Someone is halfway through a requisition. Which category? Do they need three quotes? Why was it refused? What happens next decides if the software gets used or worked around. Atlas answers four ways. Three never involve us.
"What do I do here?" comes up mid-task, and nobody stops to open a manual. So the help sits on that screen, in a panel that opens beside the work and closes again.
It fits that screen and the person's role. An approver and a requester on the same page see different help. It is written for people who didn't choose this software and don't care how it works.
In any procurement system, the biggest cause of support calls is a rule nobody understands. So every refusal says what was wrong, what the limit is and what to do next. A test fails the build if any route refuses silently.
Your buying policy, thresholds and procedure pages come from the rules the system enforces. They can't drift apart, because they share one source.
A request too vague to act on comes back with the one question that would make it clear. It is not quietly turned into a requisition someone has to undo later.
A question belongs to the team, not to whoever was asked. Anyone with the right role can see, assign and answer it. A holiday doesn't hold anything up.
Most questions aren't about the software. "Can I buy this?" "Who approves it?" "Is there a contract already?" They usually arrive as a tap on the shoulder, a chat message or a buried email.
Ask procurement is where they go instead. It is on every screen. It keeps the question with its answer, so the answer can be found later, not lost in one person's sent items.
Something is wrong: a screen is unclear, a number is off, a rule fires when it shouldn't. Whoever notices raises it from the screen they are on. No leaving Atlas, no second login, no email explaining their setup.
The support desk is not a paid module or a higher tier. Every workspace has it, on every plan, from day one.
Every ticket gets a short reference and a plain status: Open, Triaging, Waiting, Answered, Resolved, Closed. No internal codes, and no silence.
Your own IT Administrator sees every ticket from your workspace on one screen. You never have to ask us what your own people reported.
"I have a question", "something isn't working", "a number looks wrong", "I'd like it to do something it doesn't". Someone confused by a screen won't call it a defect, so we don't ask them to.
A how-to, an unexplained field or a confusing refusal gets a guided answer from your workspace's own guides. Anything that needs a code or data change goes straight to the people who build Atlas. No call centre, and no partner in between.
Our diagnosis notes stay out of the thread you see. You read an answer, not someone thinking out loud.
Both numbers reach the same place. Ava, our AI assistant, answers at any hour, in English or French. Press 3 for support. She can't see your account, so she takes your name, your workspace, what's happening and the best number to reach you, then passes it straight to the desk. If nobody can sign in or data looks wrong, she flags it urgent at once. A person calls you back within the response targets below. The call is transcribed so the team can follow up.
Support usually starts with "which screen? which version? what did you click?" That back-and-forth costs a day, and the answers are often wrong. Atlas captures it automatically when the ticket is sent.
| Captured with every ticket | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| The screen they came from | The ticket records the page it was raised from. Nobody has to describe it, or misremember it. |
| The exact software and database version | "You were on that release; the next one fixed it" is often the whole answer. We know it before anyone reads the ticket. |
| The browser and device | A fault that only happens in one browser stops being a mystery. |
| A session reference | Links the ticket to what that session did in the minutes before. "It's broken" becomes a problem we can reproduce. |
This is not keystroke logging or session recording. It is the error trail the system already keeps, linked to the ticket by an ID. It exists whether or not a ticket is raised. It is kept for the retention period your administrator sets. No period is set at the start, so until one is set, it is kept.
Next to the support button is a second, smaller one. It sends us a note, and nobody replies.
That sounds worse, but a ticket has a cost. It carries a reference, a status and a promise of an answer. That promise stops people sending "this list would be easier sorted by date." It isn't worth a case, so it goes unsaid. Yet it may be the most useful thing we would hear that week.
So there is a second channel: one line, one click. Before you type, the form says we read everything and won't reply there.
It has no reply route, no status and no reference number. Not as a policy: none was built. So the promise can't be broken by accident.
At a company this size, that is literally true. No product committee sits between your buyer's remark and the person who decides what gets built.
Every other page says what Atlas does, so you can check it in a demo. This section covers the other side.
We grade tickets by severity and commit to a first human reply. 2 business hours if nobody can sign in or data is at risk. 1 business day if a major function can't be used. 3 if there is a workaround. 5 for a question. The same targets are in your agreement.
Backbone Business Solutions Inc. is a small company, incorporated in British Columbia. The desk keeps Eastern business hours: 09:00–17:00, Monday to Friday, excluding Canadian statutory holidays. The phone line is answered around the clock, but by an AI assistant taking details, not by an engineer. Code or data problems reach the people who wrote the code. There is no round-the-clock team. Better to know that before you sign.
Ask procurement is a front door to your procurement team. It is not an IT service desk for the whole organisation, on purpose. A general ticketing tool would be a worse copy of one you already own.
Break something on purpose. Raise it from the screen where it happened. See what the ticket already knows. It takes about a minute.
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