> 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/what-the-essential-assistant-can-and-cant-do.md). # What the Essential Assistant can and can't do The Essential Assistant is the in-app chat that looks things up across your whole business and answers how-to questions. It's grounded to the page you're on, so when you have a specific quote, invoice, customer, property, contact, asset group, task, subscription, or inspection report open, it already knows that record without you pasting anything in. It can search and describe across customers, properties, contacts, asset groups, scheduling, tasks, subscriptions, automations, inventory, quotes, invoices, and pricing. It can also answer read-only business questions with complete lists, counts, grouped statistics, rankings, and joins across related records—for example, revenue by customer, open receivables, quote conversion, technician workload, or properties belonging to matching customers. Results respect your role, enabled business modules, and the business you are signed into. It also answers how-do-I, where-is, and why-is-this-blocked questions using Essential's help documentation. It can also hand you your business records as a spreadsheet: ask for a CSV, an export, or a download and it builds the file and attaches it to its reply, up to 5,000 rows — far more than it can show you in a chat answer. See [Ask the Assistant for a CSV export](/administration/using-the-essential-assistant/ask-the-assistant-for-a-csv-export.md). It can also change things, always with your approval. It can propose edits to a draft quote or draft invoice, including line items, discounts, and the customer-facing description. Separately, it can take actions across the app on your behalf, grouped by area below. It proposes them as an action card you confirm or reject; see [Asking the Assistant to do things: actions you confirm](/administration/using-the-essential-assistant/asking-the-assistant-to-do-things-actions-you-confirm.md). ### Customers, contacts, properties and tasks Create, update, and archive customers, properties, and contacts; add a contact's customer- or property-level role; append customer and property notes; post timeline comments; create a task, and rewrite its notes (moving an existing task to a different status is handled through a bulk review, not one at a time); add customer custom fields and set their values; send a one-off email or text you compose. It can also move a property onto a different customer — which deletes the old customer when that was its last property, so it confirms that with you first; give a property its own billing profile (payment terms, autopay, tax exemption) and update or remove it; save a property's access details from the task that asked for them; rewrite or delete a comment you posted yourself on a timeline (a deleted comment leaves a "Comment deleted" entry that keeps the original text, history, and attachments visible, rather than erasing them); log a completed step on a task; and add, tick off, or delete to-dos on your own private list from within the same conversation. ### Scheduling, visits and assets Schedule, reschedule, or backlog a visit, update its instructions, or delete one that hasn't happened yet; add asset groups, set asset attributes and asset group custom fields, rename a group, make it inactive, or delete it (adding a brand-new asset to a group is still done from the group's page); create, update, or delete recurring service schedules, set how a whole group's schedules are handled, and record a service completion for one asset. A scheduling batch's window, self-booking, and remaining visits are edited from the batch itself in the scheduling area, not through the Assistant. ### Quotes, invoices and jobs Create draft quotes and invoices, duplicate a quote to a customer and property in the same business or duplicate an invoice for its existing customer and property, send them to a contact, and void them; edit a quote's or invoice's content, dates, terms, line items and discounts; give an unsigned quote a fresh validity window; finalize an invoice and sync it to accounting; email a payment receipt once an invoice is paid; link jobs to quotes and invoices in either direction; set a job's custom fields, stock location and recorded parts; delete a job; and email a work acknowledgment (correcting its answers has to be done from the acknowledgment itself — there's no way to read its current answers from chat). ### Pricing, items and inventory Set or clear a price override for a customer or for one of their properties, or apply a set of overrides in one all-or-nothing batch; add, change or remove pricebook items and create reusable discounts; rename a stocked item, change its SKU, and set its reorder level; move stock between inventory locations or in and out of stock, and correct an item's on-hand count after a stock take; and raise a purchase order, update or close it, and record what arrived. Pricebook changes are business-wide and apply to new quotes and invoices, not to ones that already copied a price. Creating a purchase order records the order — it doesn't contact the supplier — and receiving one adds stock at your default location, cumulatively, so a delivery recorded twice counts twice. ### Inspection reports Start a new report on a visit or a property, duplicate an existing one into a fresh draft, submit a finished report, delete a report, and email a submitted one to a contact. On deficiencies it can resolve, reopen, record a retest, and clear or restore one. It can also fill in and correct what a report records: answer questions on the report and on its assets, add, duplicate, skip, remove and reorder assets, pass or skip a whole selection at once, add rows to a repeatable list section, raise and edit deficiencies, record service completion dates, and put a photo you've attached in the chat onto a photo question or a deficiency. Every edit is proposed with a before-and-after of the values it changes. New reports are created empty — the Assistant opens the report, and fills it in from there when you ask it to. Submitting doesn't email anything, so filing a report and sending it to a customer are always two separate confirmations. A report that has already been submitted can still be corrected, but the Assistant pairs the correction with a re-submit so the deficiencies, service completions and PDF catch up with it. Deleting a report hides it and can't be undone, but for a submitted report it doesn't reverse the service completions, deficiencies, task, files, or compliance filings that came from it. It can also run one of your business's published automations for a customer when Workflows is turned on, and change your own user settings. Each comes back as a card with buttons, and nothing changes until you approve or confirm it. It can also save notes to remember for later - see [What the Assistant remembers, who sees it, and how to clear it](/administration/using-the-essential-assistant/what-the-assistant-remembers-who-sees-it-and-how-to-clear-it.md). Anything it does runs as you, with your permissions — so it can only offer what your role already allows, and it can only edit quotes and invoices while they're still drafts. Some things stay out of reach entirely: it never signs anything for you, it doesn't change an inspection report's form (the questions on a template are report setup, handled through **Talk to a human**), and it doesn't change your business's settings apart from the pricebook. It doesn't record, charge, or refund payments, and it doesn't create, edit, or cancel a subscription directly — though archiving a customer or property cancels its subscriptions, and moving a property carries its subscriptions to the new customer, as side effects of those actions. It refers to records by name rather than internal IDs and keeps answers short. If you ask it to do something outside these abilities, it will tell you rather than pretend it acted. > **Where to find it:** Open the Essential Assistant panel from anywhere in the app; it already knows the record you're viewing. Edits and actions it proposes appear as cards in the chat that you approve, confirm, or reject. ## Related guides * [Using the Essential Assistant](/administration/using-the-essential-assistant.md) * [Asking the Assistant to do things: actions you confirm](/administration/using-the-essential-assistant/asking-the-assistant-to-do-things-actions-you-confirm.md) * [Editing a quote or invoice through the Assistant](/administration/using-the-essential-assistant/editing-a-quote-or-invoice-through-the-assistant.md) * [Editing an inspection report through the Assistant](/administration/using-the-essential-assistant/editing-an-inspection-report-through-the-assistant.md) * [Ask the Assistant for a CSV export](/administration/using-the-essential-assistant/ask-the-assistant-for-a-csv-export.md) --- # Agent Instructions This documentation is published with GitBook. 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