Assistant

The assistant is a chat built into Spensa. You ask in plain words and it answers with real numbers from your own records. You can also give it work to do. It can draft an order, record waste or fix an invoice line. It always asks before doing anything important.

What this is for

• Ask questions about your spending, orders, prices, suppliers and more
• Let the assistant create and change things for you
• Have it send orders to suppliers after you approve
• Send it files such as invoices, till reports, menus, spreadsheets and photos
• Keep several chats and switch between them
• See charts and clickable cards in its answers
• Use it on the web and in the phone app

Where to open it

You can open the assistant in four places.

The side panel (web). On any page, press Cmd+/ on a Mac or Ctrl+/ on Windows. You can also click the sparkles icon at the top right. The assistant opens in a panel on the right side of the screen. On small screens it opens over the whole page instead.

The full page (web). The assistant also has its own full page with more room. Chats you open from search open there. Click Collapse to sidebar to shrink it back into the side panel.

The Home page box. The top of your Home page has an Assistant box. It says "Ask Spensa about your spending, orders, suppliers..." and shows example questions. Type there to start a chat.

The phone app. Open the menu and tap Assistant.

Access and permissions

Every team member can chat with the assistant. Location staff do not have it; their managers use it on their behalf. One important rule applies to everyone. The assistant only sees what you are allowed to see. It can only change what you are allowed to change. If invoices are hidden from you in the app, the assistant will not show them to you either. If your role is view-only, the assistant still answers questions. It just tells you it cannot make changes for you.

Your first chat

A new chat greets you with "What can I whip up for you?" and a few questions to try:

• "Summarize last week's spending"
• "Compare a product price across suppliers"
• "Draft my next order"
• "What am I low on?"
• "Where can I save money?"

Tap one or type your own question. Write the way you speak. The assistant answers in your language. If the examples disappear, the chat box has a button to show them again.

If your company is new to Spensa, setup starts with a guided welcome chat. It walks you through your first steps. The checklist on your Home page links back to it at any time. See Getting started.

What it can answer

The assistant can look through basically all your data in Spensa:

• Orders, order templates and your order schedule
• Invoices, including every line and discount
• Products, prices and packaging
• Suppliers, including your customer numbers
• Inventory: storages, counts and recorded waste or losses
• Recipes, menu items and menu costs
• Till reports and sales (called Point of Sale in the app)
• Work schedules: shifts, availability, time off and open shifts
• Tasks and their checklists
• Your locations and your team

Ask things like "How much did we spend at Metro in June?" or "Which supplier has the best price for butter?". The assistant works with your real records. For long lists it tells you when there is more than it has shown.

What it can do for you

Tell the assistant what you need in one sentence. A few examples:

• "Order the usual from Metro for Friday."
• "Add 5 kg of flour to my draft order."
• "Record 2 kg of chicken breast as waste."
• "Create a task for Saturday: clean the cold room."
• "Add 200 g of onions to the goulash recipe."

It can help across all of Spensa:

• Orders: create an order, start one from a template, change or copy an order, mark it complete or cancelled, and send it to the supplier by email.
• Order templates: create, change and publish templates. It can even build a template from files you send it.
• Order schedule: set up your recurring ordering days.
• Suppliers: create suppliers and update their details, including customer numbers.
• Products: create products (several at once) and edit them.
• Locations: create a new location or update one.
• Invoices: save files you send as invoices and fix invoice lines.
• Till reports: save uploaded reports, correct report lines, approve reports and tidy up your till catalogue and categories.
• Inventory: create or rename storages, add items to them, set how often to count and record waste or losses.
• Recipes and menu costs: create and update recipes and their ingredients. Manage your menu categories.
• Tasks: create, update, complete and delete tasks. Manage checklist items and attach files.
• Feedback: pass your feedback or a bug report along to the Spensa team.

Everything the assistant does follows your own access. If you cannot delete tasks in the app, the assistant cannot either.

Approving important actions

The assistant never sends or deletes anything on its own. Before an important action it pauses and asks you in the chat.

1. The assistant shows a question card, for example "Send this order to the supplier?".
2. Click Approve to let it continue. Click Deny to stop it.

Nothing happens until you approve. This covers sending orders, completing or cancelling orders, approving till reports, deleting things and other big steps. Creating a new location also asks first, because it may increase your bill.

What answers look like

• Cards you can click. When the answer is about a record, you get a small card with its name and status. Click it to open the real page.
• Charts. For questions about numbers you may get a bar, pie or line chart.
• Choice buttons. When the assistant needs to know which location or supplier you mean, it shows a short list to pick from.
• Quick answers. For simple questions it offers answer buttons. You can always type your own answer instead.
• A summary of what it created. After the assistant creates something, a card lists everything new with a link to each record.

While the assistant works you see "Thinking..." and a short trail of what it does, such as "Created order" or "Recorded waste".

Sending it files

You can send files with any message. Invoices, till reports, menus, spreadsheets and photos all work.

1. Attach files in the chat box, or drag them into the chat.
2. Add up to 10 files per message. Each can be up to 10 MB.
3. Tell the assistant what to do with them, or just send them.

If it is not clear what you want, the assistant asks. It can save files as invoices, save them as till reports, build an order template from them, attach them to a task or create records from what is inside. It reads the contents for you. For example, send a few invoices and say "create this supplier".

On the phone you can snap a photo of a paper invoice and send it straight to the assistant. Photos appear right in the chat. Uploads show their progress, and a failed upload can be retried. Bigger jobs continue in the background. The results land on the matching pages, for example new invoices on the Invoices page.

Chats and history

Your chats are private to you. Teammates do not see them.

• Start a new chat: click the + button at the top of the assistant. Your old chat stays saved.
• Switch chats: on the full page, open the chat list at the top and pick one. Chats are sorted by their latest message. A chat without a title yet shows as "New chat".
• Delete one chat: open the chat list and choose Delete session.
• Delete all chats: open the chat list and choose Clear all sessions.
• On the phone: tap the clock icon for your chat history. Tap + for a new chat.

If you close the page while the assistant is still answering, the answer keeps going. It is waiting for you when you come back. You can also find old chats by title through search. See Analytics and the Home page for how search works.

It knows where you are

The assistant knows which page you are looking at when you send a message. On a product page you can simply ask "what did the price do this year?". It also knows today's date and your role. When you chat from a location, it can use that location without you naming it. It starts each chat with a rough picture of your business, such as how many suppliers and products you have.

If something goes wrong

• If an answer fails you see "Something went wrong." with a Try again button. If it keeps happening, contact support.
• You can stop the assistant while it is writing, then rephrase and try again.
• Under each answer you can rate it with Good response or Bad response. This helps make the assistant better.
• On the phone without internet you see "You're offline. Messages can't be sent until you reconnect." Sending works again once you are back online.

Your monthly allowance

Every plan includes a monthly allowance for assistant work and automatic document reading. Most companies never notice it.

• You can see your usage in Settings under Billing. It shows as Monthly AI usage with a percent bar.
• At 75% a heads-up notice appears on the billing page.
• At 100% the assistant pauses. Chat and automatic document reading resume at the start of the next month, or right away after a plan upgrade.

When the allowance is used up, the chat box shows an upgrade note instead. Your saved chats and everything the assistant already created stay untouched. See Settings and billing.

How this connects to other parts of Spensa

• Orders - the assistant creates, changes and sends orders that appear in your normal order list.
• Order templates - it builds and edits templates, including from files you send.
• Order schedule - it sets up recurring ordering days for you.
• Suppliers - it creates and updates suppliers.
• Products - it creates and edits products in your catalogue.
• Invoices - files you send can become invoices, and it can fix invoice lines.
• Point of Sale - it uploads and corrects till reports, and can approve them.
• Inventory - it manages storages and records waste and losses.
• Recipes and Menu costs - it creates and updates recipes and their ingredients.
• Tasks - it creates and manages tasks and checklists.
• Scheduling - it answers questions about schedules, shifts and time off.
• Getting started - new companies get a guided welcome chat.
• Mobile app - the phone app has its own Assistant tab.

Good to know

• You can send up to 10 files per message. Each file can be up to 10 MB.
• Supported files include PDFs, photos and images, spreadsheets (Excel and CSV), plain text files and emails saved as files.
• Files attached to tasks can be photos (JPEG, PNG, WebP) or PDFs.
• The assistant answers in whatever language you write.
• For general kitchen questions it can look things up on the web, for example a classic recipe. It never uses the web for your own business numbers.
• The assistant will not claim a list is complete unless it truly checked everything.
• Chats belong to one company. If you work in more than one company in Spensa, each has its own chats.
• On the phone, a small button helps you jump back to the newest part of a long answer.
• The app sometimes says "establishment" where this guide says "location".