How the Assistant works

The Assistant answers questions about your own workspace — today's jobs, which invoices are overdue, a customer's phone number, what needs attention — and about how Zaras works, using this help guide. It answers in the language your Zaras app is set to, even when you write your question in another one. It only reads: it never creates, edits, sends or deletes anything, and it only shows what your role can already see.

Where to find it

On the web, choose Assistant under Personal in the sidebar: it opens as a panel beside whatever you are looking at, and the panel's expand arrow opens it as a full page. Press ? anywhere outside a text field to open the panel from the keyboard (not while a dialog or menu is open). In the Zaras app, open More → Assistant, under Personal.

What it can answer

• Questions about your records: jobs, visits, estimates, invoices, payments, contacts, the calendar, timesheets, recent activity and the report figures. When an answer comes from a record, the answer links to it so you can open it in one tap.
• Questions about using Zaras: how to send an estimate, what a status means, where a setting lives. These answers come from the help guide and cite the article they used.
• It cannot answer about another workspace, about billing for Zaras itself, or about anything Zaras does not have. When something is outside what it can see, it says so instead of guessing.

Answers only, records unchanged

The Assistant has no way to change your data. Ask it to reschedule a visit or send an invoice and it will tell you where to do that yourself. Anything it says about a record is read from that record at the moment you ask, and every figure it states comes from your workspace, not from memory.

If your role cannot open a screen, the Assistant cannot read it either: a technician asking about profit gets the same answer as a technician opening the report.

The conversation

• A conversation lives on the device you are using. It is cleared on its own after 24 hours without a message, and only the last 12 messages are sent with each question, so a long conversation forgets its beginning.
• One message can be up to 2,000 characters; the composer counts for you.
• Clear conversation in the header starts fresh at any time. It asks you to confirm and cannot be undone.
• While an answer is streaming, the sparkle beside the word Assistant animates and a line tells you what it is checking ("Finding the record…"). Choose Stop answering on the web, or Stop in the app, to keep what has arrived and end the turn there.

Limits

To keep the Assistant fast and fair for everyone, questions have an hourly allowance per person and per workspace, a daily allowance per person, and, where one is set, a monthly allowance per workspace. When you reach one, the message tells you when you can ask again; hitting the limits three times within 24 hours pauses the Assistant on that account for up to a day. Sending the same question again within a minute of an answer is met by pointing at the answer already on screen.

An answer has a time budget of about 45 seconds. If a question needs more than that, the Assistant stops and asks you to narrow it — "invoices overdue this month for Acme" instead of "tell me everything about invoices".

When something goes wrong

Every failure keeps your question in the thread and your draft in the composer, and each one says what happened and what to do next:

• No connection: the composer says you are offline and keeps your question until the connection returns.
• The Assistant could not be reached, or is unavailable: an error line appears where the answer would be, with a retry action.
• No answer within 20 seconds, or an answer that stops part-way: what arrived stays, marked as interrupted, with a retry action.
• Signed out: sign in again.
• You don't have access to the assistant in this workspace. This is not about your role — every member can use the Assistant, and a role only limits what it can read. It means Zaras could not confirm you belong to this workspace just then: you were removed from it, or the check failed. Try again in a moment; if it keeps happening, ask an owner or admin to check that you are still a member.

The Assistant never retries on its own, and it never shows raw error text.