How to Ask Your Business a Question and Get a Straight Answer

Most business owners carry the same question into Monday morning: how did last week actually go? The answer is already sitting in your sales, stock and invoices. Getting it out usually means opening several reports, setting date ranges and doing the sums yourself.

Ask Foresight lets you type that question in plain English and get the figures back. Like any tool, it rewards knowing how it works. This guide covers what it can answer, how to phrase a question so the answer covers what you meant, and where its limits are.

How Foresight gets its numbers

Foresight does not estimate figures from memory. When you ask something, it decides which of your built-in reports can answer it, runs them against your live data, and writes its reply from what those reports return. If no report can answer the question, it is instructed to say so plainly, and if a period has no data it tells you that rather than filling the gap.

Those are the same report calculations behind the Sales, Products, Stock, Trends, Finance and Margins tabs in the Reports module. For the same store and dates, an answer draws on exactly what those screens show — Foresight simply saves you from finding the right tab, setting the filters and reading the table yourself.

What you can ask about

Between them, the reports Foresight can call cover:

• Today at a glance. Revenue today, yesterday and month to date against last month, cash collected, today's expenses, overdue invoices grouped by how late they are, and products running low.

• Sales over a period. The daily revenue trend, revenue by payment method, and top products and top customers by revenue.

• Product performance. Units sold, revenue, cost, profit and stock on hand for each product.

• Margins. Profit and margin percentage per product, worked out from the cost price saved on each product.

• Stock. Stock value by category, products at or below the low-stock level you have set (each with a suggested reorder quantity), and units sold per category.

• Customers. Which customers have spent the most, with how many invoices each.

• Money owed to you. The total overdue and the total still open across your invoices, plus the outstanding balance for any customer you name.

• Income and expenses. Sales against recorded expenses and purchase invoices for a period, the difference between them, and a month-by-month view.

• Seasonality. Revenue for each month of the year, so you can see which months carry the business.

Five habits for better answers

1. Always give a period. This is the single biggest improvement you can make. Without a date range, many of these reports cover your entire trading history rather than the week you had in mind. Everyday phrases work — last month, this quarter, since 1 March — and Foresight turns them into exact calendar dates based on today's date in your business's own time zone.

2. Ask one thing, then follow up. A conversation keeps its context. Start with “How is this month tracking against last month?” and follow with “Which payment methods made up the difference?” without restating the dates. A few short steps give clearer answers than one question with five parts.

3. Say what you are deciding. “Which products should I reorder this week?” gets a more useful reply than “show me stock levels.” When Foresight knows the decision, it leads with the products at or below their low-stock level instead of walking through your whole catalogue.

4. Pick the store first. If you run more than one location, answers follow the store selector at the top of the app: choose a single store to ask about that location, or All Stores for the whole business. Customer balances are the exception and always cover the whole business. Staff accounts assigned to a store see figures for that store.

5. Name the customer. For a specific account, include the customer's name — “How much does Harbour Café owe us?” — and Foresight looks that customer's balance up directly.

Questions worth trying this week

• “How are we doing today, and is anything overdue or running low?”

• “How is this month tracking against last month?”

• “How much is overdue right now?”

• “What should I reorder before the weekend?”

• “How did last week's sales split between cash and card?”

• “Which months brought in the most revenue this year?”

What it will not do

A good assistant is clear about its limits, so here are Foresight's:

• It cannot change anything. Foresight only reads reports. It cannot raise an invoice, edit a price or send a reminder, so asking a question never alters your records.

• It only sees your business. It has no access to other companies' data, so it will not benchmark you against the market.

• It reports rather than forecasts. Its answers describe what has already happened in your data, not what will happen next.

• It is not your formal profit and loss statement. The income-and-expenses answer is a quick operating view. For the double-entry figures your accountant works from, use the Income Statement in the Accounting module.

• Some questions have no report behind them yet. Amounts owed to individual suppliers, payroll and tax returns are examples. For questions like these it is instructed to tell you it cannot answer, rather than guess.

Where to find it

Ask Foresight lives in the AI Insights tab of the Reports module and is included on the Professional and Enterprise plans — see pricing for what each plan includes.

If you are new to Foresight, start with our introduction to Foresight AI. If the stock answers surprise you, why real-time inventory matters explains what inaccurate counts cost a business.

The best test is your own numbers. Book a demo and bring the question you normally spend Monday morning answering.