Manual
Help it offers
The Assistant doesn’t only answer: it comes in by itself when someone could use help. It always does so as a message in the Chat with a button. Offering costs nothing; only pressing the button asks the Assistant to work on it.
When you are stuck
When the same action, or the same edit, fails for you three times on a page within half an hour, the Assistant offers to find out why: “Post on Sales Invoice SI000123 has failed 3 times: … Shall I find out why?” Press Help me and it reads the attempts and the records and setup behind them, explains what is wrong in plain words, and proposes a fix for you to confirm. It offers at most once a day for each page.
When setup is missing
When something fails because setup is missing (a posting group without its account, a setup record that doesn’t exist, a document without its posting group), the Assistant offers at once, on the first failure: setup gaps tend to come one after another. Help me has it work out the missing value from the other setup records and the chart of accounts, and propose it with Confirm. It fixes where the value comes from too, such as the customer card as well as the invoice. Once you confirm, try again.
A missing number series (“Customer Nos must have a value in Sales Receivables Setup.”) is offered the same way: Help me proposes a series and fills in the setup’s field.
The Setup Checklist
Business Assistant looks every morning, and as soon as a company is new, for what is still to be set up, and keeps it on the Setup Checklist (in the Administrator’s Setups):
| Field | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Title | What isn’t set up yet. |
| Detail | Why it matters and what to do. |
| Status | Still to do, done, or dismissed. |
| Found, Done | When it was found, and when it was found set up. |
Its actions: Set Up opens the page where it is set up, Help Me asks the Assistant, Dismiss puts aside one the company doesn’t want, Reopen brings it back, and Check Now looks again at once.
What is checked includes the company information, someone else invited, the daily digest’s recipients, setups whose number series are blank, and posting setup: General Ledger Setup, and the General, VAT and Inventory Posting Setup of the posting groups in use, and customers, vendors, items and bank accounts without their posting groups.
The Assistant tells the administrators (users with SUPER) in the Chat of what it hasn’t told them yet, starting with a welcome on a new company, with Help me.
The daily digest
Twice a day, at 07:00 (the last 24 hours) and at 18:00 (the day so far), the people on Daily Digest Recipients get a digest of what happened: activities by person and kind, postings, and failed actions, against yesterday and last week, and what is still to set up. Each sees only the tables they may read. It comes by email, and in the Chat as the Assistant’s message (“Good evening, Mary. Your evening digest is ready.”) with Summarise, which has the Assistant tell it in two or three sentences and talk it over.
The Activity pane
The Activity pane on the Role Center tells what has been going on in the business in a few short bullets, written by the Assistant from the last few days’ activity: what was sold, bought, made and paid, not how the work went.