> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://learn.withessential.com/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://learn.withessential.com/administration/using-the-essential-assistant/asking-the-assistant-to-do-things-actions-you-confirm.md). # Asking the Assistant to do things: actions you confirm Beyond looking things up, you can ask the Essential Assistant to *do* things — create a task, schedule a visit, draft and send a quote, add a contact, update a customer's notes, update a recurring service or record a service completion, kick off a workflow. The Assistant never acts on its own: it proposes what it wants to do, you confirm it, and only then does it run. ## How it works 1. Ask in plain language, for example "create a follow-up task for Bob to check the panel next week" or "send the quote to Bob and add a note on the customer". 2. The Assistant replies with an **action card** in the chat listing each action it wants to take: what it is, a one-line summary, and the values it will use. 3. Review the card, then click **Confirm** to run it or **Reject** to discard it. 4. Once it finishes, the Assistant follows up in the chat with what happened. Nothing on your records changes until you click Confirm. ## What you can ask it to do The Assistant only offers actions your role already allows, so what you see may be a subset of the list below. It can also run one of your business's published automations for a customer, and change your own user settings. ### Customers, contacts, properties and tasks Create a customer, property, or contact; update their details, notes, and contact roles; archive any of them. Create a task in a task folder, change its status, or rewrite its notes. Post a comment on a customer's timeline, add a customer custom field, or set its value. Send a one-off email or text message you compose to a customer's contacts. It can also move a property onto a different customer, carrying its subscriptions, quotes, and invoices across. This is the most consequential action in the list: if the property was the customer's last one, that customer is deleted, and any of its contacts that don't move across are deleted with it. The Assistant asks you to confirm the deletion and say which contacts should follow before it offers the move — it won't decide either of those for you. For billing, it can give a property its own billing profile — payment terms, autopay, tax exemption, and billing address — instead of inheriting the customer's, change that profile, or remove it so the property goes back to inheriting. While you're working a task, it can save a property's access details (gate code, lockbox, who to ask for) and log that on the task at the same time. It can also record a completed step on a task's timeline, which is a note that something happened — it doesn't move the task along or notify anyone. On the timeline, it can rewrite or delete a comment that's already posted. Deleting takes the comment's attachments and edit history with it and can't be undone, so ask it to edit the wording when that's what you mean. Finally, it can add, tick off, and delete to-dos on your own private list. Those are yours alone — no customer sees them, and they don't put work on anybody else. ### Scheduling, visits and assets Schedule a visit at a date and time, move an existing visit, or add an estimated visit to the backlog, and update a visit's technician or scheduling instructions. Delete a visit that hasn't happened yet. Add an asset group to a property, rename it, or make it inactive so it stops being serviced; add an asset to a group and set attribute values on its assets; set an asset group's custom fields. Delete an asset group when you really mean to remove it and everything under it. Create or update an asset group's recurring service schedule — its service, cadence, visit type, or last service date — record a service completion for a single asset, delete a schedule, or switch every schedule on a group between automated outreach, a custom task, and neither. For a batch of visits created together, rename the batch, move its window (which re-dates the visits still open in it), change who can self-book them, or cancel whatever is still open. ### Quotes, invoices and jobs Create a draft quote or a draft invoice with line items, send either one to a contact, and void a quote or an invoice. Editing the contents of a draft quote or invoice is a separate flow — see [Editing a quote or invoice through the Assistant](/administration/using-the-essential-assistant/editing-a-quote-or-invoice-through-the-assistant.md). For a quote that has expired or is about to, it can set a fresh validity window, which is how an unsigned quote is brought back to life. The new window counts from today, not from the quote's original date. On invoices, it can finalize one — locking it against further edits and syncing it to your accounting system. That can't be undone, so the card says so before you confirm. Once an invoice is paid, it can email the payment receipt to contacts on the account or to an address you give it. It can't create a contact as part of sending: the recipient has to exist already, or be a plain email address. Quotes, invoices and jobs can be linked so the work and the paperwork stay connected. The Assistant can set which jobs a quote or an invoice is linked to, or attach one job to several quotes or invoices at once. Linking never changes a line item or a price — it only records the relationship, and every job has to be on the same property as the document. On a job, it can set custom fields, choose the stock location it draws from, and adjust the parts recorded against it. Parts move by the size of the change rather than by a new total, so two people editing the same job don't overwrite each other. It can't change a job's manual added revenue — that feeds your margin figures and stays in the app. It can also delete a job, which is permanent and takes the job's history with it; it only offers that when you've clearly asked for that particular job to be deleted. Finally, it can correct the answers on a work acknowledgment and email one to a contact or address. Correcting one replaces every answer and re-renders the customer's copy, so it works from the acknowledgment's current answers — and signatures can't be changed this way. ### Pricing, items and inventory Set or clear a price override for a pricebook item — for a whole customer, or for one of their properties — and apply a set of overrides in one go when you're reworking a customer's pricing. A batch is all-or-nothing: if one line can't be applied, none of them are, so you never end up with half a pricing profile. On the pricebook itself, it can add a service or physical item, change an existing item's price, name, SKU, type, tax setting or cost, and remove an item you no longer sell. Two things to know before you ask: pricebook changes are business-wide and apply to future quotes and invoices, not to documents that already copied the old price; and removing an item takes it out of every picker but leaves it on the quotes, invoices and purchase orders that already reference it. A removed item's SKU stays reserved, and adding an item with that SKU again brings the original back. It can also create a reusable discount, either a flat amount or a percentage. That adds the discount to the picker for future use — it doesn't discount any particular quote or invoice. For stocked items it can rename an item or change its SKU, and set or clear the reorder level that flags it as running low. Changing a reorder level can start an automation, just as a stock movement can. For stock itself, it can move quantities between your inventory locations, take stock out of inventory, or bring stock in, and it can correct an item's on-hand count at one or more locations after a stock take. Tell it either the correction ("we're three short") or what you counted ("there are 40 on the shelf") — for a count it works out the difference against the live figure at the moment you confirm, so a number quoted earlier in the conversation can't throw it off. Locations are matched by name; if it doesn't recognise the name, it tells you which locations exist rather than guessing. Finally, it can raise a purchase order to one of your suppliers, change an order's notes, expected delivery date or supplier, close it, and record what arrived. A few things to be clear about here. Creating a purchase order records what you ordered and sends nothing to the supplier — actually placing the order is still on you. Suppliers are matched by name from your existing list, and it never creates one. Receiving adds stock at your default inventory location, so if a delivery went somewhere else, ask it to transfer the stock afterwards. Receiving is cumulative and the Assistant can't take it back: recording the same delivery twice doubles it, and the fix is a stock adjustment. Closing an order is final for receiving — a closed order can't be received against, including anything still outstanding on it. All of this needs the inventory module turned on, and changing the pricebook needs the item-setup permission; the Assistant only offers what your role already allows. ### Inspection reports Start a new inspection report on a visit or a property, choosing which form it uses. The report is created empty and waits for whoever is doing the inspection — the Assistant opens it, it doesn't fill it in. If the form supports carrying the previous report's answers forward, you can ask for that too. It can also duplicate an existing report into a new draft, copying the answers, deficiencies and signatures across. That is usually the right move when a report needs redoing, because the original stays intact as the record of what was filed. Once a report is finished, the Assistant can submit it. Submitting is what turns a draft into the customer's record: it writes the assets back to the asset group, saves the deficiencies and closes out any this visit cleared, records the service completions, and renders the PDF. It can't be undone from the Assistant. Submitting does **not** email anything — if you want the report sent, ask for that as well and you'll get a second action for it, so filing a report and mailing it to a customer are always two separate confirmations. Emailing a submitted report to a contact needs inspection report emails turned on for your business. Deleting a report is the one action here marked Highest risk. It is permanent and takes the report's deficiencies and photos with it, and a submitted report may be the customer's compliance record — so the Assistant only offers it when you have clearly asked for that particular report to be deleted, never as tidying up. On deficiencies, it can mark one resolved, reopen one that was closed too early, and record that an item was retested without changing whether it is still open. It can also clear a deficiency, which takes it off the open work list without claiming it was fixed, and restore it later. Clearing and resolving mean different things and the Assistant uses the one that matches what you said. Both only work on deficiencies with advanced tracking switched on. One boundary is worth knowing: the Assistant doesn't change what a report records. Answers — a pass/fail result, a reading, a comments box — are written in the report editor, and if you ask the Assistant to change one it will point you there. When a submitted report needs redoing, duplicating it into a fresh draft is the path it will offer. ## Confirming only part of a batch When the Assistant proposes several actions, each row has its own checkbox and they all start checked. Uncheck anything you don't want and confirm the rest. If dropping an action would defeat what you asked for — approving "draft the quote" but not "send it", for example — the Assistant says so on the card. Some of those warnings are advisory and you can go ahead; when the remaining actions genuinely wouldn't do what you asked, the Confirm button is blocked. Check the action back on, or ask the Assistant for a different plan. ## Risk levels The consequential actions stand out at a glance: anything that sends a message to a customer or permanently removes a record carries a small warning triangle on its row — yellow for a high-risk action, red for the highest-risk ones — while routine actions like adding a note or creating a task carry no marker at all. Hover over the triangle to see the risk level spelled out. The marker is there to help you review; it doesn't change what you're allowed to confirm. ## Emails and texts If an action sends an email or a text to a customer, the card shows the finished message — recipients, subject, and body — exactly as it will go out. Read it before you confirm; there is no recall once it's sent. ## Actions run as you Confirmed actions run under your name, with your permissions, exactly as if you had done them in the app yourself. They appear in timelines and history attributed to you, and anything that normally follows from that action — automations, notifications, outreach — happens too. That also means the Assistant can only do what your role already lets you do. If you don't have permission for something, it won't offer it. ## While actions are running After you confirm, the card shows progress for each action. You can close the panel or move to another page — the actions keep running on Essential's servers, and the card shows the outcome next time you open the conversation. Actions run in the order listed. If one fails, the Assistant stops there rather than pressing on: everything before it stays done, the failed action shows why, and the rest are marked skipped. Ask the Assistant to try again once you've fixed the cause. > **Where to find it:** Open the Essential Assistant panel from anywhere in the app and ask it to do something. The action card appears in the chat, with Confirm and Reject buttons. ## Related guides * [Using the Essential Assistant](/administration/using-the-essential-assistant.md) * [What the Essential Assistant can and can't do](/administration/using-the-essential-assistant/what-the-essential-assistant-can-and-cant-do.md) * [Editing a quote or invoice through the Assistant](/administration/using-the-essential-assistant/editing-a-quote-or-invoice-through-the-assistant.md) * [Roles and permissions: how access works](/administration/basics/roles-and-permissions-how-access-works.md) --- # Agent Instructions This documentation is published with GitBook. GitBook is the documentation platform designed so that both humans and AI agents can read, navigate, and reason over technical content effectively. 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