Asking a Question in Chat
The assistant answers questions about your live business data — sales, inventory, customers, collections, procurement, accounting — in plain language. It's the fastest way to get a number without building a report.
You only ever see answers you're allowed to see: the assistant is held to the same permissions as the report screens.
Steps
- Open Assistant → AI Assistant from the sidebar.
- On a fresh chat you'll see suggestion cards (Sales, Revenue, Inventory, Trend, Customers, Collections, How-to). Click one to load its question into the message box, or just type your own — for example, "Give me last month's sales summary."
- Press Enter or click the send (arrow) button. Use Shift+Enter if you want a new line instead of sending.
- While the assistant works you'll see Thinking…, then a Checking … line naming the data it's looking up.
- Read the answer as it builds. It isn't one block of text — it's assembled from pieces: short written explanation, and a card for each set of figures the assistant looked up.
How an answer is laid out
Every answer is built from the same kinds of block, so they always read the same way:
- The data line. Above each set of figures, a green tick names what was checked and over what — for example, "Sales Summary · 2026-07-01 — 2026-07-31 · All stores · 0.8s". Click Data on that line to expand the exact figures the assistant received, if you want to see them raw.
- Figure cards. Totals appear as a grid of labelled numbers, with money amounts in green and zero values greyed out.
- Tables. Row-by-row results appear as a table with the first 12 rows shown and the total row count in the corner.
- Comparison bars. When a result is a straight name-and-number comparison, it's drawn as a ranked bar list instead of a table, so the biggest value is obvious at a glance.
- The explanation. The assistant's own writing sits around those cards — a short heading, a paragraph or two, and bullet points for the things worth noticing. It won't repeat the figures back at you, because they're already on screen.
- Charts. When a comparison reads faster as a picture, the assistant draws a bar, line or donut chart, and the table it came from folds away under the data line (Show table opens it). Some charts let you click a bar to ask about it — see Follow-ups, Charts and Interactive Views.
- Interactive views. Ask to explore — sort, filter, toggle — and the assistant can build a small view marked Built by AI inside the answer.
- Follow-up suggestions. At the end of an answer you'll see a row of suggested next questions ("Compare with the previous period", "What should I reorder?"). Click one to load it into the message box. They build on the answer above them, because the assistant remembers the chat you're in.
Proposals
If you asked the assistant to create something rather than to look something up, the reply contains a proposal card instead of figures — see Creating and Updating Records by Asking. Nothing is saved until you confirm it.
Templates
Don't know how to phrase it? Click Templates in the panel on the left for the ready-made questions — sales summaries, inventory balance and valuation, reorder and dead stock, collections, refunds, profit & loss, top/new/inactive customers, purchase-order reports, and the trial balance. Clicking a template loads it into the message box so you can tweak the wording (for example, change "this month" to "last week", or "today" to a closing date) before sending. The list is tailored to you — templates for data your role can't reach aren't shown.
Asking about the trial balance
Ask something like "show me the trial balance as of today" or "what's the balance on my cash account". The assistant reads it straight from the ledger, and will call out three things when they apply: if accounts are in more than one currency it won't add them together and will say so; if the figures have no cost of goods sold, it won't call the result "profit"; and if the date falls in a fiscal period that's still open, it'll note the figures may still change before that period closes. It can't tell you what a specific customer or vendor owes — that's a Receivables/Payables question, not a general-ledger one.
Questions that need more than one lookup
Some questions take a couple of steps, and the assistant handles them in one go. Ask "how much Blue Widget do I have in store 2?" and, if several items match that name, it narrows the list down first and then reads the stock — you don't have to ask twice. You'll get one data line and one card per lookup, in the order they happened.
Your recent conversations
The Assistant panel on the left keeps your recent conversations:
- Recent — click a past conversation to re-read it (a Back to current chat button appears above the conversation to return you), and click the + button beside "Assistant" to start fresh.
- Clear — removes all saved conversations.
- History lives in your browser for the current session only — it isn't shared with teammates, and it's gone after you close the browser. Re-reading a past conversation doesn't continue it: the assistant remembers only the chat you're in now (your last six questions), and starts fresh when you start a new chat.
New to the screen? Click Show me how at the bottom of the panel for a short guided tour.