Ask the Assistant About Your Own Parlé Setup

This page is for everyone. It covers the questions you can ask the assistant about your own Parlé setup and your firm’s documents — the things it used to guess at, and now looks up. There are two halves, and they work differently:

• Your live setup — budgets, models, tools, storage, spend. These change by the hour, so the assistant queries them the moment you ask.
• Your firm’s documents — policies, handbooks, methodology. These are written and change rarely, so the assistant searches them and quotes the relevant passage with a citation.

You do not have to know which is which, or switch anything on. Just ask.

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Questions about your setup

Ask these in the conversation where you are already working, rather than leaving to hunt through a settings screen.

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In a project conversation

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In a personal conversation

Everything from the project list works here too.

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How to tell it looked something up

Above the answer you will see a line naming what the assistant is doing:

Checking the project’s budget
Checking which models are available
Checking which tools are available here
Looking up your organisation’s spend
Looking up the project team
Searching your organisation’s knowledge

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Why some questions are only answered in a personal conversation

This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth understanding rather than working around. A project conversation is shared. Everyone in the project sees it, and one answer goes to all of them. So in a project thread the assistant will only tell you things every member of that project can already see on screen for themselves. Your organization’s total spend across every client is not one of those things. So if you ask for it in a project thread, the assistant answers the part it can — this project’s budget — and declines the rest. It is not being obtuse, and asking again will not help: the figure would land in every member’s view and stay in the thread permanently. Ask it in your own personal conversation instead, where the audience is one person.

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Being on your own does not make you an admin

In a personal conversation the assistant still checks your role. If you are not an Org Admin, asking about organization-wide spend gets you your own usage for that period — never the firm’s. That is the same rule the admin screens already apply; the conversation is not a way around it.

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What the spend figures mean

Spend comes back split by who it is owed to, and deliberately never added up:

• Your own provider keys — usage billed to you directly by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google or whoever holds the account.
• Parlé-managed models — usage drawn from your prepaid credit.

Every figure names its currency, and says how it was arrived at. The assistant is handed a finished figure with its three-letter code — for example £4,230.00 GBP — and a sentence about its basis, which it quotes rather than working anything out itself. It is never given an exchange rate, so it cannot convert a figure on its own. You will see one of three kinds of sentence:

• No conversion was needed — the figures are “exactly as recorded against your usage — no exchange rate was applied”.
• Converted — the figures were converted at the exchange rate Parlé published for the month named, or, across several months, each month at its own rate and then added together, with the months listed.
• Approximated — some usage was recorded before Parlé published a rate for that currency, so it was converted at the earliest rate Parlé holds.

Organization spend is given in your organization’s reporting currency. Your prepaid credit balance is the exception: it is held in US dollars and is not converted, and the assistant says so. In a project, if the caps and the spend figure are in different currencies, the assistant gives both but will not subtract one from the other to tell you what “remains” — it says why instead. See Currencies and Exchange Rates. A single total would mean two different things at once, so you will not be given one. The managed figure is described as an estimate: it is worked out by applying today’s settings to past usage, so if your access mode or pricing changed mid-period it will not match exactly. Your credit history is the authoritative record — see the Usage screen for that.

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Questions about your firm’s documents

If an Org Admin has set up organization knowledge, you can ask about your firm’s written policies in the same breath:

“What does our expenses policy say about booking flights for a client visit?"
"What’s our standard notice period in an engagement letter?"
"Do we have a policy on using client data for training?”

While it searches, you will see Searching your organisation’s knowledge above the answer. If no such line appeared, the assistant did not read your documents for that answer, so do not rely on it as policy — ask again in a fresh conversation. You will get the relevant passage, followed by a citation — the document name and version, as a link you can click to open the document itself. Three things worth knowing:

• The citation is trustworthy by construction. Its label is resolved from Parlé’s own record of the document, not written by the assistant — so it cannot cite one document and link to another, and it cannot invent one.
• Hover the citation to see the effective date of the version that was quoted.
• A retired policy cannot be quoted. When your firm supersedes a document, the old version comes out of the index — so you will not get a confidently-cited answer from a policy that no longer applies. In an older conversation, a citation to a since-retired document shows as [document unavailable] rather than opening.

If nobody has set this up yet, the assistant simply will not have anything to quote. Organization knowledge is available on the Business Elite plan and above — point your Org Admin at Set Up Organization Knowledge.

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Troubleshooting