The inbox is the real system
Job requests, invoice queries and follow-ups all land in the same inbox as everything else. Nothing is lost, exactly. It is just buried, so the same person ends up reading every message twice to be sure nothing was missed.
The same details, entered three times
They go in once when the work comes in, again when it gets billed, and again into whatever spreadsheet tracks the month. Nobody decided it should take three entries. It just always has.
Nobody knows the real status until you ask
The answer exists somewhere - in a notebook, in someone’s memory, on a half-updated board. Getting it means stopping someone’s actual work just to ask them directly.