Open Chat and ask the way you'd ask a colleague:
- "What were sales last month?"
- "Which stores are holding the most stock?"
- "Show me overdue customer balances over R100,000."
The assistant knows your business's data — your reports, your product categories, your stores — and answers with a small table or figure you can read at a glance. It may take a few steps to get there (it explores before it answers); the result you see is the final answer, not the working.
Your past conversations live in the panel on the left — collapse it with the arrow next to New chat when you want the full width for answers; your preference is remembered.
Getting better answers
- Say the scope you mean. "Sales" can mean more than one thing in a business with several channels — the assistant will state which scope its answer covers and offer the others. Being specific up front ("corporate retail sales in June 2026") gets you there faster.
- Follow up naturally. "Now by store" or "compare to last year" continues the same thread.
- Ask about the product too. "How do I email this to someone?" is a fair question — the chat is also your help desk.
What Chat will and won't answer
Chat is the assistant for your business, not a general-purpose chatbot, and it holds that line deliberately. It answers questions about your data, your business, and this product — and it brings real finance and operations expertise to them, so "how should this be treated in the accounts?" or "what does this ratio tell me?" are perfectly good questions.
What it won't do is answer things with no bearing on your business — the weather, the time somewhere else, sport, general trivia. Ask one of those and Chat says so plainly and points you back to what it can help with, rather than answering.
A decline is not an error. If a question is outside what Chat covers, you get a clear reply saying so — you will not be told the response was interrupted or asked to try again. Those messages mean something different: they mean the answer genuinely failed to arrive, and asking again is worth doing. A decline is a settled answer, and repeating the question will produce the same reply.
This is narrower than it may first appear, and intentionally so:
- Anything that could plausibly touch your business is answered. A vague question is treated as a business question, not turned away.
- It is the only reason Chat declines. It never withholds a figure, a caveat, or a limitation from you, and it is not a reason for refusing a question about people's data — those are answered from masked results, as described in Personal data in answers.
- Ordinary conversation still works. Greetings, "explain that again", and follow-ups to an answer are all part of the thread.
Choosing the period
Almost every finance question turns on a date range, and an answer is only as good as the range behind it. When your question doesn't settle the period, Chat asks before it starts work — a short list you pick from, not a back-and-forth:
- "Sales for the month of June" — which June? Pick the year and it goes through.
- "A salesperson report for July 2027" — there is no data that far ahead. The list shows what you do have, so you can pick something real instead of waiting for an empty answer.
- No period at all — "the VAT on POS sales" gets asked which months to cover.
Every period offered is one your data actually covers, with the exact dates shown underneath. If what you want isn't listed, choose Custom range… and set the dates yourself — the calendar won't let you go outside loaded data. For questions that aren't about a period at all, pick All available data.
You are not asked when you've already said it. "July 2026", "the last 3 months", "since the beginning of the month" all go straight through, and follow-ups in the same conversation keep the period you already set. Chat only interrupts a follow-up if you name a period there is no data for.
Part-finished periods are labelled as such. Pick a month that is still running, or one where data stops partway, and Chat says so and reports it as a partial period — a month-to-date figure is never presented as though it were a full month.
If you'd rather just send the question as you wrote it, Ask as I typed it does exactly that.
Reading the answer
The table shown with an answer is the one that answers your question. Working steps along the way — a count, a quick check, a look at what's available — sit behind other tables from this answer underneath it, folded away. Open it if you want to see them; each of those has its own Save button too.
Answers carry a status line that tells you how far the checking went — see Does this number tie? The status on every answer. It is worth reading rather than glancing at: a figure checked against your ledger and a figure nobody has checked yet both carry a line, and they say very different things.
If you leave the page mid-question
The question keeps running, and Chat reopens on that conversation when you come back — see Leave a question running and come back to it. Asking again is never necessary.
Some answers also mention a known quirk in the underlying data and what was done about it — for example, that a discount column includes VAT and has been adjusted so it compares fairly against sales measured excluding VAT. These notes come from your own recorded knowledge about how your system behaves, and they are applied automatically to any figure they affect. Seeing one is a good sign: it means the answer accounted for something that would otherwise have quietly skewed it. If a note describes a quirk you believe has since been fixed, tell us so the record can be updated.
If a chat stops responding
Occasionally a conversation gets stuck mid-thought. Start a new chat — your history is kept, and the new conversation starts clean. If a specific question fails repeatedly, send it to support (it helps us fix the gap).