Ask your reports a question

You want to know who your best month belonged to. You know the answer is in there somewhere. Finding out which of 42 reports holds it, and over which period, is more effort than the question deserves.

So type the question instead.

How it works

The box sits under the five tiles on the reports hub, with three suggestions beside it if nothing comes to mind. Type, press Ask, wait a moment.

What comes back has three parts, and the order matters:

1. A sentence. The answer in words, with the figures in it.
2. The report. The chart and table it used, in full.
3. View full report. A link straight to it, with the period already set.

That second part is the whole trust story. The AI doesn't calculate anything — it decides which of your reports answers the question and over what window, runs it, and then writes prose about what came back. The wording is generated; every number in it comes from the same report you'd have opened yourself.

Which is why the table is shown rather than hidden. If a sentence ever looks wrong, the evidence is directly beneath it, and View full report puts you on the report itself.

Keeping one

Some questions are worth asking once. Others you'll ask every month, and those are worth pinning.

When a question is one of the repeatable kind, a button appears under the answer offering to keep it — Keep "top staff by sales" on my dashboard, with a short name it picked for the tile. Press it and the question moves to the top of your reports page, under the heading Questions you kept.

What's pinned is the question, not the answer. Each one re-runs when you open Reports, so the figures are always current — and each tile prints the period it just covered, so you can see at a glance whether you're looking at June or the last 30 days. The tile carries the short name from the button; hover it and you'll see the question you actually typed.

That period is the thing worth understanding. It's the one the question asked for, not today's date range: a question about June stays about June forever, and a question about last month rolls forward with the calendar. Whichever you pinned, the tile says so.

Done with one? The bin icon on the tile removes it. The report is untouched, and you can ask the question again whenever you like.

Asking well

Questions that land name a thing RewireBox records and a period:

• Top 5 staff by sales last month
• Which services sold the most this month?
• How did sales change vs the prior period?

Questions that don't tend to be about things no report holds. "How busy were we" has no answer because busy isn't a column; "how many appointments did we have last week" does. When it can't route your question it says so and asks you to rephrase, rather than guessing at a report and answering confidently from the wrong one.

Naming the period helps more than anything else. Without one it picks a sensible window, and a sensible window is not always the one you had in mind.

Who can ask

The Ask box reads across your financial reports, so it needs financial report access. Someone can have Reports in their nav, open it, use the time clock report, and still have no Ask box — that's the same split described in the report library, showing up in one more place.