Where control turns projects into profit

Setting the Foundation for Commercial Integrity

You’re setting up your firm’s workspace, and the decisions you make here will ripple through every quote you send, every hour your team logs, and every invoice you issue. In many systems, these settings are just admin chores. In AtomicSam, they are the rules of engagement for your commercial control. If your numbering is inconsistent or your billing logic is disconnected, revenue leakage starts to hide in the gaps before you’ve even started a project.

Establishing these defaults correctly ensures that you aren't manually fixing invoice numbers or re-coding tax settings every Friday afternoon. It’s about building a system where the "commercial truth" of a job is baked in from the moment you name it. When your organization-wide settings are sharp, your team can focus on delivery, knowing the financial guardrails are already in place.

How the Inheritance Model Works

Before you toggle a single switch, you need to understand how AtomicSam handles data. We use a three-tier inheritance model designed to give you both speed and specific control. Think of it as a "waterfall" of settings:

Organisation level: Your global defaults (set here in General Configuration).
Client Billing Profile: Overrides for specific clients (e.g., a "Gold" client with 14-day terms instead of your standard 30).
Job level: The final word for a specific piece of work (e.g., a one-off project billed in a foreign currency).

By getting the Organisation level right, you reduce the manual effort required to set up new clients and jobs by 90%.

💡 Tip: Start with your most common "standard" operating procedure here. You can always create exceptions at the Client level later, but your global settings should reflect how you run 80% of your business.

Configuring Your Numbering and Formats

Consistency in your documentation isn't just about aesthetics; it’s about auditability and professional confidence. You can define custom prefixes and padding for your Job, Quote, and Invoice numbers.

Navigate to Settings > Organisation > General to find these fields. Most firms use a prefix that identifies the document type (e.g., "INV-" or "Q-") followed by a five or six-digit number.

📸 [Screenshot: The Numbering Format section showing prefix and padding fields]

Timesheet and Billing Logic

This is where you protect your margin by ensuring time is captured accurately and billable work doesn't go missing. You need to decide how your team interacts with their week and how those hours translate into revenue.

Setting	Use this when…
Locking Period	You want to prevent staff from editing timesheets after the billing cycle has closed, ensuring your historical data remains accurate.
Rounding Increments	You bill in specific blocks (e.g., 15-minute intervals) and want to avoid the "lost minutes" that occur with precise 1-minute tracking.
Default Billable Status	Most of your work is client-facing; setting this to "Billable" by default ensures you don't forget to charge for work performed.

⚠️ Heads up: Changing your "Work Week" start day (e.g., shifting from Monday to Sunday) mid-month can make your resource reporting look skewed for that transition week. It's best to make this change at the start of a fresh month.

Dashboard and Display Preferences

Your dashboard should reflect your role's specific commercial priorities. AtomicSam allows you to toggle sections on or off so you aren't wading through noise to find the signals that matter. For example, a Finance Manager may want to see **Aged Receivables** front and center, while a Creative Director may only care about **Resource Utilization**.

You can also create **Column Presets**. These allow you to save specific views in your Job or Invoice lists. If you find yourself constantly adding and removing columns like "Project Manager" or "Margin %," save them as a preset to switch views with one click.

The Impact of Currency and Tax Settings

Setting your base currency and tax defaults is a one-time task that safeguards your reporting. AtomicSam uses your base currency for all top-level commercial reporting. If you work with international clients, you will manage those specific currencies at the **Client Billing Profile** level, but the system will always "phone home" to your base currency for your organization-wide margin analysis.

✅ Did you know: You can set "Restricted Display" for specific users in the Display Preferences. This allows you to hide sensitive commercial data like internal cost rates from team members who only need to see the project's progress/hours.

Pro Tips & Common Gotchas

Audit your prefixes: Ensure your Quote and Invoice prefixes are distinct. Using the same prefix for both can lead to confusion in your accounting software sync.
The "Rounding" Leak: If you track time precisely but bill in 15-minute increments, your report might show 7.2 hours worked but only 7 hours billed if you round down. Decide on your rounding policy early to protect those billable minutes.
Set a Hard Lock: Use the Timesheet Locking feature to close the previous month by the 3rd business day. This forces a culture of "commercial readiness" where your data is always ready for invoicing without an end-of-month scramble.

📸 [Screenshot: The Timesheet Locking configuration showing a 'relative' lock date]