How work actually moves through a company — not the org chart, the chain. Each step names who owns it, what has to be true before it starts, the document it produces, and the specific ways it goes wrong.
Most people only ever see two or three steps of the chain they work in. The estimator never watches the invoice go out; the credit controller never sees the assumptions baked into the price four months earlier. This is written for the gap between them.
A chain is an end-to-end sequence that crosses departments — which is exactly why nobody inside one department can describe the whole of it.
The eleven steps a customer enquiry passes through before the money is in the bank — who owns each one, what document it produces, and where the chain usually breaks.
an RFQ → Costing the job → Reviewing and issuing the quotation → Negotiation and revised offers → the customer's purchase order → Order entry → making it → Despatch and shipment → the invoice → Accounts receivable and collection → Payment and cash application
Every field, what it means, a realistic example value, and the thing that goes wrong with it in practice.
What the job actually involves, a realistic day, the measures it carries and where it leads.
Formula, a worked calculation, how to set a target from your own numbers, and the ways each measure misleads. No borrowed benchmark figures — we do not publish numbers we cannot source.
The Atlas is written to be read without downloading anything. Where a page describes work a CapsuleM8 tool already does, it says so — and where it does not, it still tells you how the job is done. The formulas behind every tool are published separately in the methods reference.
Nothing here is legal, tax or accounting advice. Contractual and tax practice varies by jurisdiction; confirm the specifics for where you trade.