Ask the assistant a question about your books or your email

Click Assistant at the top of the sidebar. It opens beside the screen you are on, and that screen stays usable, so you can look at a figure while the answer comes in. Type your question in your own words and press Enter, or press Dictate and say it. Escape or a click outside the assistant closes it; a search that is still running carries on. The expand button in its top corner opens the same conversation on a full page.

With nothing asked yet, the assistant offers a few questions to start from, such as "Who owes me money?". Click one to ask it.

What you can ask

• Your books. What you spent on shipping last quarter, who owes you money and how late they are, what you owe your suppliers, your profit for a period, your GST/HST and PST for a filing period, your sales by channel, or what a job cost in materials and labour. It can produce the trial balance, the cash flow or the general ledger detail for an account, find the bank lines or journal entries behind a figure, read your chart of accounts, and tell you what Books Health has found and why.
• Your email. Find a message by who sent it, what it was about or roughly when. Each email the answer uses appears as a card under it, with its subject and sender; click the card to open the message. The line at the top that starts "Searching" names the mailbox it looks through, and with more than one mailbox connected you can click it to pick another.
• How to do something. It answers from these help articles. When an article has a walkthrough, a Steps button appears under the answer and shows you where to start.

Its figures come from your own ledger, not from a guess. Before you rely on one for something that matters, such as a tax payment, open the report it came from and check it.

When it suggests a change

Some answers end with a card proposing something to do: record a payment on an invoice, mark an invoice paid, approve a bill, code a bank line to a category, match a receipt to a card charge, post an entry a document is missing, or flip the sign of a bank line that came in the wrong way round. The card shows exactly what would be recorded, worked out by HQ rather than by the assistant, and lets you change the details it offers, such as the amount or the category.

Nothing is written until you press the button that names the action, such as Record payment or Approve bill. Not now puts the card away and changes nothing. If the record has changed since the card appeared, the card shows the new figures and asks you again.

Earlier conversations

Past conversations lists what you asked before. Open one to read it again or to carry on where you left off, and press Back to chat to return. New chat starts a fresh conversation.

On a phone, anything you type into the Do button's command bar that is not a quick command goes to the assistant.

Each question uses part of your plan's monthly AI allowance. If the allowance runs out, the assistant pauses until the next month, or until you upgrade or connect your own AI provider key.