Ask the software

1Overview #

The help search finds the words you type. This answers the question you would rather ask, in your own words, and names the screens to go and look at.

It is not a chatbot that knows things. The page first searches the product's own help, picks the passages that best fit your question, and hands the AI those passages with an instruction to answer from them and nothing else. It is given the documentation and asked to put it in words.

No data of yours is involved. What leaves is your question and passages of our own published help. No customer, no ledger, no figure - none of that is in the help to begin with. It is the one AI feature in the product that touches nobody's records.

2Who it is for #

• Anybody who would rather ask than search.
• Somebody new to the software, or to a module they have not used before.

3What it is not for #

• Questions about YOUR figures - it cannot see them. A question about what you sold is a report, not a question for this.
• Anything it has not been given help about. It says so rather than guessing, and that is the point of it.
• Advice you act on without checking. Open the screen it names.

4Step by step #

1. Type the question as you would say it. - "How do I ..." is fine. So is a single word, though the search box may serve you better for that.
2. Press Enter, or the Ask button. - Shift+Enter starts a new line instead.
3. Read the answer, then read Read from. - Those are the pages the answer was built out of - click one to open it.
4. Ask again to narrow it down. - Each question is asked on its own, so say enough in it to stand alone.
5. Start again clears the thread. - Nothing is kept: the conversation lives only while the page is open.

5The fields #

Asking

There is only one box.

• Your question - What you want to know, in your own words. Required What help is searched for, and what the AI is asked. Up to 1,000 characters - a question longer than that is two questions.
• Read from - The pages the answer was built out of. Read-only Nothing - but it is the part worth reading. These are what the page RETRIEVED, not what the AI says it used, so they cannot be invented.
• Start again - Empties the thread. Optional The screen only. Nothing was stored.

6Rules and integrity #

• It answers from the help, or says it cannot - The AI is given the passages and told to use nothing else, and to say plainly when they do not cover the question. An answer it made up would be worse than no answer, because nobody could tell.
• The sources are the ones actually read - They are listed by the page, from what its own search retrieved - before the AI ever sees the question. The AI is not trusted to cite itself.
• Nothing of yours is sent - The question, and passages of published help. The help index holds no customer, no ledger and no figure, so there is nothing of yours to send.
• Nothing is kept on the screen - The thread lives while the page is open and goes when it closes. The REQUEST is logged, as every AI request is - what was asked, who asked, how much went - on Settings > AI Assistance.
• The help can be wrong - It is written by people and can be out of date. The screen the answer names is the authority; this is a quicker way to find it.

7Shortcut keys #

• Enter - Ask.
• Shift+Enter - A new line, to keep typing.
• Esc - Leave the page.

8If something does not work #

9For an administrator #

• What is actually sent - The question (capped at 1,000 characters) and up to 9,000 characters of passages from wwwroot/help-index.json, chosen by word overlap weighted by how rare each word is across the index. Nothing else is gathered.
• Switching it off - Untick Answer a question about the software on Settings > AI Assistance, or switch AI assistance off entirely. The page still opens and says which switch it was.

10Settings it uses #

• 284 - use AI assistance at all.
• 285 - must include HelpAsk for this page to answer.
• 286 - how long the log of what was asked is kept.