Who is Backbone Atlas for — and who it isn't for

The one question

Does a purchase have to pass through somebody other than the person who wants it?

If yes, Atlas has something to enforce, a record to keep and a decision to defend. If no — whoever wants it also approves and orders it — every control here is friction, and you shouldn't buy it.

True of a forty-person firm and a four-hundred-person council alike — which is why this isn't a list of company sizes.

Where it earns its keep

Four shapes of organisation.

Public buyers with a legal mandate. Councils, school boards, health, universities, agencies. You already have to prove a purchase was fair — the record, audit binder and generated policy exist for exactly that. Atlas's strongest fit.

Private firms with a real delegation of authority. Manufacturing, construction, engineering. Nobody makes you tender — but somebody has to sign, and the ladder escalates on criticality as well as value, so a cheap safety-critical part gets the process it deserves.

Procurement still living in email and spreadsheets. Quotes in an inbox, approval a reply, policy a Word file nobody has opened. The work is being done — just not recorded anywhere you could show someone.

Organisations that got audited and hated it. If evidencing why a supplier was chosen once took days to assemble, the binder builds the same pack from the record in one click.

Said plainly

Where we are the wrong answer.

We would rather lose the meeting than the first year. Every one of these is a real limit of the product, not a negotiating position.

Not for

Why

What to do instead

One person buying

Below roughly twenty or thirty people the nine roles collapse onto two or three, and separation of duties stops meaning anything.

A spreadsheet and a filing convention. Come back when a second person signs.

The largest global enterprises — not yet

Group structure, two-way integration with eleven finance systems (four proven against live ledgers, seven proven on your own ledger at onboarding) and enterprise SSO are built. What a 10,000-person global still buys a suite for: supplier network, payment execution and independent attestations.

Ariba, Coupa or Ivalua today — but this is squarely where we are heading as the reference customers land.

Anyone on legacy SAP ECC or Oracle E-Business Suite needing a two-way connector

S/4HANA and Oracle Fusion connectors are built and swept every 15 minutes; each is proven against your own system during onboarding, and journal posting into either is built on request. ECC and E-Business Suite get no full connector, but can pull Atlas's read-only feed (JSON/CSV, one API key) on the same cadence. A purpose-built connector can be added.

On the modern products this is not a limitation — ask us what your ledger actually supports.

Anyone needing SOC 2 today, or round-the-clock support

We do not hold SOC 2. We commit to 99.5% monthly availability with service credits, not penalties, and support targets run in business hours, 09:00–17:00 Eastern, Monday to Friday. Saying otherwise would be the easiest lie on this page.

If it is a hard procurement requirement, we are not compliant. Tell us and we will say so in writing.

High-volume retail or e-commerce inventory

This is a procurement system with inventory in it, not a warehouse or merchandising system. Tens of thousands of transactions a year is the wrong shape.

A dedicated inventory or ERP product.

US & Australian public sector — not yet

Public buyers are supported in Canada, the UK, the EU and the Gulf. In the US and Australia the public regimes and document set are not built, and you cannot select a public category there.

Australian private sector works today — see the Australia page.

It isn't about your size. It's about who signs it off.

Does a purchase have to pass through somebody other than the person who wants it?

Four shapes of organisation.

Where we are the wrong answer.

Fifteen minutes, and an honest answer.