Reports and Email
The assistant can turn a finding into a document, and send it on. These are the only two things it does that reach outside eConnect, and both act on your behalf.
Producing a PDF
Ask for a report — "put that in a PDF", "produce a report on this subject" — and the assistant generates one from what it has established in the conversation.
The document carries the substance of the answer: the figures, the tables, the charts, and any diagrams it drew. It is meant for a case file, a briefing or a handover, and it reads as a document rather than as a transcript of a chat.
For the standard subject and plate reports, with their own selectable options, use the module's own report feature instead — see PDF Reports. Ask the assistant when the thing you want reported is the enquiry you just did rather than one record.
Sending email
Ace can email a report or a finding to someone. It shows you the message first — who it is going to, the subject, the body and the attachments — as a card in the conversation with Send now and Cancel.
The card counts down and sends on its own after 45 seconds if you do neither. That is deliberate: the model is waiting on the other side of this card, and a request left sitting fails as a timeout rather than waiting for you indefinitely. Treat the card as the moment to object, not as a step to complete — if the message is wrong, or you are not ready, press Cancel and nothing is sent.
Where an attachment can no longer be resolved, the card says so, Send is disabled and the countdown does not run: an incomplete message is never sent on your behalf.
Email is delivered through the mail relay your administrator has configured. If sending fails, that configuration is the place to look — see Email.
Reports on a schedule
For something you need regularly rather than once, do not ask the assistant each time. Set up a subscription, which produces and delivers a report on a schedule with no one involved. See Subscriptions and Scheduled Reports.
| You want | Use |
|---|---|
| A document from this enquiry, now | Ask the assistant |
| A standard subject or plate report | The module's report feature |
| The same report every Monday | A subscription |
Recipients see only what they are entitled to
An emailed report is a document, and once sent it is outside eConnect's permission system — the recipient can read whatever it contains.
That is worth a moment's thought before sending. The report contains what you could see, so sending it to someone with narrower access hands them data they could not otherwise reach. This is not a fault in eConnect; it is what sending a document means, and the responsibility is yours.
What is recorded
Emails sent by the assistant are audited, so there is a record of what left the system and who asked for it. Conversations that produced reports are audited as chat activity. See What eConnect Audits.