Sharing your material

An office that has never seen your price list will write a quote that guesses. An office that has your catalogue writes one that is right. The half-hour you spend handing over material is the difference between the two, and it is the highest-value half-hour in this whole guide.

What is worth sharing

In rough order of what it changes:

1. Your price list. Nothing else moves quotes from plausible to correct.
2. Your catalogue or service list — what you sell, in your own words, with the distinctions that matter to you.
3. Your terms — delivery times, payment terms, warranty, anything a customer asks before buying.
4. Anything you find yourself typing twice. If you have explained it to your office once in conversation, it is written down. If you explain it to customers every week, it belongs here as a file.

You do not need to prepare any of it. Send what you have, in the shape you have it.

The way that works today: send it in the conversation

Attach the file to your conversation with your CEO and say what it is. That sentence matters more than the file name — “this is our price list, the second column is the trade price” teaches your office something a spreadsheet alone does not.

From the Knowledge page you can jump straight there with Attach files in chat. Everything you send shows up on that page under Ingest, with its state: Queued, In progress, Ingested, Failed, or Partly ingested.

Partly ingested deserves a word. It means the file arrived but could not be fully read — usually a scan or an image-heavy document. The page then tells you the way through: paste the text into the conversation, or send a text-based copy of the document. Your office does not quietly pretend it read something it could not.

Connecting a place your files already live

The Connectors page has a Knowledge sources block above the departments. It belongs to your whole office rather than to any one department, and it is for the case where your files already sit somewhere and you would rather not send them one by one.

What it offers depends on what is switched on for your office:

• Upload a file I should watch reads Coming soon today, with the page’s own words beside it: there is nothing to connect yet. When it arrives, this is how you hand over a file and ask your office to keep watching it.
• Google Drive, where it is offered, connects your drive and lets you pick which files your office may see. Where it is not offered, the page says so on the row rather than failing when you press the button. Learn more beside a row opens what that connection can and cannot do — and where the detail has not been written yet, it says that too instead of inventing it.

Picking a folder shares the files in it as they are today. When you add new ones, use Check for new files so your office sees them. That is not a limitation anyone hid from you; it is printed beside the picker.

Once a file is shared, its row can carry Use as price list. Marking one file that way tells your office which document to trust for prices when it writes a quote — worth doing the moment you have shared it.

Disconnecting clears your picked-file selection. Your own files are never touched.

What happens to what you share

It is read, written into your office’s own record, and used when your office answers you or writes something for you. You can read that record yourself on the Knowledge page, under What your CEO knows.

It stays inside your office. It is not shared with other businesses, and sharing a file with your office is not the same as publishing it — the material your website visitors may see is chosen separately, page by page, and you approve that list yourself.

If something in the record is wrong, tell your CEO in conversation. That is the correction procedure, and it is deliberately the same one you would use with a colleague.