assigned calls permission turned on in their Employee record, Next up lists the rest of today’s calls, and the week follows. Days off, theirs and the whole company’s, are listed either way. So are tasks the office put on them on the Calendar: today’s under Tasks today, with the time and the place (an address opens directions), and the rest of the week’s after. The ✓ at the end of a task’s row marks it done; it stays, struck through, and a second press opens it again.

An install they are on shows on the days it runs: which day of the job it is, what the day is for, who else is on it, and its timer. A call under way is always at the top, with its Next up under it, and the install and the call just done follow; with no call under way, the install comes first. Prep on it opens the job’s prep list, and so does pressing an install under Installs this week: the crew can Pull parts there, and the office gets the job itself, open on Prep.

Under the day, Done today lists the calls finished today: when, who, where, and Complete or Cancelled. Tap one to open it.

My Calls

My Calls, in a technician’s side menu, is their own calls looking back: the last seven days, newest first, under each day. Pick a date to see the week ending on it, and Today to come back. Search by the customer’s name, the address or the call number to look back a year; customers’ names come first, then entries that start with a number. Only their own calls are listed, the ones they helped on with them, and never a call still waiting its turn. An owner or admin in Field view has Mine and Everyone at the top.

A finished call opens read only. Its lead presses Edit on the Job complete card to change the Notes, the Parts and the Photos; Time on site sets their own hours on it, and Reopen puts it back to In Progress with the timer paused where it stopped, so Resume carries on and Job complete closes it again. Done locks it again. Every change to a finished call goes in the audit log — who, when, what it said and what it says now — and the card then reads Edited by the person and the time, for the office as well.

A call they are helping on reads With Seth Poplin · lead, and Log my hours stands in for Start timer: the lead starts and completes the call, and each helper records their own hours. A helper writes the call's notes and adds its photos too; its parts, its timer and its other actions stay the lead's, and once the call is done it is the lead's to change.

On a phone the Week is a strip of the seven days across the top, with a short dash for each call in its technician’s colour. Tap a day and its calls are listed underneath, with the rest of the week after them: customer, what, who and when. Tap a call to open it, and the + beside a day for the day’s actions. Swipe across the strip of days to go a week forward or back, or across the calls to go a day. At the top, the four counts sit in one strip; under them are the arrows, Today, a filter button and a round + for the day’s actions; then the date beside Month, Week and Day. The filter button opens the search, the employee and the calls filters, and shows a small number when any of them is changed. It all scrolls away with the page. Nothing on the phone scrolls sideways.

Getting around

• The calendar opens on the week: hours down the side and every call as tall as it is long, so a six-hour install looks like one and a gap in the day looks like a gap. Calls that overlap stand side by side. Blocked days, holidays, birthdays and anything without a time run in the band across the top, and a red line marks the time now.
• Month, Week and Day switch the view, and the calendar remembers the one you last used. The arrows move one month, week or day at a time, and Today jumps back. In the week, click a day's name to act on that day, or use + Day Action at the top.
• On a computer the bar is laid out like Dispatch's: the arrows and Today, Month, Week and Day, the date, then a pill for what needs someone — overdue in red, needs scheduling in amber; press one for the list — or Current with a green dot when nothing does. On a phone the counts sit in a strip above the bar.
• Needs scheduling runs across the top of the week: the open calls, install jobs and site visits still waiting for a date. Press one to open it. A call already invoiced, or cancelled, is not waiting for a date and is left out.
• Beside the week, the small month picks the week to show, and the technician list turns one person on (press the name again to show everyone) and says how many hours each is booked that week. Each card folds with its arrow and moves with its grip; Atlas remembers both.
• The month is a map of the work: one dot per call in its technician's color, ringed red when it is urgent, and a bar under the dots with the hours booked that day, split by technician — a full bar is a full day for the whole crew. A day someone is off names them (Mike off; point at it for the reason), a holiday the company closes for is hatched (any other is only named), and tasks, reminders, bids and birthdays are small squares. Nothing is cut off, however busy the day. A completed call is a hollow ring, and on the day it is faded and ticked ✓ Done.
• A bid's due date carries a Bid flag that counts down. Inside a week it turns amber and a strip across the top of every view says Bid due in N days with the project; in the last two days it is red and pulses. Press the strip to open the bid on the Bid Board. Once the bid is sent the date stays and reads Sent, and stops counting; a declined bid comes off the calendar.
• Click a day on the month to open it beside the month, as the week's hours one column wide, with every call, task and block named. Click the picked day again, or use + Day Action at the top, for its menu: a ticket, an install job, a site visit, an estimate, a task or blocked time. Day Action is the office’s; technicians and installers do not see it. On a computer, drag the line between the month and the day (or between the week and the column beside it) to change their widths; Atlas remembers it, and a double-click puts it back. On a phone the month scrolls sideways so each day is wide enough to read: swipe across the week, today is in view when it opens, and the day you picked sits under the month.
• The four counts across the top — Today, This Week, Overdue and Needs Scheduling — can be clicked. 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, and the dropdown beside it narrows to Open calls or All calls. In Month and Day a second dropdown picks one technician.

Colors on the calendar

Every entry carries a colored edge showing who it belongs to — the employee's dispatch color, 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 color and the calendar repaints straight away; you do not need to reload.

What an entry is shows in how it is drawn. A service call is a card with a glowing bar down its edge in the technician's color, fading across the card. Tasks and blocked time are see-through amber with a glowing amber outline, and reminders the same in light blue, so anything that is not a job reads apart from the jobs at a glance.

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.
• Install Job — a job with a crew, starting that day.
• Site Visit — a trip out to look before writing the quote.
• 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. Its Location box looks the place up as you type: properties on file first, then addresses online. Pick one, or type anything — what you type is saved as typed. An address shows under the box as a link to Maps, and it opens Maps from the task on the Calendar and on My Day too; a place name stays plain words. Press a task to open it: Save, ✓ Done and Remove sit on one line, and the × closes. A done task stays on its day, ticked and struck through, until Open calls hides it with the finished calls; Reopen puts it back. The person it is given to can tick it off on My Day.
• Block Time — mark an employee, or the whole company, 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

1. Click the day, choose Block Time.
2. Pick the Employee — or Whole company, first in the list, for a day everyone is off — and a Reason: Vacation, Sick Day, Day Off, Personal Time, Training, Holiday, Company Event, Unavailable or Other. A whole-company block shows on the calendar as Lancaire Closed and takes everyone off Dispatch that day.
3. Set First Day and Last Day (press the calendar icon in the box, or type the date; Reset in the calendar empties it). Every date box in Atlas opens the same calendar. For one day off, leave them the same. For a vacation, move the last day out to the end of it — Atlas says how many days you have picked before you save.
4. Duration is All Day unless you choose Specific Time, which is when the start and end time boxes appear.
5. Block Time saves it. Everyone sees it — blocked time is shared, not a note in your own browser.

A range longer than a day offers Weekends, so a two-week vacation does not have to block the Saturdays and Sundays nobody was working anyway. Sixty days is the most that can be blocked at once, which is there to catch a mistyped year rather than to limit anybody's time off.

Click an existing block to change it, or use Remove Block to free that person up again. A day that belongs to a range offers two: Remove This Day takes back the one day — somebody came home early — and Remove All Days cancels the whole vacation in one go. 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.

Dispatch

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

On a phone the board is one day at a time. Swipe the strip of days left for the next day and right for the day before; it carries on into the next or last week. A technician with more than one call that day shows one call at a time; swipe the call for their next one, and the dots under it count them. The strip of days at the top picks the day and stays in view as you scroll. Under it, the day’s unassigned calls come first, each with Assign, which opens the same window as a ticket’s own Assign. Then there is a card for each technician with their hours booked against eight and that day’s calls.

The board is the week by person: one row for each technician, with Unassigned pinned at the top, and a column for each day Monday to Saturday (Sunday appears when something is booked on it). Today's column is lit. One bar sits over the board: the week, Month, Week and Day, then what needs someone, then search and the two new buttons. When nothing needs anyone it says Current; otherwise it shows only what does: how many calls still need a day, how many of this week's have nobody on them, and how many are urgent.

Needs scheduling is the door above the lanes: every open call taken with no day waits there (not one already invoiced, such as a ticket made only to bill), oldest first, with how long it has waited. A week has no cell for a call without a day, so this is where such a call shows. Drag one onto a person's day and the ticket opens with that person and day filled in; on a phone each has Schedule, which opens the ticket with today filled in. Hide folds the door away and is remembered; it disappears on its own when nothing is waiting.

• Each call sits in its person's row on its day as a see-through Atlas blue card, the same for everyone, with the person's initials in their dispatch color on its face. A press opens it. An urgent call is outlined in red.
• Under each day is the time booked against an eight-hour day, as hours and a bar. It turns amber when the day is full, and says who is off (Mike off) when the person is off; point at it for the reason. Blocked time is the amber card.
• A Calendar task given to someone is the teal card on their day, with its times; its hours count toward the eight. A press opens the task. A done task is ticked and counts for nothing. A Test account always sits at the bottom.
• Drag a call onto a person and a day to move it there: it saves on the drop, and a line under the week says what moved with Undo.
• Click an empty spot in a person's day to start a call for them: New Service Ticket opens with that person and day filled in.
• A PMA visit's call has a dashed edge, a PMA label, and its checklist as a bar with how many items are done.
• Tap a person's name to see only their calls; tap it again for everyone.
• The arrows and Today move the week. The search box narrows the board to a customer, address, ticket or technician, and All calls or Open calls chooses whether finished work stays on it. Month and Day open the Calendar in that view.

Install jobs and site visits

Not everything on the schedule is a service call. New Job beside + New Ticket makes either kind: an Install job, with a crew and one day or several, or a Site visit, the trip out to look and write the quote. Press the people going under Crew; the star in a person's chip makes them the lead, and puts them on the crew if they were not. Find a person narrows a long list, and anyone already on the crew stays in view. The line under the chips names who is going. Leave Starts blank to save it unscheduled; it waits on the Calendar's Needs scheduling until you give it a day.

• A new job and a new service ticket share one toggle across the top: Service ticket, Install job and Site visit (on a phone, Ticket, Install and Visit). Press another kind and the form changes to it, keeping the customer, place, day, time, technician or crew, and the words already typed. The Calendar's day menu and the Atlas bar (type "install" or "visit") offer all three too.
• A ticket or job already made wears the same toggle when the office edits it, its own kind lit. Press another kind and that kind's form opens with the same things carried over; nothing changes until you save it. Then the old one is deleted if nothing was on it yet, or cancelled and marked "Moved to" the new one if it had notes, parts, photos, hours or an invoice, or was started, so its number and history stay. The line under the toggle says which before you save, and the new one says where it came from. Pressing the old one's own kind goes back to it unchanged.
• Address is one of the customer's addresses on file, or a new one: type it in the Address box and pick it from the list, which also looks addresses up online, or choose + New address and fill in the street, city, state and ZIP yourself. With a customer chosen it is saved as one of their service locations; with no customer it stays on the job as typed. Address starts on + New address when there is no customer or the customer has no addresses yet.
• An install is drawn once, in the Jobs row across the top of the board, over the days it runs, framed in amber with its crew's faces on it. Each crew member's row gets an amber dot on those days, and the day counts as a full eight hours, so nobody on the job looks free.
• A site visit is a dashed purple card in the day of each person going, and books its length against their day.
• At the visit, open it: Photo or video takes them with the phone's camera or picks them from its library, and a note goes in the box under it with Add note. Each is saved to the customer the moment it is taken and shows on their profile under Photos & notes. Build quote opens a new estimate for that customer and property with the visit's notes filled in; nothing is saved until the estimate's own Save.
• Job and Days in the Jobs cell switch how installs are drawn: the whole job, or cut into its days with what each day is for. Atlas remembers your choice on this device.
• On Days, press a day to plan it: type what the day is for, or tap tasks from the library to add them, tick Day done, and press Save. Finished days fill amber. What you save stays on the job until someone changes it.
• Press a job itself to change its customer, dates, crew or status, or to remove it. Create Invoice on an install job bills it (see Invoices).
• An install has a timer, like a service call: Start timer, then Pause and Resume, and Job complete, which marks it Done. When the office presses it, Create Invoice appears under the timer, and the invoice opens asking to collect. The crew runs it from My Schedule, and the office from the job. It counts the time worked less the pauses, so the crew pauses at the end of each day. The bell says when a crew starts and finishes.
• The Calendar shows the same jobs: an install on the hours of each day it runs, eight hours from its start time (8:00 when it has none), with which day it is and what the day is for, and a visit on the hours at its time. Each person on an install is counted eight hours that day.

The library lives on Settings under Scheduling, in the Day Plans card, for owners and admins. Manage Day Plans keeps two lists: plans, a set of days for a kind of job (a three-day heat pump replacement), chosen in the Day plan box when an install is made; and tasks, the short pieces tapped into a day on the board. With a plan open, tapping a task puts it in the day last clicked, or the first empty one. Changing the library never rewrites a job that is already planned. A day’s editor on the board carries a Library door to the same lists.

Getting an install ready: Prep

A saved install job has a Prep tab beside Job: the parts the job needs, and how many of them are ready (Prep · 9/14). The same count shows as a PREP bar on the job's card on the board. The Prep button is amber until every part on the list is pulled, then green. Each part is grouped by where it came from — the estimate, a kit, Extra Stock, or added by hand — with its bin and supplier under it, how many are needed, how many the warehouse holds, and where it stands: Pulled (and by whom), Ordered (on an open purchase order, with when it is due), In stock, or Short and by how many.

• From estimate lists the lines the customer accepted, in the option they chose. Untick what the job does not need and press Add. Labor lines start unticked and say Labor; Atlas never adds labor by itself.
• + Kit opens the kits: saved lists of parts for a kind of job. Add puts a kit's parts on the job under its name; each kit says how many jobs it has been used on, and can be renamed or deleted there. Save as kit keeps the job's list as a new kit; a name already in use asks first, and Overwrite gives that kit this job's parts instead.
• + Add a part: type it, or pick it from Inventory or the Price Book as you type. Change how many in the Need box; the × takes a part off.
• Pull marks a part taken off the shelf by you, now, and takes it out of Inventory, with the job number on the adjustment. Unpull puts it back. Pull all in stock pulls every part the shelf covers. Technicians on the crew can pull too.
• Order short makes one open purchase order per vendor for everything short, on the Inventory page's Purchase Orders, and those parts read Ordered. A short part not matched to an Inventory item is named instead; pick its part first.
• Pick sheet prints the parts still to pull, in bin order, with the job, customer, town, day and crew, then what is short and what is arriving.

That is the whole page. Taking a call is + New Ticket; putting a person on it is Assign on the call, or dragging it onto their row. A call with helpers shows in full in the lead’s row with +1, and as With Seth in each helper’s row, counted in their hours; an Anytime call says so and comes first in its day. Who is on the board: active technicians and installers, and anyone ticked available for dispatch in the Employee Bank, which 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 sits inside Atlas like every other page, with the side menu and the top bar around it. The command center 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.

The search box at the top finds an agreement by its name, customer or property and brings the matches up to it. Press Enter to open the agreement when only one matches. If the queue you are on has nothing for that customer, the search looks through every agreement.

For a technician: doing a PM visit

1. Open the agreement and press Open Checklist on the visit.
2. Pick the equipment; the checklist narrows to the items that apply to it.
3. 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.
4. Press Complete Visit when the unit is done.

For the office: adding an agreement

Press Add agreement, choose the customer and the service location, and fill in the terms. Enter Starts and Ends fills itself in a year later, and Renewal target six months before the end. Type your own date into either and it stays as you typed it.

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, Unschedule or Cancel visit each one. Scheduling sets the appointment only — it never changes what the agreement owes. Unschedule takes the time off and the visit is still owed; Cancel visit closes it, takes its call off Dispatch, and the agreement's next visit is counted from it.
• + 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 color and lets you drag it to a new slot. Click a visit to change its time or technician and Save Visit; the same window has Unschedule and Cancel visit.
• A Due band runs across the top of the dispatch grid carrying what each agreement owes next, on the day it falls due, with overdue ones marked. Those are projections, not bookings — nobody has been committed to them. Click one and Add Visit opens with the agreement and the date already filled. Anything due beyond the dates on screen waits in the Projected rail beside the calendar, each with Book this visit.

Maintenance work is not on the main Calendar. It lives here, on the Dispatch Calendar, so the Calendar page is service work and this screen is maintenance work — and the same visit can never be counted on both.

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.

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. It is the first page in the side menu’s Inventory folder, for technicians and installers as well as the office.

• − 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 catalog record. You can add something typed by hand, and Atlas will tell you it is not linked.
• Remove from list takes it off for good: a ticket that uses it later records the use but does not put it back. The movement history is kept — add the part back and its history comes with it.

On a phone each part is one row: the name, then “Carry 4 · Short 2”, then the count between − and +. A part named by its catalogue code, such as B2009011, says what it is under the code, in the price book’s words. Labor, a diagnostic, a service call and a trip charge are billed on the ticket and never land on a truck. A short row carries an orange or red edge and a Fill word in its caption that restocks that part to what you carry. The line at the top says how many parts are tracked, how many are below par and how many units are short; the search pill under it narrows the rows as you type, and the + disc in its right end adds a part from the price book. Fill the van restocks every short part in one go, and the disc beside it refreshes the list. Tap a part’s name to open its sheet: the price and cost, a Carry box, Fill to par when it is short, History for where each one went, and Edit to change the unit or take the part off the truck. The Inventory order tab is not on the phone; open Truck Stock on a desktop for the company-wide order.

The Inventory order tab totals every van's shortfall into one list of what to buy; the office and accounting have it. Office staff can switch which employee's truck they are looking at; everyone else sees their own, and technicians and installers have no order tab.

Scan

Instead of counting a shelf by hand, film it or photograph it. Press Scan, the same button wherever it is: on Truck Stock beside Fill the van, on Warehouse beside Add Receipt, and on Extra Stock beside + Extra part. Then pick Video or Photo: on a phone each opens the camera, and Library takes a video or up to twelve photos already on it; on a computer Video and Photos choose files. Pan slowly along the shelves, under a minute. The office first picks The van, The warehouse or A delivery; everyone else counts their own van, and Extra Stock’s Scan counts Extra Stock.

Atlas takes two frames a second from a video, or each photo as one frame, and Claude counts what is in them against the list: a part seen in many frames is counted once, and a part that never came into view is left as it was, not set to zero. It takes under a minute. The review shows each part with the frame it was counted on and a box round it, a number for each on the line under the frame, and the count on file beside what was seen. Press a line, or a number, to see its frame. A part it was not sure of says why. Change any Seen number before you apply, or untick a line to leave it.

• Update the van sets each ticked part to what was seen, from what the van holds at that moment, as a correction noted “Counted from video” (or “from photos”) in the part’s history. A part not on the van’s list is shown but not added; add it with + Add part.
• For the warehouse, Apply sets each ticked item, recorded as a Cycle Count.
• For a delivery, Send to receiving files it as a receipt to review, with the purchase order read off the packing slip; the receipt’s own Apply to Inventory adds the counts and closes the order.
• Close leaves the count waiting, and Set aside drops it. A count waiting shows as a line over Truck Stock, or over Warehouse, with Review.

Checking a delivery while the driver waits

Open the order under Purchase Orders on Warehouse and press Check delivery to check what came in against it, live, before the driver leaves. Point the camera at the cartons and pan slowly with the labels in view: each line of the order ticks up as its cartons go by (“2 of 4”), green when it is all there, and anything that is not on the order is listed under it. Press Done and it says what is short, or that everything is here, and the camera goes off. Keep checking carries on the same count; Receive files what was counted as the order’s receipt and opens it, and its Apply to Inventory adds the counts and closes the order. Nothing changes a count until then.

Warehouse inventory and purchase orders

Warehouse, in the side menu’s Inventory folder for the office, 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.

Add Receipt on the Purchasing Inbox card takes a photo of a packing slip or counter receipt (on a phone it offers the camera), or the PDF or email a supplier sent. Atlas reads its lines and opens them for you to check; no count changes until you press Apply to Inventory. Each line shows the part it matched. One it could not match asks Which part?: choose the part, Add as a new part, or Skip this line. Apply adds the counts and closes the purchase order the receipt names. Not a receipt throws it away. Adding the same receipt twice opens the first.

Supplier email can come in on its own. Forward it to the address the Purchasing Inbox card shows (Forward supplier email to), or set a mail filter to forward it: Atlas reads the attached invoice or slip when it arrives, and the next time Inventory opens it waits there as a receipt to review, the same as one you added. An email that was not a receipt is named on the card with why, and nothing is added for it. The office is told in the bell when one arrives.

To order sits at the top of Inventory whenever a part is at or below its reorder level (a count equal to the level counts). Each part is ticked with a suggested quantity that brings it back to twice its level; change the number or untick it, then Make Purchase Order. Parts from one vendor open the order form to check over; parts from several make one order per vendor. The bell sends this list once a week, on Monday morning, rather than every day.

Supply Houses

The nearest supply counter, its hours, a call and directions.

Supply Houses is in the side menu’s Inventory folder, on a phone and a computer, for technicians and installers as well as the office. It asks where you are and lists the company’s supply houses nearest first, with the miles. Each one shows its chain, what it carries, whether it is open now by its hours, and our account number there. Call dials it; Directions opens Apple Maps on an iPhone or iPad and Google Maps everywhere else. Type in the filter box to narrow by name, chain or what it carries (“Lennox”, “refrigerant”).

If the phone’s location is off or refused, the list comes in name order and says so. Allow location for Atlas and press Near me to sort again.

Adding and editing (office)

+ Add supply house opens the form: name, brand or chain, what it carries (separated by commas), address, phone, hours, our account number and notes. Write hours the way the counter prints them — “M-F 7-5, Sat 8-12” — and Atlas works out open or closed from them. On save the address is looked up on the map. Standing at the counter, I'm at the counter pins it exactly where you are -- press it only there, because Directions go wherever the pin is; or paste the link from Share in Google or Apple Maps. Edit on a row changes it, Clear location forgets a pin so the address is used again, and Delete removes it for everyone.

The Assistant answers “closest Johnstone” or “who near me carries Lennox” from the same list, using the device’s location.

Extra Stock

Extra parts in the warehouse, waiting for a job that calls for them.

Extra Stock is the fourth row of the side menu’s Inventory folder. Owners, administrators and office staff keep it; accounting can look at it; technicians and installers don’t have it. Each part shows how many there are, where they are, what Atlas watches for, and On a bid: the open or awarded bids that call for it. Press a bid there to open it.

+ Extra part opens the form beside the list: Name, Make, Model / part #, Qty, Where, Watch for and Notes. Move to job, on a part’s form, puts it on an install job’s Prep: pick the job and how many, and that many come off Extra Stock (all of them takes the part off the list). On the job it sits under Extra Stock, In stock until it is pulled; removing it there before it is pulled gives it back to Extra Stock. In a new part, Scan beside New reads the part off a photo or a short video of it or its label: Name, Make, Model, Qty and Notes fill in where they are still blank, and nothing is saved until you check them and press Save. Something that is not a part is turned away. Press a part’s name to change it. Save keeps it, and Remove asks first, then takes it off the list. Scan beside + Extra part counts the parts on the shelf from a video or photos against this list (see Scan under Truck Stock); Apply sets each ticked part’s Qty.

What Atlas watches for

The model is always watched. In Watch for, put the other words a plan or a quote would use, with commas between them: the models it fits (CEH3380), or what it is called (roof jack). A model is found however it is written — CEH3380, CEH-3380, CEH 3380 — and in a longer model that starts with it, like CEH3380T. Words are found in capitals or not, plural or not, even split across two lines, but never inside a longer word: roof cap is not found in “roof capacity”. A word shorter than three letters is not watched, because it would turn up everywhere (RJ is in every RJ-45).

Atlas reads every open or awarded bid for them: the schedules read off its plans, its supplier quotes, its takeoff’s mark types and its scope.

Where it shows

• On a takeoff’s Schedule card, a row that calls for a part has a green edge and In stock with how many there are. Press it to see which part, where it is, and the word that matched.
• On the bid, a From the warehouse card lists each part it calls for, the row or words that called for it, and how many there are.
• When a bid is marked Awarded, the owner gets Extras called for in the bell and the same by email, naming each part. It comes once for each part on each bid: saving the bid again, or marking it Awarded again later, does not send it again. The bell opens the bid.

The Assistant can list the parts, add one (“add the roof jacks to Extra Stock”) and change or remove one.

Invoices and payments

Billing a completed call, and taking the money safely.

An invoice is raised from a service ticket or an install job, 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: the estimate’s accepted lines when the ticket is the job an estimate became, plus its parts and labor. Mark Complete (under Ticket actions) on a ticket does this for you: it completes the call, then goes to Invoices with the ticket’s invoice open, made from the ticket if it had none, so taking payment is the next step. A ticket that already has an invoice opens that one, with Open Invoice, and says above its buttons what has been collected on it so far.

A deposit already paid comes off. When the ticket is the job an approved estimate became, and the customer paid that estimate’s deposit, the invoice Atlas raises takes it off: “Less deposit received (INV-1042)” sits under the tax, and the total is what is left to pay. Tax is still worked out on the whole job, because a deposit is a payment, not a discount. Only money actually received counts — a deposit invoice nobody paid credits nothing — and the same happens when a technician raises the invoice at the door. Editing the invoice keeps the credit.

An install job is invoiced from the job. On the job’s window, Create Invoice makes its invoice: the job’s customer and address, billed with the accepted lines of the estimate it was made from — the option the customer chose and the optional lines they picked — less a deposit already paid. A job with no estimate gets an empty invoice to fill in. A job that already has its invoice opens it (the button reads Open Invoice), and a job billed in draws has none.

Linked. At the top of a ticket, an estimate, an install job and an invoice, the Linked row names the others it connects to — Ticket #30 · EST-1042 · JOB-14 · INV-12. Tap one to open it. No row means nothing is linked yet. A ticket or invoice at a property that came from Legacy also names the newest three Legacy jobs there. The other way round, a Legacy job on Job History lists every Atlas ticket and invoice at its property under At this property, newest first, with what was billed and paid.

Invoice lines carry the same grip at the left of each description as an estimate's do: drag it, or click it and use the arrow keys, to put the lines in the order the customer should read them.

The customer sees what was done. An invoice raised from a ticket carries the ticket’s service record on the customer’s copy: Equipment Serviced and Work Performed sit above the charges, and the ticket’s photos follow on a page of their own. It is read from the ticket each time the copy is drawn, so fix the write-up on the ticket and the invoice shows the fix. The On the customer's copy card on the invoice is where the office chooses: untick a section to leave it off, or tap a photo to leave that one off. The technician’s field notes and diagnosis are never on it.

• Take Card Payment opens the card fields for a card in front of you. Tick Save card on file before typing the card and it is kept for the customer as it is charged, ready for Charge Card on File next time. Save Card on File under Invoice Actions keeps a card without charging it.
• Receipts. When a card taken in Atlas clears, the customer is emailed a receipt: what was paid, how, what is left owing, and the Google review code. Each payment on the invoice says where its receipt went and when. Preview receipt shows the email itself; Send receipt (or Resend receipt) asks for the address first, so one that went to junk can go to another address. The Assistant can send one too.
Edit Invoice, under Invoice Actions, changes the lines, the discount (the same three icons the estimate has — none, % or $ — with its label), the tax rate and the Notes / Special Instructions printed under the totals, on any invoice that is not paid or void.
• PMA members. A customer with an active agreement in force today is marked PMA member · 15% off on their tickets and invoices. An open invoice with no discount offers Apply 15%, which opens Edit Invoice with the discount filled in; nothing changes until you press Save Invoice. Edit Invoice offers the same as a PMA 15% button beside the discount. A paused, cancelled or expired agreement does not count. The 15% is never taken off the agreement's own price or a trip or dispatch charge: on an invoice that has them, the discount is 15% of the other lines, and Edit Invoice notes not plan/trip beside it. A bill with nothing else on it, such as the agreement's own billing invoice, a dispatch fee alone or a deposit, offers no discount at all.
• Retainage for commercial work: Retainage held by owner on the invoice (filled from the estimate's own Retainage held by owner box, or the customer's contractor profile) holds that share back. It shows under the total as Retainage held and is left out of Due now, on the customer's copy and the pay link too. An invoice paid up to everything but the held share reads Retainage held; Release retainage makes the held amount due on that same invoice, and the figure is fixed from then on. The Invoices page counts what is still held under Retainage Held.
• Card fee: Card fee on Edit Invoice starts at the company's rate (Admin Settings) and can be changed for that invoice, 0 for none. The total does not change; under it By credit card shows what a card pays, on the invoice and the customer's copy. A credit card pays it on the pay link and on Take Card Payment, which shows the fee and the new total before the second press charges it. The pay page itself does not mention the fee until a credit card is entered and Pay is pressed. Debit, cash, a check and a bank payment pay no fee.
• Billing in draws: an install job made from an accepted estimate has a Billing card (contract, billed to date, paid, retainage held, left to bill). Bill progress lists the estimate's lines; type the % done on each and the draw works out what that adds since the last one, holds retainage on it, and becomes its own invoice (Draw 1, Draw 2, …). A line cannot be typed below what was already billed. At the end, Bill retainage raises one invoice for everything the draws held, and each draw is then settled once the rest of it is paid. A job is billed in draws or on one invoice, never both; a draw is corrected by voiding it and billing it again.
• At the top of an invoice, With the customer shows Sent, Opened and Paid, with the step the invoice has reached lit and when it happened underneath. Sent is the first time it was emailed, texted or its pay link copied; Opened is the last time the customer opened the pay page; Paid is once nothing is owed. Paid up to everything but the retainage, Paid carries an amber end with what is still out: dashed while it is held, solid once released and due. Once it is paid, Paid keeps an amber ring for good, here and on the Invoices list, so an invoice that had retainage stands out. Send to customer comes next, then Take Card Payment and Invoice Actions, and the invoice itself below them.
• Send to customer: the round buttons are Preview (the customer's copy, on screen), Link, Print and PDF (download it). Under them, Email or Text picks how it goes, and the message is already open: To is filled with the customer's email and can be changed, and the message starts written — their first name, the invoice, what is owed and how to pay, the office's number. Change it as you like, or press Draft and Claude writes it up as a finished email (the customer's name never goes to Claude; Undo puts your words back). The one blue button pinned to the foot of the window sends it and says which: Send email or Send text. Email goes from Atlas with the PDF attached and a pay button while there is a balance; the line under the buttons says who it went to, and the button reads Emailed until you change something.
• Link copies a link the customer can pay from anywhere. It is only there while the invoice has a balance.
• Pay online on the invoice: while there is a balance, the customer’s copy — Preview, Print, the PDF and the one that is emailed — has a Pay online box under the total with a QR code and the same link, so a printed invoice can be paid too. Previewing or printing does not mark it Sent; the customer opening it does. A paid invoice has no box.
• The customer’s pay page shows the amount due, what it covers, and three tabs: Card (with Apple Pay or Google Pay when their phone has one), Bank account (when bank payments are on in Stripe; clears in 3–5 business days), and Financing (the lenders whose links are set on Admin Settings, on invoices of $500 or more). The customer pays the amount on the link — the balance, or the deposit — and cannot change it; a partial payment is the office’s to take, with Take Payment on the invoice. Stripe emails the receipt when the customer has an email on file. A bank payment is one debit for that invoice, and the page says so under the bank field. A bank account typed in by hand is checked first: Stripe sends it a small deposit in 1–2 business days, the page reads Bank account added with a Confirm deposit button, and nothing is taken until the customer confirms it. While a bank payment waits on that deposit or clears, the link shows that instead of Pay, so the invoice cannot be paid twice.
• Text on an invoice that still has a balance texts the customer that link: check the number, Rewrite the message if you like, and press Send text. The texts sent about the invoice, whether they were delivered, and any reply are listed under it. On a paid invoice Send text sends the receipt as a PDF from your device.
• Charge Card on File charges a card the customer has already authorized. Saving a card asks who authorized it, and that name is kept.
• Record Payment is for money taken elsewhere — cash, a check, an ACH that landed in the bank.
• Void Invoice retires an invoice that should never be collected — raised in error, or a test. Its lines and any payment already recorded stay on the books; it just stops counting as owed. An invoice with a payment against it cannot be deleted, only voided, so the record of money received is never lost. Voiding asks for a reason and cannot be undone.

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.

Payroll

What each person is paid, and what earns them a commission.

Nothing on this page calculates a check. It holds the rules a pay period is worked out from, so the figures come from one agreed place instead of somebody’s notes.

• Pay is entered from the Employee Bank: open a person’s card and press Pay & Commission. The Payroll page’s Pay tab is a ledger of everyone’s current rule, one line each: the rate on the right ($28.00/h, or $52,000/yr for a salary) and the commission under it. A gold dot and No rate mark somebody nobody has set pay for yet. Tap a person to open Set Pay, the same editor; overtime, departments and the start date are in there. The round search button beside the tabs finds a person by name or role. Every change takes effect from the date you give it, and Atlas keeps the rule it replaced.
• That is the reason a raise entered today does not change last week’s hours. A period is always worked out from the rule that was in force on the day the work happened.
• A commission is set per person and can be changed whenever you like. Choose whether it is calculated on gross margin, on invoice revenue, or as a flat amount per job — the Rate box means a percent for the first two and dollars for the last.
• A margin plan can carry a floor, so a job discounted below it earns no commission. Atlas will not pay a margin commission on a job whose costs it does not know rather than treating those costs as nothing.
• Leave the department boxes clear to pay commission on all work; tick some to pay it on only that work.
• Take Off Commission ends a plan without deleting it. That is different from a plan set to zero, which still reads as “on commission, earned nothing”.
• Pay — rates, commission plans, their history, the Register and its CSV — is seen only by owners, administrators and whoever does payroll: Accounting, or anybody given Set pay and approve payroll. Somebody given only See everyone’s hours gets the Timesheets tab and no Pay tab: hours, never a dollar. Nobody sees their own pay here. For everybody else Payroll is not in the menu, and nothing about rates, commission or hours is shown anywhere.

Timesheets

The Timesheets tab lays two records of each day side by side: what the clock says a person was at work, and what the hours were booked to. Neither is believed over the other. Where they disagree by more than an hour, the day is flagged and the reason is written out.

• Clock In and Clock Out are under your name in the top bar, for everyone: press your name and the menu opens. On a phone the name is not in the bar, so the clock is at the top of the side menu instead, as one row of round buttons. The first is the clock: press it for Clock in (or Clock out, which asks first) and Add My Time. Then My clock log, for an owner or admin Field view (below), and on the right Reload, which reloads Atlas. Hold a button down to see its name. While you are on the clock the row turns green and the menu button wears a green ring. On a computer, the ring around your initial and the line under your name go green and say since when, and nothing else. Unless Auto clock-in is on (below), nothing closes a punch for you: one left open shows the office “still on the clock” the next day until they close it with a note saying when it should have ended and why.
• Hours on a service ticket come from the crew-hours card a technician confirms at completion. Everything else that is paid but is not a ticket — travel, shop, training, PTO, sick, holiday — a technician enters with Add My Time under their name, and the office adds or corrects with Add Time on the sheet. A person sees and can remove only what they typed themselves. Those kinds are kept separate because payroll providers import each as its own column.
• A completed ticket with no hours booked against it is flagged too. It is the most common way a day comes up short.
• The tab reads as a ledger: one line per thing, the number on the right with a small line under it, and a gold dot on anything that needs a look. Tap a line to open what is under it; tap it again to close it. The dates at the top are one pill — change either date and the tab reloads.
• Needs a look · everyone lists everyone who has a flagged day in the range, one line each: how many days, and the reason their days carry most. Tap a person to open their sheet underneath. The name above the sheet picks anybody else.
• The sheet is one line per week, newest first: the hours on the clock on the right, then tickets and other time and how many days are flagged, with Approve at the end. Tap the week for its days; each day shows its clocked hours and how much of that was on tickets. Tap a day for its punches, its tickets, its other time and how far the clock and the work are off.
• Add Time is at the foot of the sheet: press it to open the form for travel, shop, training, PTO, sick or holiday. Close Punch on a forgotten punch, inside its day, records who closed it and why; the person’s own clock time is never edited silently.

Auto clock-in

In the iPhone app, Atlas can clock you in when you arrive at a job and out when you leave your last one, with the phone in your pocket and the app closed. Open the side menu and turn on Auto clock-in. The app explains what it does, then iOS asks about location twice: choose Allow While Using, then Change to Always Allow. Without Always it cannot see you arrive while the app is closed, and the switch says it needs Always location, with Settings to fix it.

• Arriving at one of today’s jobs clocks you in if you are not on the clock already. Today’s jobs are the calls assigned to you that are scheduled today, already underway, or finished today. A finished job never clocks you in: driving past one is not work.
• Leaving a job clocks you out only when nothing else today is still waiting: no job you are still standing at, and no job scheduled today that is not completed and that you have not been to yet. A job you arrived at and left counts as done for the day, whether or not you tapped Complete.
• A parts run from your last job clocks you out, and coming back clocks you in again. Both show as Auto, and the drive is the gap between them.
• A job with no map position, or past the twentieth job of the day, cannot be seen arriving. While one of those is not completed, Atlas keeps you on the clock rather than guess — clock out by hand at the end of the day.
• Atlas records only that you arrived at or left a job, and when. It does not record where you go between jobs, and it never stores a map position. The phone shows “Clocked in” or “Clocked out” when it happens.
• My clock log, the second round button on the clock row, lists your own arrivals, departures and punches for the last fourteen days. On the Timesheets tab the office sees the same punches marked Auto beside the time Auto clock-in set.
• Turning the switch off stops it on that phone and cancels its key. Turning it on from a new phone replaces the old one.

Clock reminders

Four reminders keep the clock honest. Each one can be turned off, and two of them timed, on the Clock Reminders card in Admin Settings, under Schedule. All four start on.

• Last job done. Pressing Job complete on your last ticket or install of the day, while you are on the clock, asks right there: Last job today, with Clock out and Not yet. On a ticket it sits under the invoice question. A call you are helping on, or an install day not ticked done, still counts as left.
• Still on the clock. Still punched in an hour after your last job finished, or an hour after closing if that is later, Atlas texts your work phone “Still on the clock?” and puts the same line in your bell; tapping it opens your clock. A second text goes two hours later, and an hour after that the office’s bell says who is still on. No texts between 9:30 PM and 7 AM: the latest one due goes in the morning. The hour can be 30, 60 or 90 minutes.
• Morning check. At 8:15 on any day with work booked (8:00 or 8:30 if chosen), the office’s bell lists who has a job starting within half an hour and has not clocked in, with their first job’s time and address. An Anytime call has no start to be late for. Nothing rings when everyone is in.
• Before payroll. Monday at 7 AM, payroll’s bell lists what last week needs fixed before it is approved: a punch never clocked out, a punch over twelve hours, and a day with tickets done and no punch or time entered. Nothing rings on a clean week.

Approving a week

Each person’s sheet is grouped by week, Sunday to Saturday. Accounting reviews the week — books hours where they are missing, closes forgotten punches — then presses Approve on the week’s line and Approve Week to confirm. The line then reads “Approved” with the date.

• A week with flagged days can still be approved, but the reason has to be written down and it stays with the approval. That is how a call with genuinely no paid hours — a warranty callback, a ticket the office closed from the desk — stops showing as needing a look.
• An approved week is locked. Nothing in it can be added, removed or edited — not the clock, not the other time, not the hours on a ticket — by anybody, until Withdraw Approval, inside the opened week, reopens it. That needs a reason too, and the approval stays on record as withdrawn rather than disappearing.
• A week with somebody still on the clock cannot be approved; close the punch first.

The register: running payroll

Register is the tab you open on payday. It answers one question: what do we pay each person for these dates?

1. Set the dates pill at the top to the pay period.
2. Read Owed this period: the total for everybody. Under it, in gold, how many weeks are not approved yet. Approving happens on the Timesheets tab.
3. Read down the list, one line per person: what they are owed on the right, and pay and commission under it. A gold dot means a week not approved or hours with no pay rate; nothing is owed on those until they are fixed, so the figure is a dash. Tap a person to open their weeks, their commission and the invoices it came from, under that line only.
4. Press CSV, beside the dates, and hand the file to your payroll provider.

If the page says nothing is recorded in those dates, nobody clocked in, booked hours on a ticket, or entered time between them — widen the dates, or look at Timesheets to see whose weeks are sitting there.

Where the register’s numbers come from

You do not need this to run payroll. It is here for the day somebody queries a figure.

• Hours. On a day somebody clocked in, Atlas uses the clock. On a day they did not, it uses the hours booked against their tickets. It never adds the two together, so a day cannot be paid twice.
• PTO, sick and holiday. Paid at the person’s normal rate. They never push anybody into overtime, because nobody worked those hours.
• Overtime. Hours actually worked, above the weekly threshold set on that person’s pay rate, at that rate’s multiplier. It is priced on the day it was worked, so a raise in the middle of a week is right on both halves of it.
• A salary shows as one week’s worth of the yearly figure, for each approved week.
• Commission comes from invoices issued between your two dates. The percent is figured on the price of the work before sales tax, less the trip charge (a dispatch fee counts as one); sales tax and the trip charge are never commissioned, and a deposit paid earlier does not reduce it. The invoice’s line in the register says how much trip charge came off; an invoice that is only a trip charge earns nothing. Where several people worked the job, each gets the share their crew hours earned; where one tech was assigned and nobody booked hours, they get the job. A plan paid on profit rather than on the invoice is refused with the reason rather than guessed at, because an invoice records what the customer was charged and not what the parts cost us.
• Somebody with hours and no pay rate is called out by name rather than quietly priced at nothing.

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.

Below the technicians, Lead Sources counts where this year's new customers came from, biggest first, from the Lead Source on each customer. It is the same whatever the filters above show, because a lead source belongs to the customer, not to a job.

Employee BankOwner & admin

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

Field technicians and installers do not have this page: it is not in their side menu, and a link to it goes back to HQ with a note that it is for the office. Their own profile is still theirs to change, from Edit My Profile in Settings.

+ Invite Employee fills in the whole card up front — name, role, department, permissions, dispatch color — 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.

Permissions follow the role. A new card's permission boxes start ticked with its Role's defaults, and change when Role changes. On a card, a box that differs from the role wears an amber dot, and Reset to the role puts the role's set back. An Administrator has everything, so their boxes are not used. Each role's defaults are set under Role Defaults on Admin Settings, under People.

An administrator saves any card’s details — name, phone, birthday, permissions. Changing someone’s role or account type, or deactivating them, is the owner’s.

Sent Invites, above the list, is every invitation sent by anyone in the company: who it is for, their role, when it went and who sent it, and whether it is Pending, Accepted, Expired or Revoked. A link lasts 24 hours. Resend emails a fresh link for the same card, and the old one stops working; Revoke withdraws the invitation so its link can never be used. Once somebody accepts, they are in the list below as an employee. A Give Sign-In on a worker's card is listed too, marked Give Sign-In, and reads Accepted once they have signed in; it has no Resend or Revoke.

Workers who never sign in. For somebody you only need to schedule, press + Add Worker beside + Invite Employee (or choose No sign-in at the top of the new-employee form): there is no email to fill in, and the button reads Add Worker. They exist straight away — in the technician pickers, the Calendar, crew hours, and on the Dispatch board when Available for dispatch is on — and the list marks them No sign-in. Atlas never lets that account sign in, never emails it a reset and never rings its bell. On the Company Employees roster, Make worker does the same for a name with no Atlas account. When they do need Atlas, Give Sign-In on their card takes a real email and sends the password link; their tickets and hours stay theirs. One added by mistake comes off with Delete Account Permanently on their card: type their name to confirm. A worker with calls or hours on record is kept, so deactivate them instead.

• Dispatch Color is that person's identity across Atlas: their calls and their blocked time wear it on the Calendar, and their maintenance visits wear it on the PMA 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. It is off until someone turns it on, and only people with it on can be put on a ticket or a job. The Assistant can turn it on for you when you ask it to assign someone who is off; it asks first.
• 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".
• Birthday — one box: "Oct 6", "10/6", or "10/6/1985" with the year. The year is optional and stays on the card; the Calendar shows the month and day only.

Website Photos

The company’s pictures for its website, in one library.

Website Photos is a tile on Admin Settings under Tools (Open Website Photos), and for the office and accounting the same tile on their own Settings, under Company; it is not in the side menu, since what is in it goes on the website. It is the office’s: owners, admins and the office upload and change photos, accounting can look and download, and technicians and installers do not see it.

Upload photos picks as many as you like at once — on a phone, from the camera roll or the camera. JPEG, PNG, WebP or HEIC, up to 25 MB each. Each one shows its own line while it goes up (Uploading, Saved, or why it failed) and lands in the grid. Tag new beside it is the tag the next uploads get: Installs, Service, Team, Trucks, Before & after or Other.

The star on a photo marks it for the website; press it again to take the star off. The chips above the grid show All, Starred for website, or one tag.

lancairemech.com reads the starred photos from Atlas: a starred photo is in its Our Fleet & Work gallery within a minute, newest first with its caption, and taking the star off takes it off the site. Only the picture and the caption go; never who added it. A starred HEIC photo stays in the library but is not on the site (its line says HEIC · not on site), since most browsers cannot show HEIC.

Hold a star to make that photo the Cover, the big photo across the top of the website’s home page; on a computer, a right-click on the star does the same. The grid labels it Cover, and there is one at a time, so making another the cover moves the label. Hold the cover’s star again to end it. With more than one starred, the home page’s banner turns through all of them, the cover first, about six seconds each; with none, it shows the fleet photo it always had. The starred photos are also the website’s Gallery page.

Photo brightness, Zoom and Banner shade, above the grid, set how the website draws its photos. Photo brightness is 100% for the photos as taken; slide right to brighten every photo on the site. Zoom is each photo’s own: how close the home banner draws it, from 100% as taken up to 250%, from the middle of the photo — for a truck shot from across the lot, say. Banner shade is the dark layer over the home page’s big photo that keeps its white words readable; less shade shows more of the photo, too little makes the words hard to read. The small picture beside them shows a starred photo as the banner will, starting on the cover; the ‹ › buttons step to the next starred photo, and the Zoom slider follows the photo shown. Letting go of a slider saves it, and the site takes it within a minute. Reset goes back to 100% and 71%, and the photo shown to 100% zoom.

Press a photo to see it large, with who added it and when. Download saves the original file. The office can change the caption and the tag and press Save, star it with the ☆ beside Download (Use on website; gold when on), or Remove it — Atlas asks first, and a removed photo leaves the library but is kept on record.

Spotify

Play the shop’s music from Atlas. Atlas plays the sound itself, in its own tab on your computer; it can also send the music to a speaker, phone or computer running Spotify.

Each person connects their own Spotify once, with a Premium account: Connect Spotify on the Spotify card on Settings (under Account) or on HQ. Spotify asks you to sign in and allow Atlas, then brings you back. Disconnect Spotify on Settings undoes it. Until the company has set Spotify up, none of this shows.

Connected, a pill beside the bell shows what is playing on every page — the cover, a green equalizer and the song. With nothing playing it is a small note. Press it for the player: the song and how far in, back, play or pause and next, your library (press one to play it), and Playing on with the device; press the device to move the music to another one. HQ has the same player as a Now playing card, and the two always agree.

The library has two lists: Playlists and Albums, your saved albums. Press either to switch; Atlas remembers the one you used last.

Once Atlas is open, the music moves to Atlas on its own and Playing on reads Atlas (this tab), first in the device list; there is nothing to pick. Browsers stay silent until you click something on the page, so if the player says Click = start sound, click anywhere in Atlas. The music keeps playing while you work in another tab. Pick another device in the list and the music stays there until you move it back or reload Atlas.

If you connected Spotify before Atlas played the sound itself, the player shows Reconnect: press it once and allow Spotify again. Until then Atlas works as a remote, as before. The same Reconnect shows once for everyone connected before Albums came: until it is pressed, the player lists playlists only.

The volume slider sits under the play button in the player and on the card: drag it, or press the arrow keys on it. The speaker beside it mutes, and pressing it again brings back the level you had. A device that keeps its own volume (most phones) shows Volume on the device instead.

On a computer the keys work from any page while Spotify is connected, except while you are typing in a box: Alt + Shift + P play or pause, Alt + Shift + → next, Alt + Shift + ← back, Alt + Shift + ↑ and ↓ volume up or down by 10, Alt + Shift + M mute. On a Mac it is Option + Shift. Point at a control to see its keys.

Another device needs the Spotify app open before Atlas can play there; if none is, the player says Open Spotify on a device. A free Spotify account can see what is playing but not control it or play it in Atlas (Premium needed). A browser that cannot play Spotify says No sound in this browser. Spotify is on the computer only: on a phone, Atlas shows none of it.

Settings

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

Admin Settings is four tabs: Tools, Company, People and Schedule. Tools is small tiles — Day Plans, Estimate Templates, Cost Library, Service Task Templates, Auto Receptionist, Texting, Website Photos and Birthday Sign-in — each with what it holds in the corner and its buttons underneath. Company is Company & Pricing Defaults, Company-wide Field Limits and Markup Labels; People is Role Defaults and Email Alerts; Schedule is Business Hours, Clock Reminders and Festive Chips. It opens on the tab you last used on that device, Tools the first time. On a phone the tabs are one row and the cards one column.

Role Defaults is what each role — Office, Technician, Installer, Accounting — may do before anybody is changed by hand. Pick the role, press its permissions on or off, and press Save for that role. It applies to everyone on the role, except a box changed on a person's own card. Back to Atlas's set ticks the set Atlas started with; nothing changes until you save.

Company-wide Field Limits, Email Alerts and Festive Chips are rows of chips, one per setting. A filled dot is on, a hollow one is off; press a chip (or Space or Enter on it) to change it. Field Limits are kept when you press Save Protected Settings; Email Alerts and Festive Chips keep each press at once. Business Hours, on Schedule, has its own Save Protected Settings: it is the same save, so either one keeps the Company boxes, the Field Limits and the hours together. A box on Company that cannot be saved, a card fee over 3 say, opens Company and points at it.

On Admin Settings, Contractor License is the license the company works under, typed the way it should print. It prints on every estimate, invoice, bid and letter, on screen, printed, as a PDF and on the customer's own link: on Classic in the white step under the right end of the masthead, on Signature bottom left, on the footer. Left blank, the company's own, License # NC-35390, prints.

Email Alerts, on Admin Settings, picks who gets an email for each kind of notification. The bell always rings; the email is separate. Each kind is a chip showing its choice; each press moves it to the next: Off, Sender (whoever sent the estimate, pay link or text it answers; only on those six), Just me (whoever pressed it), then Office & admins (everyone the bell rings for, and the office mailbox). The dot's colour says which, as the key under the chips shows, and the count beside the title says how many email. A chip someone else set to just them shows their name, and stays until it is pressed. Any of them can email, not only the ones that used to. A text reply starts off; an estimate opened, accepted or declined and a payment start on Sender; a change request on Office & admins. Only an Owner or Admin can change them.

Festive Chips, on Admin Settings: in each holiday's weeks a small holiday scene sits in the corner of the Classic masthead, most with a greeting written into it. At Christmas, snow, lights and a snowman dress the whole masthead on screen. In Atlas shows it on Atlas's own screens; On what's sent decides whether each send starts with it on. Press a holiday to see its chip now, everywhere in Atlas and on every computer and phone, and Pulse to go back to today. While a holiday is showing, the send buttons on an estimate or invoice have a green Festive button beside Preview (and the Letterhead page has it in its Print or send menu): on, the chip goes out on that Preview, PDF, print, email or estimate link; off, it does not. Paper gets one still frame of it. On the Calendar, a holiday that has a scene wears it in the corner of its day, all year; turning In Atlas off takes those away too.

On Admin Settings, Google Review Link is the page the review code on a paid invoice opens, and the card around the code links to it too. Paste a link that lands on the write-a-review box itself; blank means the company’s own write-a-review page. Wisetack Link, Service Finance Link and Lendmark Link are the links each lender gives you for customers to apply. A lender with its link filled in is offered on the pay page’s Financing tab (invoices of $500 or more) and on quotes that offer financing; blank means not offered. Financing on Quotes is whether a new estimate offers financing; each estimate can change it, lender by lender.

The Texting tile on Admin Settings asks Twilio, with Atlas’s own keys, whether the keys work, which number texts go from, whether the carriers have approved the business texting registration (until they do, many texts are blocked), and where a customer’s reply goes. Check Twilio asks again; if replies go anywhere but Atlas, Send replies to Atlas points them here so they land in Messages. Owners and admins only.

Birthdays. On your own birthday, the first time you open Atlas that day, it greets you by name before HQ: the wordmark bursts into confetti, the greeting lights up in pink neon a letter at a time, then breaks apart and falls away as HQ comes in. Tap anywhere to skip it. It plays once a day on each device and only on your screen. Until midnight your initials in the top bar wear a party hat and a gold ring, a rose ticker above the Calendar wishes you a happy birthday (only you see it), and pressing your initials pops confetti; on a computer the account menu opens as usual. On a phone the hat sits on the menu button for the day, and pressing it pops the confetti too. Mute birthday, the first row of the account menu (on a phone, of the side menu), takes the hat, the ring and the confetti off until midnight on that device. The birthday is the one on your profile; hiding it from the company calendar does not stop your own greeting. Preview birthday sign-in, on the Birthday Sign-in tile on Admin Settings (the owner’s alone), plays it for whoever presses it, once, on that device, with the hat until midnight, and clears a mute. The same tile lists the next five birthdays (month and day, never the year) and the people who sign in with no birthday on file; add theirs on Employees. Owners and admins only.

Everyone has this page. Sign out is here too, on the My Account card. The quicker way is your name at the top right: click it and Sign out is the last row, one click with no question. Signing out starts Atlas fresh, so the next person on that phone or computer sees nothing of yours. Admin Settings is for owners and administrators; anyone else who reaches for it lands on their own Settings. Edit My Profile lets you change your preferred name, work phone, skills and date of birth (or just a Birthday, month and day), and whether your birthday shows on the company calendar. It is the same form the Employees page opens for you. Your role, department and dispatch color are set by an administrator — ask if one is wrong.

Tips. The first time you open a page, one or two small notes point at the controls that matter for your role and what you are allowed to do. Got it or × clears a tip for good, on your phone and your computer alike. A tip only points: pressing the control is still yours, and one marked Live points at a control that saves. On the My Account card, Replay tips brings them all back, page by page; Show tips off means none; Tips seen counts the ones you have cleared out of those for your role.

The color scheme is yours alone and follows you to any machine you sign in to: Atlas, Dark for night dispatch and a phone in a cab, and Steel: navy chrome, a page that falls from navy through steel to frost, and gunmetal cards over it.

Text Size, beside the color scheme under Appearance, makes Atlas easier to read on a roof or in a truck: Standard, Large or Extra large. The page, a window’s contents, the side menu and the Assistant’s answers grow; the header across the top stays as it is. It is kept on this phone or computer only, so a big size on your phone leaves the office screen as it was.

The page is in sections, listed down the left: Account, Appearance, Estimating (Estimate Templates and the Cost Library), Company for owners and administrators, and Danger zone. Pick one and only that section shows; Atlas opens on the one you had last. On a phone the sections are a row across the top.

The side menu is yours too. The row at the foot of the menu switches it between a list, which shows the pages in groups that open under a parent — Customers holds Service Locations, Equipment holds Atlas ID and PMA, Schedule holds Calendar and Dispatch, Money holds Revenue Reports and Price Book, Inventory holds Truck Stock, Needed Materials and Supply Houses (and, for the office, Extra Stock and Warehouse), Team holds Employee Bank and Payroll — and a rail, which shrinks it to a column of icons and gives the page the width; hovering an icon names the page. Like the color scheme, it follows you to any machine you sign in to, and on a phone the menu stays a drawer either way.

The order is yours as well. Arrange menu, the arrows icon at the foot of the menu, puts every row — a page, a group, the guide — and every page inside a group beside two arrows: drag a row where you want it, or press its arrows. Each press moves the row one place, and the row you moved lights up for a moment. Pressing a row while you arrange does not open it. On a phone, Billboard stays at the top and has no arrows. Reset puts back the standard order and Done ends it; the order is kept on your account, so it is in place the next time Atlas opens, on any computer.

Owners and administrators also get Company Administration, which holds the company name, the default labor 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.

Estimate templates

A template is a named set of estimate line items the office reuses. They are built and changed here, not on an estimate — a template is company pricing, and it ends up on every estimate made from it, so it should not be editable a keystroke away from the line you are typing.

1. Manage Estimate Templates opens the list.
2. + New Template gives it a name and a set of lines — description, quantity, cost and rate, and a tick for any line the customer chooses rather than gets. Start typing a description and the Price Book offers what matches, under the box; pick one and its cost and rate come with it. Anything not in the book can still be written out by hand, and a cost or rate you have already typed is never overwritten.
3. Edit changes one. Renaming replaces the old one rather than leaving a second copy behind. The grip at the left of each description reorders the lines, by dragging or with the arrow keys, and the order you leave them in is the order they insert onto an estimate.
4. Delete removes one. Estimates already built from it are not changed.