Chat can answer questions about your customers and suppliers — balances, outstanding orders, account classes, names of businesses. What it protects is personal information: contact people, phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses and bank details.
When an answer includes a personal column, those cells show [MASKED] instead of the value, and the answer says which columns were masked. Everything else in the table — the business figures — is real.
Why some cells are masked
Answering in chat means the data passes through an AI service outside your organisation, and downloading or emailing a table sends a file out the door. South Africa's POPI Act (and good practice anywhere) says personal details shouldn't make that trip when they don't need to. So:
- In chat answers, personal columns are always masked — for everyone.
- On screen, users with a finance or admin role see the real values in the results grid; other roles see the masked version there too.
- In downloads and emailed reports, the same roles apply: finance and admin users export the real values, other roles get the masked version. When a file is masked, the download message and the email body both say which columns were masked — a masked file never pretends to be complete.
How to see the real details
If you need a customer's or supplier's actual contact details, open their record on the relevant screen (for example the customer or supplier enquiry) rather than asking chat for them. Your role determines what you can see there, and nothing is sent outside the organisation.
What chat will still do
A masked column never stops an answer. "Which franchisees have open orders and for how much?" comes back with accounts, business names and values — that's business information, not personal information. If you ask specifically for contact details, chat will tell you they're masked and point you to the right screen instead of refusing the whole question.