Manufacturing · Job Shops & Fabricators
Six areas, five questions each: how a job moves, the documents that have to exist, who touches the system, what Atlas does about it, and which modules you’d switch on. Every step is tagged with the module that handles it — that connection is the whole point. One of the six is Poma Architectural Metals’ world.
Worth saying plainly: this is not an MES. Nothing here schedules your floor, routes work between machines or watches a spindle. It runs the money and the paperwork around the job — the quote, the material, the hours, the certifications and the invoice.
CNC Machining
Pre-Sales & CPQ · in the core platform Quote from the print against your catalog and your own history on the part, with every revision kept on the quote. Forty quotes a week is the volume this has to survive — and the one you won is what the job gets built from.
Customer Relations · in the core platform Every RFQ is a deal with the customer, the buyer and the package on it. Deal Coach flags the quotes going quiet, so the follow-up happens on day three instead of at the monthly review.
Procurement & Purchasing Material and outside processing as purchase orders against the job, with three-way matching between PO, receipt and supplier invoice. Vendor scorecards make a slow heat-treat house a fact rather than a feeling.
Project Management The job itself: phases, hours and burn against the estimate. This is where job costing happens while the job is still open. It is not a shop-floor control system — no machine monitoring, no routing, no production schedule.
Shipping Outbound shipments raised from the job that needs them, with the carrier, the tracking and the packing slip on the same record as the certification package.
Invoicing & Billing The invoice fills itself from the shipped job, progress billing on a long job comes off the phases, and overdue statuses roll without anyone checking.
8–15 documents per job — and the quote is one of forty you sent that week
Estimator Prices off the print in Pre-Sales & CPQ, against the catalog and the last time you ran that part, with every revision kept on the quote instead of in a folder of v3-final files. Customer Relations holds the quote until it is won or dead, so a package does not go quiet because the estimator moved on to the next forty.
Programmer Works from the job the won quote created in Project Management: the print revision, the material on order, and the hours the estimate assumed. Program time books against the job like any other phase, which is how it lands in the job cost instead of disappearing into overhead.
Buyer Turns the material line into a purchase order in Procurement & Purchasing, with the mill and the certification requirement on it. The PO, the receipt and the supplier invoice reconcile three ways, so a price move on bar stock is visible while the job is open rather than after it closed.
Shop floor lead Sees the open jobs, their phases and the hours booked against each one in Project Management. CaptivaHQ does not drive machines and does not sequence the floor — it holds the job, the paperwork and the cost, so the board stays yours while the hours and the documents stop being.
QA Files the first-article report, the material certification and the certificate of conformance against the job they belong to, so the document set exists before the customer’s receiving inspection asks for it. The inspection phase has to be signed off before the job can close.
Office manager Invoices from the shipped job in Invoicing & Billing, watches overdue statuses roll on their own, and pulls quote-to-win by customer out of Analytics & BI instead of a spreadsheet nobody updates.
“Which open jobs have burned past their estimated hours?” — Atlas lists them with the customer, the estimator and the hours booked so far, while there is still a job to fix.
Fabrication
Email & Meetings Capture · in the core platform RFQs arrive as email, so the thread, the drawing and the revision land on the deal by themselves, summarised, with the follow-up already created. Nothing about the package lives only in one estimator’s inbox.
Pre-Sales & CPQ · in the core platform The quote off the drawing, built from your catalog, every revision kept. When the same package comes back next year at a different steel price, last year’s quote is the starting point.
Customer Relations · in the core platform Sixty quotes a month at a one-in-four win rate is a pipeline whether or not anyone calls it that. Deal Coach flags what is going quiet and what resembles the ones you usually win.
Procurement & Purchasing Purchase orders against the job, mill test reports captured on receipt, three-way matching between PO, receipt and invoice — so the material cost on the job is the real one.
Project Management Cut, form, weld and finish as phases with hours booked against them. Job cost and job status — not a shop-floor control system. Nothing here drives a machine or schedules the floor for you.
Invoicing & Billing Invoice from the shipped job, progress billing and retainage where the package runs long, and overdue statuses that roll without a reminder.
6–10 documents per job, on roughly sixty quotes a month — three to five shops bidding each one
Estimator Sixty quotes a month means the number comes off the drawing and the last time you made that part, not a blank sheet. Pre-Sales & CPQ builds it from the catalog and keeps the revisions on the quote; Email & Meetings Capture files the RFQ thread on the deal, so which drawing revision you quoted is never in doubt.
Shop foreman Runs the open work off Project Management: which packages are cut, which are in the weld booth, what hours are booked against each. The estimate travels with the job, so a package that has already eaten its hours says so before it ships.
Welders Book hours against the job from the shop instead of a time card keyed in on Friday. Weld procedure records and welder qualifications sit on the Employees record they belong to, current or flagged — which is the first thing a structural customer asks for.
Buyer Material on order against the job in Procurement & Purchasing, mill test reports collected on receipt and matched to the PO. When steel moves, spend analytics say which customers you quoted at the old price.
Office manager Invoices from the shipped job, chases the overdue on schedule, and pulls win rate by customer out of Analytics & BI — which is the number that decides who is worth quoting next quarter.
“Which customers do we actually win?” — Atlas ranks quote-to-win by customer and flags the RFQs still sitting unanswered after two days.
Structural Metal
Pre-Sales & CPQ · in the core platform The bid, with shop, material and field scope as separate priced lines, kept with every revision. When the GC asks why the number moved, the answer is on the record.
Contract Management · in the core platform The subcontract, the retainage terms, the amendments and every field change order — e-signed and versioned. A change order that never became an amendment is the classic way a package loses money.
Project Management Detailing, submittal approval, fabrication and erection as gated phases with hours and budget burn on each. Approval cycles are dated, so the schedule story is evidence rather than recollection.
Shipping Loads raised against the erection sequence, so what leaves the shop matches what the crew can set that week, with the delivery record on the package.
Work Orders & Field Dispatch The erection crew runs the site from work orders: sequence, pieces, bolt-up and field-weld sign-offs, photos and hours from the steel. Dispatch is load-bearing on this work.
Invoicing & Billing Progress billing by phase, draw requests off the project, retainage tracked to final release, and punch-list work billed rather than absorbed.
15–30 documents per package — and the approval cycle is where the schedule goes
Estimator Bids the package in Pre-Sales & CPQ with shop hours, material and erection scope as separate priced lines, because that is exactly where the argument with the general contractor happens later. The bid stays on the deal in Customer Relations until it is awarded or lost.
Detailer Runs the submittal cycle as phases in Project Management: drawings issued, with the architect, returned, revised, approved for fabrication. Days-with-the-architect becomes a dated fact on the record rather than a memory — which is what a delay claim is built from.
Project manager Owns the package end to end: the subcontract and its amendments in Contract Management, the fabrication phases and the erection sequence in Project Management, and the field change orders that arrive as amendments instead of as a phone call nobody wrote down.
Shop foreman Fabricates to the approved drawing revision with hours booked against the package. Nothing goes into the shop against a submittal that has not come back approved — the phase will not let it.
Erection foreman Works the site as work orders in Work Orders & Field Dispatch: the crew, the sequence, the pieces delivered, the bolt-up and field-weld sign-offs, photos from the steel. The field half of this work is a module here, not an upsell.
“Which submittals have been sitting with the architect for more than a week?” — Atlas lists them by package with the days waiting and drafts the chase.
Aerospace
Pre-Sales & CPQ · in the core platform Quote the part and the special processes as priced lines from the catalog — heat treat, NDT, finish, source inspection, first article. Here the paperwork is a cost line, not an afterthought.
Contract Management · in the core platform The contract, its flow-down clauses and every amendment, versioned and e-signed. What the customer imposed on you is what you have to impose on your suppliers, from the same record.
Procurement & Purchasing Approved sources, purchase orders that carry the certification requirement, three-way matching on receipt. A supplier whose approval lapses is flagged on the vendor record before a buyer raises the next PO.
Project Management The lot as phases with inspection gates: first article, in-process records, final. It holds the job and its evidence. It is not an MES and does not run the floor or the machines.
Compliance Manager It ships as a GRC suite — GDPR, ISO 27001, DORA, NIS2, the EU AI Act — so it is not a pre-built AS9100 framework. What a shop on AS9100 and Nadcap takes from it is the evidence spine: a requirement, the record that proves it, the document attached, and the retention date the system watches, instead of a folder tree one person can navigate.
Shipping The shipment and its certificate of conformance leave as one record, lot traceability intact, packing documents where the receiving inspector expects them.
a certified document set per lot, retained ten years or more, and an AS9100 or Nadcap audit that can ask for any of it
Quality manager Owns the record, which on this work is half the deliverable. Certifications, inspection records and special-process certs are held as evidence against the lot and the supplier they belong to, with retention dates the system watches — so an AS9100 surveillance audit is a filter rather than a fortnight.
Estimator Prices the part and the paperwork: heat treat, NDT, finishing, source inspection and the first article itself as catalog lines in Pre-Sales & CPQ. A quote that forgets the special processes is the one you win and lose money on.
Buyer Buys only to the approved source list in Procurement & Purchasing, with the certification requirement on the purchase order and the supplier’s approval status on the vendor record. A cert that arrives short stops the receipt, not the shipment.
Program manager Runs the lot in Project Management against the contract in Contract Management: flow-down clauses, delivery schedule, and phases that cannot close until the inspection records exist.
Document control Builds the per-lot package once, from records already attached to the lot, instead of assembling PDFs out of four folders the night before a delivery. Every document says which lot, which revision and which retention clock it is on.
“Pull every document for lot 4417.” — Atlas assembles the package and names what is missing, before the customer’s receiving inspection does.
Machine Builders
Pre-Sales & CPQ · in the core platform The scope, the options and the assumptions as a configured quote from the catalog. That quoted number is the baseline every later change order is measured against.
Project Management The build: phases, milestones, hours, capacity and budget burn, with change requests as their own scope. Job costing on a one-off machine — not a production scheduler, and nothing here sequences a floor.
Procurement & Purchasing Long-lead purchase orders against the build, promised dates on the record, vendor scorecards on who actually hits them, three-way matching when the invoice lands.
Inventory & Warehouse Components and spares stocked, transferred and counted across locations, with reorder points and demand forecasting — so the spares you promised in the O&M manual exist.
Work Orders & Field Dispatch Commissioning, SAT and warranty visits as work orders with hours, photos and customer sign-off from their floor. The same board handles the callout eighteen months later.
Customer Service After handover the machine has a ticket history: what broke, what was changed, what is under warranty — with SLA timers on the response you contracted to.
8–14 controlled documents per machine — and every change order re-versions three of them
Sales engineer Scopes and prices the machine in Pre-Sales & CPQ, then keeps the scope letter and its assumptions on the deal. The argument six months in is always about what was in the original scope.
Project manager Runs the build in Project Management: phases, milestones, hours and burn against the quoted number. A change request becomes its own scope with its own hours, which is the difference between a re-quote and a write-off.
Controls engineer Books design and commissioning hours against the machine, keeps the functional design spec and the schematic revisions on the project, and hands the FAT protocol over as a phase with a sign-off rather than an email.
Buyer Places long-lead orders in Procurement & Purchasing against the build, watches the promised dates on the PO, and carries components and spares in Inventory & Warehouse — so a machine is not waiting on a part someone thought was ordered.
Field service engineer Commissions on the customer’s floor from a work order in Work Orders & Field Dispatch — site hours, punch items, sign-off — and the tickets and spares that follow handover run in Customer Service against the same machine.
“Which builds have change orders that were never re-quoted?” — Atlas lists them against the original estimate, with the hours booked since.
Electronics
Pre-Sales & CPQ · in the core platform Quote a build from a BOM that runs to a thousand lines, revision by revision, against your catalog and your own history on the assembly.
Procurement & Purchasing Approved vendor lists, purchase orders with promised dates, shortage visibility and three-way matching. An end-of-life notice becomes a list of what it touches instead of a scramble.
Inventory & Warehouse On hand, reserved and short across locations, with cycle counts, transfers and demand forecasting on the components that cause the delay.
Project Management The run as phases with hours and cost booked against it — the build’s job cost and status. Not an MES: no line sequencing, no machine monitoring, no real-time production schedule.
Customer Relations · in the core platform The customer is a relationship with constant quote and change traffic on it, not a one-off order. Every thread, quote and run sits on one record.
Shipping Outbound shipments with carrier, tracking and the shipment record on the run, so what went where is still answerable a year later.
one quote against a thousand-line BOM — and an engineering change against it most weeks
Quoting engineer Prices a build off a BOM that runs to a thousand lines, in Pre-Sales & CPQ, against the catalog and the last time you quoted the same assembly. Every revision stays on the quote, because the BOM you priced and the BOM you built have to be the same document.
Commodity buyer Sources against the approved vendor list in Procurement & Purchasing, with lead times and promised dates on the purchase order and spend analytics across suppliers. When a part goes end-of-life the question is which open quotes and open orders touch it — one filter, not three exports.
Planner Holds the material in Inventory & Warehouse: on hand, reserved against a run, short — with reorder points and demand forecasting on the parts that actually bite. The runs themselves are projects with hours and cost; this is not a production schedule the system pretends to own.
Test and inspection lead Files test and inspection records against the run they belong to, with the RoHS and REACH declarations the customer asks for at the worst possible moment.
Account manager Runs the customer rather than the order: quotes, change traffic, open runs and invoices on one record in Customer Relations, with Email & Meetings Capture keeping the change thread out of a private inbox.
“Which open quotes and open orders touch this part number?” — Atlas lists them the moment a component goes end-of-life, so the substitution reaches quoting and purchasing together.
Where the margin goes
Three things that are true about job shop work right now — none of them about software.
27%
is how far off an estimate built from experience typically lands.
Measured against 190 finished jobs, and the error runs in the expensive direction — estimates came in about 22% under actual cost. One manufacturer, one product line, but it is the only study that has ever checked estimate against actual on real jobs.
Bendul & Apostu · International Journal of Business Administration 8(7) · 190 jobs at a single die manufacturer · 201724%
of the quotes a metal fabricator sends turn into a job.
Four quotes go out for every one that lands, at an average 5.7 days of turnaround each. The estimating work on the other three is unpaid.
Fabricators & Manufacturers Association · Financial Ratios & Operational Benchmarking Survey · FY2021, reported December 2022About half
of manufacturers said their operating margin shrank in the last six months.
Only about one in five said it grew. Most shops are making less on the same work than they were six months ago.
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas · Texas Business Outlook Surveys, special questions · 10–18 November 2025, published 24 November 2025Every one of these is somebody else’s data, published and checkable. Contact Us
Pricing
Every plan is priced per person, works for teams of up to 25, and has no minimum — add or remove people whenever you want. What changes between plans is how much of the system you switch on.
These are the platform itself, not a bolt-on. They come with Essentials, Professional and Enterprise alike — what you choose below is which add-ons sit on top. Hover any of them to see what it does.
Essentials
Get the core of the business running in one place
$69 per person / month
Up to 25 people
Start 14-day trialCard required. Cancel any time before day 14 and you are not charged.
The 16 core modules, plus any 5 add-ons
Our suggestion for industrial & manufacturing, shown first. Click one to remove it, then pick a replacement from the rest underneath.
Remove one above to swap
Most popular
Professional
Run the whole operation, office and field
$99 per person / month
Up to 25 people
Start 14-day trialCard required. Cancel any time before day 14 and you are not charged.
The 16 core modules, plus any 10 add-ons
Our suggestion for industrial & manufacturing, shown first. Click one to remove it, then pick a replacement from the rest underneath.
Remove one above to swap
Enterprise
When the way you work needs software built around it
Custom
More than 25 people
Talk to usWe walk your process first, then quote. No obligation.
All 31 modules — no cap
The 16 core modules plus all 15 add-ons, with nothing held back — including the Client Portal, which is Enterprise only.
Prices are per person, per month, in USD. Hover any module to see what it does, and click to add or remove it. More than 25 people, more than 10 add-ons, or the Client Portal? That is what Enterprise is for.
Register your shop
CaptivaHQ is in closed beta with a small group of selected clients. Register your shop and we stand up a workspace with your area’s modules, your vocabulary, your customer list and your open jobs — then you watch Atlas work it. Two short steps.
Watch · 1 minute 22
The short version: five systems that never talk to each other, the work that leaks between them, and the one platform that replaces the lot — RFQ to invoice, with the certifications attached.
One platform · thirty-one modules
Every area above maps onto a handful of these. Every module reads the same records, obeys the same permissions and is driven by the same AI — nothing is sold to you twice. Hover or tap any card to see what people actually do with it.
Shipping next
Atlas · the AI in every module
Atlas is not a chatbot bolted onto the side. It is integrated in every part of the system, and is always context aware to provide you with accurate results. It is able to perform just about any action.
Atlas will always ask you when needed.
“Open a ticket for the new bracket order, and give me an estimate based on our last few jobs.”
Customer Service · new ticket
Ticket CS-2041 is open for Harbor Point. Here’s the estimate, priced from your last three jobs.
Invoicing & Billing · estimate EST-0417
Based on jobs J-118 · J-121 · J-124
01 · The ask
02 · Atlas does the work
03 · The answer
FAQ
No. Twelve people is the middle of who this is built for. You start on Essentials: the core platform plus the five add-ons the shop actually runs on — quoting, purchasing, job costing — and nothing else. It is priced per person, so a twelve-person shop is not paying for a three-hundred-person plant’s software.
Yes — as records against the job, not as a folder tree. Certificates of conformance, mill test reports, first-article and dimensional reports and special-process certifications are stored against the lot, the job or the supplier they belong to, with the retention dates the system watches, and a job’s inspection phase cannot close until its records exist. It is not a pre-built AS9100 or Nadcap framework. It is where the evidence lives, so an audit or a customer’s receiving inspection is a filter rather than a fortnight.
No. Keep QuickBooks for the books. CaptivaHQ runs the operation — the RFQ, the quote, the job, the paperwork, the invoice — and hands invoice and payment data to your accounting through the automation module’s integration steps, webhooks and a full REST API. Your accountant keeps working the way they do today.
Either, and it is worth being exact about what this is. CaptivaHQ is not an MES: it does not schedule your floor, route work between machines or monitor equipment. What it runs is everything around the floor — the RFQ and the quote, the customer, the purchase orders, the job and its hours, the documents and the invoice. Shops on spreadsheets and paper replace the lot with it. Shops keeping an ERP they have already paid for put CaptivaHQ in front of it for quoting, job costing and the paperwork, and hand data across through webhooks and the REST API.
Setup is measured in days, not quarters. Fields and labels are customizable without code, CSV import is built into every module, and the onboarding team maps your customers, parts, suppliers and open jobs onto CaptivaHQ. Most shops start with quoting and the open job list and widen from there once the first invoices have gone out of the new system.
It comes with you. Customers, parts, suppliers, quotes and open jobs import from CSV, which is what QuickBooks, JobBOSS, E2, Global Shop and a spreadsheet all export. The onboarding team maps your fields onto ours, and because labels are customizable the system adopts your vocabulary rather than the other way around. It stays your data throughout, and you can export it at any time.