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Owner handbookUpdated 2026-07-03

Ask Sarah & escalations

Two halves of the same idea. Ask Sarah is you telling the business what to do — out loud, hands-free. Escalations is the business telling you what it couldn't settle on its own. Between them, the day runs without you touching a keyboard.

Ask Sarah — the business by voice

The green mic in the middle of the tab bar (or the Ask Sarah — hands-free card on Today) starts a live, open-mic call with Sarah — the same AI that answers your business line, with live captions on screen and Mute and End buttons. Talk normally; no button-holding.

What you can do that the crew can't

The crew get a small, practical voice toolset — add a note, extend a job. As the owner you get the full operator toolset, including everything money-related that the crew never get by voice:

  • mark a job complete and finalise its invoice
  • add or remove invoice lines
  • read an invoice summary, list unpaid invoices, record a payment
  • hear a revenue summary and time-on-job figures
  • list cancellations and look up crew

Worked examples

  • "What's still unpaid?" — Sarah reads the list and offers: "shall I chase them?"
  • "How did we do this week?" — the revenue summary, spoken.
  • "Add an hour's labour to the Carter invoice." — Sarah reads the change back; it only lands after you say yes.
  • "Extend my current job 45 minutes and text the next customer." — one sentence, the whole knock-on handled.

The security model doesn't relax on your own phone

Financial actions ask for your voice PIN before they run. High-stakes ones — finalising a big invoice, removing an invoice line — re-prompt for a fresh PIN even mid-call. And every write follows the two-step rule: Sarah reads the exact action back, and nothing happens until you say yes. The full model is in Voice PIN & operator mode.

Ask Sarah needs the full app build. If your business hasn't finished voice setup, the screen says so plainly — "Voice isn't set up for this business yet" — rather than pretending.

Escalations — the queue that needs a human

The header sets the tone: "N open · Sarah couldn't settle these alone." Three tabs with live counts — Open, Acknowledged, Resolved — and the open ones also appear under NEEDS YOU on the Today screen, with the count on the Today tab's red badge.

What's on a card

Each card is built so you can act without ringing anyone first:

  • Who called and what happened, in plain words.
  • SARAH'S PROPOSED FIX — always two parts: how to handle this caller now, and how to stop the same thing happening again. The second part is the one that shrinks the queue over time.
  • Provenance — "Flagged by Sarah" and when.

The three buttons

  • Acknowledge — claims it, so the rest of the team knows it's yours.
  • Mark resolved — closes it. Both are real updates, shared with the web queue instantly.
  • Call back — dials the customer from your phone.

The promise on the screen

The footer isn't decoration — it's the contract: "Sarah only escalates what she can't settle herself — she never promises money or reads your internal notes to a customer. A failed text or email still lands here, so nothing slips." That last line matters: delivery failures escalate too, so a bounced email never becomes a no-show you find out about on the doorstep.

The deeper work — recurring patterns, root-cause analysis, the "fix one, kill ten" view — lives on the web escalations page.

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