The assistant

A built-in helper that answers questions about Noctessa and about your own venue, from inside the admin panel.

Where it is

The Assistant button sits in the bottom-right corner of every admin screen except the door scanner. Tap it and a panel opens beside the screen you are on. Type a question and press Enter (Shift + Enter adds a line). The panel remembers the conversation while it is open; New chat starts a fresh one.

If you do not see the button, the assistant has not been switched on for your venue. Ask the Noctessa team.

What you can ask

Two kinds of question work well.

How the product works. "How do I move a booking to another table?", "What does the Confirmed counter include?", "How do I publish an event to Instagram?". The assistant answers from this help centre and points you to the screen and the button to use.

Your own venue, right now. "Which tables are still free tonight?", "How many bookings do we have on Saturday?", "Is our setup finished?". The assistant looks the answer up in your venue's own data at the moment you ask:

• Bookings for one event, or for every event on one day, with staff table blocks counted separately.
• Which tables are free, reserved, held, confirmed or blocked for an event.
• The free tables for an event, grouped by section and table type, with their seat sizes.
• Your events in a date range, so it can turn "tonight" or "Saturday" into the right event.
• Your Finish setting up checklist.
• Which optional features are switched on for your venue, so it never sends you to a screen you cannot open. It uses the same check to stay inside your plan.

It knows your venue's date, time and timezone, so "tonight" means tonight where your venue is. When the day has more than one event, it asks which one you mean.

How to read an answer

Every answer is written in the language you asked in. Under it you will find:

• Sources. Which help page an answer came from, or From your venue's data when it looked something up. A help source is a link; open it to read the full page.
• Answers are based on the help centre and your venue's data. A reminder of the only two places an answer can come from. The assistant does not guess, and it does not use anything it may know about other products.
• Thought for a few seconds. Open it to see the steps it took: reading the help centre, checking your data, asking the model, checking the answer.

When it counts bookings for a day, it states the date and timezone it used, so a figure for "tonight" can never be mistaken for a figure for another day.

What it will not do

• It never changes anything. It cannot confirm a booking, move a guest, edit an event or touch a setting. It explains and looks things up; the buttons stay yours.
• It does not invent answers. If the help centre does not cover a question and your data cannot answer it, it says so in one sentence rather than guessing.
• It does not see guest names. Guest names are removed from what the assistant reads before a question is answered, so an answer can count bookings but never describe a guest.

Sending a request to the Noctessa team

When you ask for something Noctessa does not do, or describe something that looks broken, the assistant says so plainly and offers to pass it on. Choose File report and a short request is drafted for you: what you asked for, what the product does today instead, and why it matters to your venue. Read it, edit the summary if you like, then choose Send.

Every request you send is listed on the Support screen, behind your initials in the top right, with its status: Open, In review or Closed. Requests filed from the assistant carry the question and the answer they came from, and the screen you were on, so the team sees what you saw — the whole conversation you had in the assistant, not just the last answer.

When the team closes a request, they always write you an answer. It appears under the request on the Support screen, and on the request itself, labelled Our answer. Until you have seen a new answer, a small dot sits on your initials in the top right and the Support entry in that menu shows how many answers are waiting. Opening the Support screen (or the request) marks them as read. There is no email for this — the dot is how you find out.

Limits

Each venue has a daily allowance of questions, and one question runs at a time per venue. When the allowance is used up, the assistant tells you when it resets. Questions and answers are kept in your venue's own records, like every other action in the panel.