Des

The advisor can read your live numbers, look up customers and invoices, generate documents and make changes for you. It is the same advisor on both form factors and it remembers the conversation across them.

There is no answer-length dial: Des matches the length of its answer to the question. Tone changes the voice — Sharp is no fluff, Warm is friendly, Analytical leads with data — and bluntness decides how much cushion comes before a hard number. You can also tell Des a preference in chat ("stop telling me that"), and it can remember it for later conversations.

Images get read visually — a nameplate, a whiteboard, a paper work order — and PDFs get read as documents. Pick the file, add your question if you have one, and send. It is the fastest way to turn a photo of a work order into an invoice.

Outward-facing sends and irreversible changes — customer email, emailing your CPA, marking a commission paid, or deleting a payment, expense or customer — stop for a confirm popup. Smaller removals, including customer notes and email drafts, happen with a five-minute undo chip. Nothing is sent without your confirmation.

Des opens with a line above the message box that says what you are asking about — the invoice, or the first look figure with its period — and a question already typed for you. Nothing is sent until you press send, and you can change the question or press Clear to drop the line. Des does not trust the number you saw on the screen: it looks the record up again for this business when you ask, and if the figure changed since you opened the screen, or the invoice is paid or gone, it says so. It never sends or changes anything because of that line. The handoff lives only in the open tab: it is not kept in the address bar or in your browser's storage, and switching to another business drops it.

Des reads the same records every page reads — your transactions, invoices, quotes, jobs, customers, team and tax position — and a money answer is computed from those rows before it is worded, so the total on the chip is the total on the Money page. It does not guess at what it cannot see: a job with no costs attached is reported as unknown margin, not 100%; a business with no industry set gets no benchmarks; a connection that has not synced in two days is named before any figure is quoted. Product questions are answered from the same written reference as these docs, and where that reference is silent Des says it is not certain rather than inventing a settings path. What Des shows is the evidence, the conflicts, the limits and the next action — the decision stays yours.

Des runs on the assists included in your plan — 750 a month on the base plan — and an assist is measured by what the work actually cost, so a quick question uses fewer than a long, deep one, and Add-ons → Plan says about how many questions your plan covers. DeskOps tells you at 90%, before anything costs extra. Past your included assists, extras are on unless you turn them off: each extra assist is 3¢ ($30 per 1,000, prorated), up to a monthly limit on extras you set. If your account is moving from an earlier rate, Boost shows your current rate and the scheduled renewal date. Your current period keeps its rate; increases receive at least 30 days of written notice. With extras off, or at that limit, Des pauses new messages until your month resets or you allow more extras, and tells you the exact reset day. An answer already started can finish. Help still answers how-to questions. Phone calls with Des are separate: a $20 pack of five calls from Boost.

Open Ask Des → gear → Knowledge to inspect saved facts and preferences for this business, including unpinned facts. Edit a wrong fact with Save correction, or Forget it (Undo is available for facts). The same Knowledge screen lists active business rules under Rules Des follows. Forget rule stops using that instruction in future answers. Rules and notes are listed separately; forget each entry you no longer want used. It also lists the category suggestions and vendor names learned from Expenses; Forget rule stops using one for future entries/imports and leaves existing expenses as they are. Category rules suggest a category for your review; they do not silently change the books. A saved correction replaces the old fact for future answers; it does not change transactions or other business records. If saving fails, the draft stays available and Des does not claim it saved. Conversation facts are not automatically pinned, and not every message is saved. A rule such as "we never work Sundays" can be remembered; the name Des uses for you is a separate setting. Open the gear in Ask Des → AI Settings to change your nickname, tone or bluntness.

In-app voice is a live conversation — you talk, it talks back, and you can interrupt it.

Calling Des by dialling a number works only once the phone line is switched on. When it is on, the owner sees Des's number with Add to contacts at the top of Ask Des, and registers their own phone under Phone enrollment; only that registered phone gets through. When it is not on yet, Phone enrollment says so and Ask Des shows no number to ring. Either way you can talk to Des out loud right now: the call button on the Ask Des page starts a voice call in the app, on a computer or a phone. Those calls come out of a balance of calls, not minutes — a $20 pack from Boost is five calls, and a call under fifteen seconds is not counted.

Tools holds the niche tools for your trade. They are structured workflows rather than chat — you fill in typed fields, every input is checked again before anything is made, and you get a branded PDF out. For anything else — a free-form brief, a letter, or reading a photo — just ask Des in chat or attach the file with the + button.

The set you see is driven by the industry on your business profile, so if the list looks wrong for your trade, check Settings → Business details → Industry first. Each tool is built for a specific job in that trade and produces a document you can hand to a customer.

Tools use the inputs you enter and the business details you have saved; your name, location and logo appear when those details are available. Some tools provide labelled estimates or typical ranges, which are not recorded business results or a final customer price. Fill in the required inputs, and review the document before sharing it.

The set you get is chosen by the industry on your business profile, so a roofer and a hair salon see different tools. They cover the paperwork a job actually needs — proposals, scopes, letters and summaries — and each one comes out as a PDF. If you need a Word file, ask Des in chat to write the document as Word instead. If the list looks wrong for your trade, the industry on your profile is the thing to change.

Every document the Tools make is kept for as long as your business is on DeskOps, and the newest ones sit at the top of the Tools drawer under Recent documents, one tap from opening. An old link opens too: DeskOps signs a fresh one when you tap it. On a computer you can also press Command-K (Quick find) and type the document's name.

Your allowance refreshes on your billing day every month, even on an annual plan. Unused assists do not roll over. Most things use less than one assist. A deep question usually uses about 5–10; the base allowance covers about 100 deep questions, or a mix of questions and other work. At 3¢ per extra assist, a typical extra deep question costs about 21¢ (about 15–30¢ for 5–10 assists). No single action counts more than 50 assists; DeskOps covers the excess without using your allowance or adding to your bill. The monthly reset date refreshes your allowance; a separately labelled price-change date changes only the rate on extra assists, after notice.