Where control turns projects into profit

You’ve landed the work, the contract is signed, and the team is ready to start. But as any firm owner knows, the transition from "vague idea" to "billable project" is where margin usually starts to leak. You need a way to track the work without the administrative overhead eating your profits before you've even logged the first hour.

In AtomicSam, Jobs are the heartbeat of your firm's commercial control. They act as the bridge between the promises you made in your quote and the reality of your team’s timesheets. By centralizing budgets, tasks, and invoicing in one place, you ensure that every minute recorded contributes to your bottom line instead of disappearing into the "delivery gap."

Managing the Job Lifecycle

Unlike other systems that clutter your view with "Quoted" or "Lead" statuses, AtomicSam keeps it clean: a Job only exists once there is work to be done. Quotes have their own independent lifecycle; once a quote is accepted, it pushes financial data into an Active job.

The status of your job dictates exactly what your team can do—restricting time entries or invoicing to prevent accidental overhead on paused or dead projects.

Status	When to use	Permissions
Active	Work is currently underway.	Full time entry and invoicing allowed.
On Hold	The client paused the project or a contract is being renegotiated.	Time entry and invoicing are blocked immediately.
Completed	The deliverables are out the door, but you’re waiting on final admin.	Invoicing allowed; time entry allowed during the grace period.
Cancelled	The project was spiked before completion.	All financial and time activity is blocked.

💡 Tip: Use the On Hold status as a commercial safety net. If a client stops paying their bills, flipping a job to On Hold prevents your team from continuing to burn hours that you might never recover.

The Completion Grace Period

We know that people often forget to log their Friday hours until Monday morning. To prevent your team from being locked out the second a project ends, AtomicSam includes a Completed Job Grace Period (defaulting to 21 days). This allows late time entries to be recorded against a finished job, ensuring your final margin reports are accurate before the job locks permanently.

Setting Your Job Numbering

Consistency is the secret to a tidy audit trail. You can configure your job numbering format in Workspace Settings to match how your firm thinks about its portfolio. You can choose from four primary formats:

Simple Sequential: (e.g., 1001, 1002) Perfect for smaller firms.
Client Prefix: (e.g., ACME-001) Keeps work organized by account.
Year-Based: (e.g., 2024-501) Useful for tracking annual volume.
Per-Client Sequential: Restarts the counter for every new client you onboard.

⚠️ Heads up: Changing your numbering format won't retroactively update existing jobs. It only applies to new jobs created after the change, so pick a format that scales with your firm's growth.

Budget Snapshots and Scope Creep

A job can have multiple quotes associated with it as projects evolve. When a client accepts a revised quote or a change order, AtomicSam creates a Budget Snapshot. This preserves a full audit trail of what the budget was at any point in time, protecting you during "how did we get here?" conversations with clients.

When you accept a new quote into an existing job, you’ll choose one of three merge strategies:

Replace Budget, Keep Time: Updates the financial targets but leaves all existing timesheets attached to the project.
Add as Variation: Keeps the original budget intact and adds the new quote as an incremental "Variation" line item—the gold standard for protecting margins against scope creep.
Create New Job: Keeps the finances entirely separate by spawning a new, linked job.

✅ Did you know: AtomicSam uses the job_budget_snapshots table to let you compare your "Original Quote" against your "Current Budget" in real-time. This is where you spot if a project is drifting off course.

AI-Assisted Job Setup

Setting up a job shouldn't feel like data entry. AtomicSam uses built-in AI tools to speed up the process so you can get back to billable work:

Job Description Generator: Drafts a professional project summary based on your quote’s line items.
Short Name Generator: Takes a long, clunky contract title (like "Quarterly Marketing Strategy Phase 2") and suggests something punchy for timesheets (like "Q2 Mktg Strat").
Task Suggestions: Analyzes your project type and suggests common tasks (e.g., "Client Review," "Internal QA") to ensure your team logs time against the right buckets.

Pro Tips for Commercial Control

Review the "Completed" list monthly: Don't let jobs sit in Completed status forever. Once the grace period ends and the final invoice is paid, ensure they are locked down to keep your Active list focused.
Always use Variations for scope changes: Instead of just "updating the budget," use the Add as Variation merge strategy. It makes it much easier to justify additional fees to a client when they can see the original scope vs. the additions.