Ask your business data
Ask a business question. See the records behind the answer.
Use plain-language questions to find useful answers across connected business records, without building a new report for every one-off question.
The answer is a set of records.You can open every one of them.
Which open quotations have no next action?
3 quotations need a next action
Quotations
QT-1042Apex Components
- Value
- ₹2.4L
- Owner
- Amit
- Next action
- Not set
QT-1057Nova Engineering
- Value
- ₹1.1L
- Owner
- Neha
- Next action
- Not set
QT-1063Prime Industries
- Value
- ₹3.0L
- Owner
- Ravi
- Next action
- Not set
Three quotation records, each one openable. The answer is a count of records, not an opinion about the pipeline.
Which orders are waiting because stock is not available?
2 orders are waiting for stock
Orders
SO-2104Kamath Traders
- Item
- AX-40 · 40 units
- Status
- Waiting for stock
SO-2111Vikram Industrial
- Item
- BR-12 · 15 units
- Status
- Waiting for stock
A different record shape: the useful facts here are the item and why the order has stopped, not a value and an owner.
Which customers have an overdue invoice and an open sales order?
2 customers appear in both
Customers
Kamath TradersCustomer
- Overdue invoice
- INV-883 · ₹80,000
- Open order
- SO-2087 · Preparing
Prime IndustriesCustomer
- Overdue invoice
- INV-901 · ₹1.2L
- Open order
- SO-2119 · Confirmed
This one joins two record types. It is the question you cannot answer by opening one screen and filtering a list — which is the reason a question like this is worth asking at all.
Sometimes you know the question, not the report.
- Which quotations have no next action?
- Which orders are waiting for stock?
- Which customers have both overdue money and an open order?
Every one of these is a reasonable thing to want to know on a Tuesday afternoon, and not one of them deserves a permanent screen built for it.
Ask across the records that are connected.
- Leads and quotations
- What has been offered, and to whom.
- Orders
- What was confirmed, and where it has reached.
- Invoices
- What has been billed, and what is outstanding.
- Stock
- What is available, where that is maintained.
- Customer records
- Who the account is, and how you work with them.
Only records that are actually connected can contribute to an answer. A system nobody has connected is not a system this can read, and a record your team keeps in a separate file is not part of the result.
Show the records behind the answer.
Not this
“Sales look weak this month.”
Nobody can check it, and nobody can act on it.
This
3 open quotations have no next action
- QT-1042Apex Components
- QT-1057Nova Engineering
- QT-1063Prime Industries
A useful answer should make it easy to check where it came from. The first sentence cannot be checked by anybody; the second comes with three quotation numbers.
Do not fill in missing data.
Which customers have an overdue invoice and an open sales order?
Kamath Traders
Open orderSO-2087 · Preparing
AccountingINV-883 · ₹80,000 overdue
Sharma Engineering
Open orderSO-2098 · Confirmed
AccountingAccounting status unavailable
Unknown is not zero.Missing is not none.
The second customer may have nothing overdue, or may owe a great deal. The honest answer is that this result does not know — and saying so is what lets somebody go and find out.
Asking is not alerting.
Asking — this page
- A person asks, now
- The question can be different every time
- The answer comes back with its records
- Nothing happens until somebody asks
Alerts & reminders
- A known condition or date becomes true
- The condition was decided in advance
- The right person is told
- Nobody had to think to check
Nothing on this page watches your business or decides what you ought to notice. If something should tell somebody by itself, that is a rule, and a rule belongs on the alerts page.
Alerts & RemindersA one-off question is not always a report.
Ask it
- The question is new
- You will ask it once, or occasionally
- It crosses records that no single screen shows together
- You are checking something before a meeting or a call
Build a view for it
- The same question comes up every morning
- The same people need the same view
- It is part of how the team already works
- Somebody would rather open it than type it
Ask when the question changes.Build a fixed view when the question stays the same.
What should stay human?
- Deciding what action to take
- Judging which of the three actually matters
- Deciding whether an exception is acceptable
- Contacting the customer or the supplier
- Changing the underlying record
The answer helps you find the relevant records.A person still decides what those records mean for the business, and what to do next.
The answer depends on the records available.
- If the record is not connected
- It cannot contribute, and the result should say so rather than leave it out quietly.
- If the record is incomplete
- A field nobody fills is a field no question can use.
- If the record is kept inconsistently
- Two teams recording the same thing differently will produce an answer that looks wrong to both.
This is the honest limit of the whole idea. Asking a question cannot repair the records underneath it, and a business whose quotations are kept in three places will get an answer about one of them.
Where the records come from
- Customer 360One customer, with everything about them in one place.
- Sales PipelineThe quotations and opportunities a question like this reads.
- Order Status TrackingWhere an order’s current state is kept.
- Alerts & RemindersWhen a known condition should tell somebody by itself.
- AI for BusinessWhere AI helps across reading, finding, drafting and comparing.
What does your team open four screens to answer?
Tell us the questions people ask each other across sales, orders and accounts. We’ll help identify which deserve a fixed view, and which are better asked when they come up.