AI Sales Assistant and Natural Language Query

On Monday morning a sales manager wants to know which customers ordered less this quarter than last, and what that cost in gross margin. Every fact needed to answer that sits inside SAP Business One already: the sales orders, the deliveries, the A/R invoices, the item master costing and the business partner hierarchy. Answering it, though, means opening the query generator, remembering how ORDR joins to RDR1, deciding whether to measure on document date or posting date, and then formatting the result for a meeting. In practice the question is either never asked, or it lands on the one person who maintains the Crystal Reports library and comes back three days later, after the decision has already been made.

This add-on closes that gap. It puts a conversational layer in front of your SAP Business One company database so that people who will never write a query can ask in plain language and get an answer assembled from your own posted transactions, with the underlying figures and document numbers shown alongside so the answer can be checked rather than trusted blindly.

What ECOSIRE builds for you

This is a build-to-order engagement. There is no shrink-wrapped download and no ready-made binary waiting on a server. We build the add-on against your company database, your chart of accounts, your user-defined fields and your document flow, then install it for you.

The core of the build is a semantic layer defined during scoping: a curated map of the SAP Business One objects that actually matter to your business. That normally covers Business Partners (OCRD) and their addresses and contact persons, Items (OITM) and item groups, Sales Quotations and Sales Orders (ORDR/RDR1), Deliveries, A/R Invoices and Credit Memos (OINV/INV1), Purchase Orders and A/P Invoices, Journal Entries (OJDT/JDT1), Warehouses and per-warehouse stock (OITW), price lists, plus any UDFs and UDTs you rely on. Questions are resolved against that map instead of against a free-form guess at your schema, which is what keeps answers stable, repeatable and reviewable month to month.

Read access runs through the SAP Business One Service Layer (OData v4) where the object model is the natural fit, and through parameterised, read-only queries against the company database where an aggregation over many rows is more appropriate. Where a question implies a write — logging a follow-up activity against a business partner, flagging an account for review, raising a draft document — that write is executed through the DI API or the Service Layer under a named service user, and only for the specific actions you approve during scoping. Nothing writes to your database that was not agreed in writing first.

Grounded answers you can audit

Every answer carries its working. The assistant returns the metric definition it used, the date basis it applied (document date, posting date or due date), the filters in force, and a drill-through list of the actual document numbers behind the figure, so a controller can open the same documents in SAP Business One and reconcile. Where a question falls outside the semantic layer, the assistant says it cannot answer rather than inventing a number — this is the single most important design rule in the build, and we test it deliberately before handover.

Question shapes we typically implement include revenue and gross margin by customer, item, item group, sales employee, branch or warehouse; period-on-period and year-on-year comparison; open sales order backlog and its value; stock on hand versus committed and ordered; A/R ageing by business partner; slow-moving stock; and top or bottom N ranking against a threshold. Answers export to Excel, and any question can be pinned as a saved question so the same definition is reused next month instead of being re-derived.

Permissions, tenancy and logging

The assistant respects your SAP Business One authorisation model rather than working around it. During scoping we map which user groups may see cost and margin, which are limited to revenue only, and whether results should be automatically filtered by sales employee, branch or warehouse. Each question, the query it resolved to, the responding user and the timestamp are written to a log table in your database, so you can review exactly what was asked and what was returned. The deployment is per tenant: your data stays in your company database and is never pooled with another customer's.

Who it is for

Owner-managers and general managers who want the answer before the meeting rather than after it. Sales managers who watch margin and backlog daily and currently rely on exports. Finance teams who field the same ageing and cash questions every week from three different people. Operations and purchasing staff who need a stock or backlog answer without opening five windows and a query.

How delivery works

1. Scoping call. We walk your company database structure, your document flow, the UDFs you depend on, and the twenty to thirty questions you actually want answered. We confirm your SAP Business One version, database platform and hosting model. 2. Fixed quote. You receive a written scope and a fixed price before any build work starts. If the scope changes later, we requote rather than absorb it silently. 3. Build. We develop the semantic layer, the query resolution logic, the permission mapping and the user interface against a copy of your data or a representative test company. 4. Install into test. The add-on is installed into your test company database first. You ask real questions against real data and we tune definitions until the numbers match what your finance team expects. 5. Production. Once you sign off on the test company, we install into production, configure the service user and authorisations, and hand over the documentation. 6. Support window. A defined support period follows go-live for defect fixes and definition adjustments, with an optional ongoing agreement after that.

Typical lead time from signed quote to production install is two to four weeks, depending on how many question shapes are in scope and how quickly a test company can be made available.

What this add-on is not

It is not a replacement for your statutory reporting or your Crystal Reports library, and it is not a general-purpose chatbot that browses the internet. It does not restructure your data or migrate you to a new platform. It answers questions about the SAP Business One data you already have, inside the permission boundaries you already run, and it tells you when it cannot.