Ask your business a question

Every owner has questions that would take ten minutes to answer from reports: what sold best last week, who owes the most and since when, how this week compares with last. They are simple questions, but they wait because the phone is ringing. This tour follows the owner of a sample cash-and-carry at half past twelve, between calls, asking the business those questions directly.

How is asking the assistant different from running a report?

A report shows everything in a fixed layout. A question gets one answer to one thing, in plain words, with the records behind it. You still need reports for the full picture; the assistant is for the quick question in between.

The assistant reads your own records, nothing else, and the heading on the chat says so: it reads your own records, and changes wait for your Confirm.

Step by step

1. Open the assistant. Past conversations are listed on the left, so a question you asked yesterday is still there. Start a new one or carry on an old one.

2. Ask in plain words. The owner types: "What did I sell most last week?" No special format is needed. Ask the way you would ask a colleague who knows the business.

3. Read the answer. The reply gives the top three products by sales value last week, with the figures. It is short and direct, because the question was.

4. Check the sources. Under the answer, a Sources list shows the records it was built from, in this case orders from the last 7 days and the products. This is the part that makes the answer usable. If a number looks wrong, the sources tell you where to look, and you can check before you act.

5. Ask it to start something. Next the owner types a request to start an order for a regular customer. The assistant does not save anything. It shows a panel marked "Needs your OK" with the draft order it would create, and Confirm and Cancel.

6. Decide. Read the customer, the products and the quantities. If they are right, press Confirm and a draft order is saved. If not, press Cancel and nothing changes. Even once the draft is saved, it reserves no stock and charges nothing until someone confirms the order itself through the normal order screen. There are two checks before anything real happens.

7. Ask about money. On the page with the day's AI suggestions, an "Ask about your business" box sits beside them. The owner asks: "Who owes me the most, and since when?" The answer comes from invoices and payments, and is labelled as built from them.

8. Use the suggestions when stuck. Above the question box sit ready questions: best sellers last week, sales this week vs last, what is running low, who owes the most. Tap one to run it. They are a good way for new staff to learn what the assistant can do.

Why show the sources at all?

Because an AI answer without its working is a guess you cannot check. Language models can be confidently wrong, especially about numbers. Listing the records an answer was built from turns it from "trust me" into "here is where to look". For quick questions, the answer is usually enough. For anything you will act on, such as chasing a customer or changing a price, the sources take you to the real figures.

The same reasoning sits behind the confirm panel. Reading is safe; changing is not. So the assistant reads freely within your business, and every change waits for a person.

A worked example

Say the assistant answers that your best seller last week by value was a 24-pack of soft drinks, with 120 packs sold for 1,440 in sales. Before ordering more, open the sources: if 80 of those packs went to one customer in a single order, the picture changes. That one order may not repeat, and ordering for 120 a week could leave you overstocked. The answer was right; the sources told you what it meant. The markup vs margin guide is useful here too, because the best seller by value is not always the best by profit.

Tips for useful questions

• Name a period. "Last week" or "this month" gives a clearer answer than "recently".
• Ask one thing at a time. Two questions in one sentence often get half an answer.
• Open the sources for any number you act on. It takes seconds.
• Use commands for exact lookups. For money owed, the /owed command is instant and needs no AI model; the AI assistant tour shows how.
• Follow up in the same conversation. After "what sold most last week?", asking "and the week before?" keeps the context, so you do not have to repeat yourself.
• Keep useful conversations. They stay in the list, so a question you ask every Monday is easy to repeat.

Common mistakes

• Treating an AI answer as a report. It is a quick answer. For the full picture, open the report.
• Confirming a draft without reading it. The panel shows the customer and lines so that you can check them.
• Asking about things the business does not record. If sales never go through the system, the assistant cannot know them.
• Expecting an undo button. There is no undo on screen, so confirm only what you mean.

What to do next

For instant, exact lookups with / and @, take the AI assistant tour. To act on who owes you money, read the customer credit guide and the cash flow guide. For where AI helps and where it does not, read AI for small business.

The business, products and figures in this tour are sample data.