AI assistant — help

One assistant, everywhere. Ask questions about your organisation's data in plain English — "How did the High Street site do last week?", "What's out of stock?", "Which products have no accounting group?" — and, if you're an organisation owner, describe menu changes for it to draft — "Raise every main by 50p", "Take the burgers off the kiosk", "Send all drinks to the bar printer". You can also attach files with the 📎 — menu photos, screenshots, PDFs, or CSV/XLSX exports (up to 4 per message, 8 MB each) — and the assistant reads them: describe what you want done with the attachment and it can draft the changes it implies. Open it with the AI assistant button in the bottom-right corner of any page, ⌘J (Mac) / Ctrl-J (Windows), or the AI assistant button in the header of the Menus pages — or give it the whole screen under Assistant in the sidebar (see The full page).

It answers only from your organisation's own data, and it never changes anything by itself — every change it drafts goes through a review where you approve each line before anything is applied.

Who can do what

Organisation owners can ask questions and draft menu changes.
Store managers can ask questions about their own store(s); staff names (staff-by-staff sales, who closed a till or a day, who did what on an order), the team, gift cards, email wording, accounting groups and the activity log are owner-only. Once an owner allows it, managers can also draft and apply stock and store settings changes — counts, sold out at their store, daily limits, hours, closures, pausing order types, notices, pacing and service charges — at their own stores only. Everything else stays read-only for them: asked for a price change, the assistant says it needs an owner. Managers see their own changes under Changes and can undo them; owners see and can undo every manager's changes too (Team › Activity).
Owners decide what the assistant may do under Settings › AI assistant: each area (menus, stock, sales, orders and so on) is Off, View, Create & edit or Full. Out of the box it can look at everything below and draft the menu and promotion changes described here. If an area is switched off or view-only, the assistant tells you so and names the setting, and a draft that needs a higher level shows red lines saying which. See AI assistant permissions.

What it can see

Sales & reports — takings, covers, voids, top products, and breakdowns by hour, payment method, category, accounting group or VAT for any store and date range; plus today's dashboard numbers.
Stock — what's out or running low per store, the organisation-wide out-of-stock summary, and daily limits.
Menus & products — your menus and the product catalogue (names, prices, categories, accounting groups, channels).
Orders — the latest orders per store, and any single order in full by its number: what was on it, modifiers and voids, discounts and service charge, how it was paid, what's still owed, and its timeline ("what happened with order 412 at Leeds?"). Customer names — and the name on a bar tab — are shown only if an owner has switched Customer details on under Settings › AI assistant, and then only to owners. Phone numbers, emails, addresses and customer notes are never shown.
Z reports — closed trading days per store: takings, orders and each day's cash variance, or one report in full (takings by method, till shifts with float, expected, counted and variance, refunds, voids, gift cards, VAT by rate). "What was the cash variance at Leeds last week?"
Tills & printers — when each till last checked in, retired tills that are still syncing, and each printer's health from recent print jobs: failing, its last error, and when it last printed. "Why isn't the kitchen printer printing?"
Customer feedback — guest ratings (food, service, ambience) for one store or all of yours: averages, how many rated anything 2 or below, and the latest comments.
Opening hours — whether a store is open now, its weekly hours, the next 7 days with closures and special hours applied, and upcoming closures.
Activity log (owners) — who did what and when: till voids and overrides, refunds, day closes, staff and printing changes, and the assistant's own changes.
Team (owners) — who works where, their role and job title, whether they can approve refunds, voids and discounts on the tills, and whether their PIN is set or locked; and your job titles with how many people have each. PINs are never shown — not to you, not to the assistant — and neither is what each job title permits (that's on Team › Permissions).
Gift cards (owners) — look up a card by its code (amount, balance, expiry, note) and, for cards bought online, whether the card and the buyer's receipt emails arrived; or the latest online purchases and purchase links. Buyer and recipient names show only with Customer details on; email addresses never do.
Customer emails, receipt QR codes and accounting groups (owners) — the order emails' wording, each store's receipt QR codes, and your accounting groups with their account codes. An order's detail also shows which customer emails went out about it, and whether any failed.
Help guides — these help pages. Ask "how do I reopen a day?" and it reads the guide and tells you where to go.

Each of these can be switched off under Settings › AI assistant (the help guides are always available — they hold no data of yours). If a question needs data outside that list — predictions, anything it has no view of — or in an area that's switched off, it says so honestly instead of guessing.

The trail

While the assistant works you'll see dimmed lines like "Looking at sales for the High Street site, 7–14 Jul…". These stay in the conversation after the answer as a record of exactly what was checked — and where a matching page exists (Reports, Stock, Products, Menus, Orders, Z reports, Feedback, Activity, Opening hours, Stores) the line is a link, so you can open the real page and verify any number yourself. Team lines link to Team and Team › Permissions; gift cards, emails and accounting groups link to their pages.

Changing menus (owners)

Ask for a change — e.g. "Raise every main by 50p", "Add a Sunday-only Roasts category with the beef and chicken dinners", "Mark the fish pie sold out", "Route starters and mains to the kitchen" (station names come from your Printers & routing registry). Where the request is ambiguous the assistant asks first; for small uncertainties it drafts anyway and states its assumptions.
Review the draft — the proposed changes appear as a checklist, one line per change ("Steak pie — £12.50 → £13.00 (new price version)"), grouped by type, after being checked against your live catalogue:
- Ordinary changes start ticked.
- Destructive changes — archiving anything, or removing a sales channel / order type (with a "takes N products off sale" note) — start unticked: tick each one you actually want.
- Orange flags mark changes worth a second look, e.g. a price moving more than ±50% or to £0. They're still ticked — just check them.
- Red rows can't be applied (e.g. a product name the assistant got wrong) and are excluded automatically; everything else can still go ahead.
- Untick anything you don't want — exclusions are yours alone, the assistant isn't consulted again.
Apply — the ticked changes are applied together, all-or-nothing, and the menus, categories and products pages refresh. If someone edited the catalogue while you were reviewing (say, renamed a product), nothing is written — the stale rows turn red and a Re-validate button re-checks the draft against the latest catalogue. The same happens if an owner lowered the assistant's permissions after the draft was made: the red rows name the setting.

One small change is one tap. When a draft is a single change to a single thing that undo can fully put back — "Mark the fish pie sold out", "Fish pie — sold out at Leeds", "Pause the SUMMER10 code", one price — and nothing about it needs a second look, it shows as a single card with the change, Confirm and Cancel, instead of a checklist. Catalogue changes like these apply at every store, and the card says so; stock changes name their store. Anything bigger — several changes, several products, archiving, a new promo code, anything flagged — always gets the full checklist. AccentPOS decides which, never the assistant.

Every draft is saved as a proposal the moment it's checked, and Apply applies that saved proposal — exactly what you reviewed, minus anything you unticked. That means:

Applying twice applies once. A double click, or a second tab, can't land the same changes twice — the second attempt says they've already been applied.
Drafts last 24 hours. An older draft can't be applied any more; ask the assistant again.
Dismiss is recorded. Dismissing a draft marks it as dismissed (nothing changes). A new draft in the same conversation replaces the one under review, and the older one is kept as replaced.
Only you can apply your drafts — another owner can't apply a draft from your conversation.

Sending a new message sets a pending draft aside. Closing the panel — or reloading the page — keeps a pending draft: it's still there when you reopen the conversation. Dismissed and expired drafts stay in the conversation as a dimmed line.

Undo

Every applied change can be undone. The confirmation in the panel ("Applied 3 changes — …") has an Undo button, and so does each AI assistant row under Team → Activity (pick AI assistant in the filter to see just those). Any organisation owner can undo any applied assistant change.

Undo doesn't change anything straight away: it drafts the reversal, which opens in the panel as an Undo — review checklist, and you apply it like any other draft. An undo started from the panel is recorded in that conversation ("Undo drafted for review — …"); one started from Activity isn't part of any conversation.

The undo puts back what the change replaced. If you raised a price, undo restores the old price as a new product version. If you archived a category, undo restores it. If you created a modifier group or a promo code, undo archives the group or pauses the code.
Anything edited since is flagged and left unticked. If someone re-priced the burger by hand after the assistant's change, the undo row says so, e.g. "Burger: price is now £13.50; undo would set £14.00". Tick it only if you want to overwrite that later edit.
Some changes can only be partly undone, and the review lists what stays under This undo can't put back. For example, undoing a new menu archives the menu but leaves any products it created in your catalogue. Options added to a modifier group stay until you remove them under Modifier groups.
A change can be undone once. Afterwards its Activity row shows Undone. The undo is itself an applied change, so you can undo it too (it shows as "Redo: …").
Some changes can't be undone at all, and the review says so on the line before you apply — "Can't be undone: …" in red. Clearing a PIN is one: the old PIN is gone, and a new one is set on the Team page. So are issuing a gift card and resending an email. These never show as a one-tap card.
Undoing a stock count puts the earlier count back exactly — including when it was counted, so anything sold since the original count still comes off it. If someone re-counted at that store since, the undo row is flagged and left unticked. Undoing a store's first count or first daily limit switches it off rather than removing it, so the Stock page lists the product there as not counted (or limit off) — nothing sells differently.
There's no time limit, and undos are recorded under Activity in your name, linked to the change they reversed.

What it can and can't change

Can: create menus; rename, schedule, archive menus and categories; add/remove products in categories; prices, descriptions, allergens, dietary tags and tax category (always as a new product version — history is preserved); sold-out (86) flips; which sales channels and order types products appear on; accounting groups; kitchen and bar station routing; product photos (from an image you attached in the chat); age restrictions; modifier groups — create them (sizes, options, linked products, min/max rules) and change them (rename, rules, add options, apply to more products or categories); new promo codes, and pausing or resuming existing ones; archiving products, and restoring archived menus, categories, products and modifier groups ("bring back the fish pie").

Stock, store by store (once an owner raises Sold out & stock to Create & edit under Settings › AI assistant — it starts at View): re-count a product at a store ("we've got 12 fish pies left at Leeds"), stop counting it there, set its LOW level; mark it sold out at particular stores ("86 the fish pie at Leeds" — its count there goes to 0) or back on (counting stops there); set or switch off a daily limit ("only sell 30 a day at York"), or a one-day cap ("just 20 on Christmas Eve"). Sold out at every store is still the organisation-wide sold-out switch. A count is the new total — for "add 10 more" the assistant reads the current count and tells you the total it drafted, so you can check it.

Store hours, closures, order types and notices (once an owner raises Store operations under Settings › AI assistant — it starts at View): change the weekly hours for particular days ("open till 1am on Fridays") — a store with no hours yet needs all seven days, since the rest would otherwise count as closed; add a closure or special hours ("closed on Boxing Day", "10 till 2 on Christmas Eve") or remove one; pause or resume dine-in, takeaway or delivery ("pause delivery at Leeds"); and add, edit, switch off or switch back on store notices. Anything that changes what guests can order right now carries a Live ordering line — on the one-tap card and in the review — so you see the effect before you confirm. Removing a closure and switching off a notice need Full.

Pacing and service charges (also Store operations): change slot length, orders per slot, whether a full slot refuses or just warns, which order types it refuses, and per-section limits ("only 30 mains every 15 minutes"); reword what guests see when pacing kicks in; and set, change or switch off the service charge per order type ("12.5% on dine-in and collection", "a £1.50 bag fee on delivery"). A service-charge change always gets the full review, and its line shows the before and after for each order type it touches, with the result for all four underneath. The charge's tax treatment stays on the Charges & tips screen.

Team (once an owner raises Team to Create & edit under Settings › AI assistant — it starts at View): add a staff member ("add Priya as a waiter at Leeds"), change which stores someone works at, give them one of your job titles (or put them back on their role's default), and lock, unlock or clear a PIN.

The assistant never handles a PIN. A new person starts with no PIN, and you set one on the Team page before they can clock in. If you type a PIN into the chat, the assistant won't repeat it, and it's masked ("PIN ••••") wherever the conversation is saved.
Clearing a PIN ("reset Sam's PIN — it's been shared") stops it working on every till at the next sync. It can't be undone, so it starts unticked and the review says so; set the new PIN on the Team page. To stop a PIN for now and bring it back later, ask the assistant to lock it instead.
Making someone a manager is flagged. A Manager role or a manager job title lets them approve refunds, voids and discounts on the tills, so the line says so and it always gets the full review. What a job title permits, and a person's own exceptions, aren't something the assistant can change — that's Team › Permissions.
People who sign in to the Hub (store managers with their own login) have their stores changed on the Team page, not by the assistant — those stores are also what they manage in the Hub.
Undoing a new staff member removes them from the team: off every till and off the Team page, with their history kept. Undoing that brings them back. Removing staff isn't something you can ask for directly.
Names must be unique for the assistant to tell people apart: it won't add a second "Sam", and if two people already share a name it asks you to make that change on the Team page.

Gift cards, emails and accounting (each area starts at View; an owner raises Vouchers & gift cards, Emails & receipts, Finance or Orders to Create & edit):

Issue a gift card ("a £25 gift card for the raffle"). Its code is generated when you apply it and shown in the confirmation. It can't be undone — a card can only be voided on the Gift cards screen, with a manager's PIN — and anything over £100 is flagged.
Resend a gift card's emails by its code, when the card or receipt didn't arrive. Both go again: the card to the recipient and the receipt to the buyer.
Resend an order's emails ("order 412's confirmation bounced — send it again"). Only emails that failed or bounced can be resent (one that's on its way may still arrive), and they go to the address on the order — the assistant never sees or changes it. There's no separate receipt email; these are the order-status emails from Settings › Emails.
Reword the customer emails — a stage's subject, heading or body, whether it's sent at all, the contact line, and whether the total and timing show. Tokens are {order} {venue} {name} {total}; anything else in braces is flagged. Wording changes always get the full review.
Change a receipt QR code at a store — its link, text, size, position, dates, or switch it on or off (on/off alone is one tap). New codes, removing one, and choosing which code a receipt prints stay on the store's Printers & routing page.
Add, rename or re-code accounting groups. Undoing a new group removes it again; removing a group otherwise stays on the Accounting page.
Not here: voiding gift cards, booking or cancelling delivery couriers (they're real bookings with fees, run from the till) — the assistant can still tell you a delivery's status.

Promo codes: besides creating and pausing codes, it can change an existing code's dates, maximum uses, note and amount off (Promotions, Create & edit).

Can't: shared stock pools, tax rates (or a service charge's tax treatment), other store settings (address, pre-orders, tips, round-up), orders or refunds, setting or seeing PINs, removing staff, what a job title or person is permitted to do, voiding gift cards, couriers — and it has no delete: everything is archive-only and restorable, by the assistant or by hand. The assistant itself never writes anything; every change goes through the same review-and-apply pipeline whether it was drafted by AI or entered by hand, and each applied set is recorded under Team → Activity in your name, marked as applied through the AI assistant.

The full page

Assistant in the sidebar (also Open full view ↗ at the top of the panel) opens the assistant as a page of its own. It's the same assistant and the same conversation as the panel — start a chat in the panel and carry on here, or the other way round, and a draft made in one can be reviewed and applied in the other.

Your conversations are listed on the left, newest first, under two tabs: Chats (conversations you started) and Alerts (each alert and daily digest, which arrive as their own conversations). An alert's conversation stays under Alerts even after you reply in it, so Chats holds only what you started. Click one to reopen it; + New chat starts another. To delete one, hover over it and click × — it disappears from your list, but anything it applied stays applied and stays listed under Changes and Activity.
Changes (organisation owners, and store managers for their own changes) has two lists:
- Awaiting your review — your drafts that haven't been applied or dismissed yet, with when they expire. Review opens the conversation the draft came from, with the checklist ready.
- Applied by the assistant — every change the assistant has applied for any owner, newest first, with who applied it, plus drafts you dismissed. Undo drafts the reversal for review, exactly as under Activity. Conversation reopens the chat a change came from — only for your own, since conversations are private.

Store managers see the conversation list and the chat, but not Changes.

On your phone

The assistant is the Hub's phone app. On a phone (or any screen narrower than a laptop), Assistant fills the screen: a menu (☰) with New chat, your Recent chats and Alerts (two lists, switched at the top), the organisation switcher, a way into the full Hub and Sign out; Changes at the top right for owners; and a Store picker above the message box, so "how are we doing today?" means that store. One-tap changes show as a card in the chat; a bigger draft opens as a sheet from the bottom of the screen — close it to keep chatting and tap Review to bring it back. Signing in on a phone takes you straight to the assistant. Other Hub pages still open on a phone, with a note that they're best on a larger screen.

Add it to your home screen so it opens like an app, full-screen:

iPhone / iPad (Safari): open the Hub, sign in, tap Share → Add to Home Screen.
Android (Chrome): open the Hub, sign in, tap ⋮ → Install app (or Add to Home screen).

Sign in to the home-screen app with your password. On an iPhone, a magic sign-in link opens in Safari rather than the home-screen app, so the app stays signed out. The app always needs a connection — it never shows saved figures from earlier, so what you see is always live.

Notifications

The phone app can notify you, and tapping a notification opens the conversation it's about.

Turn them on from the strip under the header (Turn on) or from ☰ → Notifications → Turn on notifications, then allow them when your phone asks. Each phone or browser is turned on separately.
iPhone / iPad: notifications only work in the home-screen app (iOS 16.4 or later). In Safari the strip shows how to add it: Share → Add to Home Screen. Then open AccentPOS from the home screen and turn them on there.
Android: the strip offers Install — or turn notifications on in Chrome straight away.
Check it works: ☰ → Notifications → Send a test notification. It arrives within a few seconds; tapping it opens the chat you sent it from.
Turn them off with ☰ → Notifications → Turn off on this device. Signing out turns them off on that device, so a phone someone else picks up stays quiet.
Blocked? If you said no when asked, only your phone's settings can change that: allow notifications for AccentPOS there, then come back.

Alerts and the daily digest

With notifications on, the assistant tells you when something needs attention. Each alert arrives as a notification and opens its own conversation — the alert itself shown as a card at the top, with its fix underneath — so you can ask a follow-up ("which till was it?", "we've got 20 more"). These conversations live under the Alerts tab, apart from your own chats, and the panel at the bottom-right always opens your latest chat, never an alert.

Alert	When	Ready-made fix
Tills not syncing	Every till at a store that's open (by its opening hours) has been silent for 10 minutes. Off by default until the till app sends a heartbeat (build 28): before then a quiet spell can look like silence	Pause takeaway and delivery there, so online orders don't go unseen
Sold out	A counted product sells through to 0 at a store. Several at once arrive as one alert	Put the ones you tick back on sale without counting (nothing is ticked to start with), or tell the assistant the new counts
Voids spike	10 or more items, or £150 or more, voided at a store within an hour	— (it says what was voided and why)
Unpaid order	An order still open with money owed, untouched for 3 hours	— (check it on the till; payments are never taken through the assistant)

A fix is never applied for you. It's a change for you to review: a one-tap card or a checklist, applied through the same review as anything else, recorded under Activity and undoable. If two people get the same alert, only the first fix applied lands; the other person's copy says someone else already did it.
The daily digest arrives between 8:00 and 10:00 with the day before: takings and orders per store, voids, alerts and any changes waiting for your review. If the system was down for that whole window, that day's digest is skipped rather than sent late.
Choosing which alerts you get. Organisation owners decide which kinds the organisation uses, and can raise the thresholds, under Settings › AI assistant › Alerts. Each person can then untick kinds they don't want for their own account under ☰ → Notifications in the phone app. An alert reaches you only if both allow it.
Who gets what: organisation owners get alerts for every store and the digest for all of them. Store managers get alerts for their own stores and a digest of those stores. Nobody gets anything until they turn notifications on.
Permissions apply (Settings › AI assistant). An alert only goes to someone who can view its area: Devices & printing for tills, Orders for voids and unpaid orders, Sold out & stock for sell-outs, Sales & reports for the digest. A fix is offered only if your level allows that change (Store operations, or Sold out & stock, at Create & edit). Otherwise the alert says which setting to raise. For store managers, the Store managers setting applies.
A store with no opening hours set never gets till alerts, because the assistant can't tell whether it should be open.

Good to know

Answers are formatted for reading: bold figures, short lists and small tables where they help. Links in an answer only ever go to Hub pages; the assistant can't link out or show images.
Inside a store's settings pages — and on the Menus pages — the panel shows a "Currently viewing: …" chip, so "how did we do today?" means that store and "raise the mains" means the menu on screen. Dismiss the chip (×) to ask about the whole organisation.
Conversations are saved. Reloading the page, or opening the assistant on another computer, picks up your latest conversation where you left off, with its trail lines and any draft still awaiting review. New chat starts a fresh one; the old one stays saved, and the full page lists them all.
Your conversations are private. Nobody else in your organisation can read them — not even another owner — and AccentPOS's own admin tools don't show them. What does show to every owner is the record of applied changes under Team → Activity.
There's no limit on how long a conversation runs. The assistant reads the most recent 20 messages each time you send one, so in a very long conversation it may not remember the start — mention it again, or start a new chat.
Each message uses AI tokens from your organisation's monthly allowance — typically a handful per question; see AI tokens for your balance and usage history. Out of tokens? The panel says so.
If your subscription payment is more than 14 days overdue, or your account has closed, you can still read past conversations but can't send new messages or apply changes. See Account.
Stopping an answer mid-stream keeps whatever has arrived — including a draft, which you can still review and apply.
A very long answer or draft can hit the assistant's length limit. When it does, the reply ends with a note saying it was cut short and that anything after that point, including a draft, didn't happen. Ask it to continue, or split the request into smaller parts.
Server setup: the API needs ANTHROPIC_API_KEY; without it the panel reports that the assistant isn't configured.