# How Dash answers a question about your shop without inventing a number

> What happens between 'how much did I sell yesterday?' and the answer: masking, tools that read your data with your permissions, an approval card for any change, the caps.

By The Dashing team · 2026-09-14

Canonical: https://dashing.krd/en/blog/how-dash-answers-without-inventing-numbers

AI assistants have a reputation problem in accounting: they sound confident and are sometimes wrong. A number that sounds right and is wrong is worse than no number. When we built Dash, the assistant inside Dashing (داشنك), the design goal was not "be smart" but **"never invent a number, never act alone"**. This article explains how that is enforced, step by step, and what Dash still cannot do.

![How Dash answers without inventing a number: the question, masking, the tool, approval](/diagrams/dash-answer-en.svg)

## 1. The question

You type in Arabic, Kurdish or English on the Dash screen: "how much did I sell yesterday?", "who has not paid for a month?", "what is about to run out?", "why did the margin drop in July?". Dash answers in the interface language you chose.

## 2. Masking before anything leaves

Before any request leaves for the AI model, **phone numbers, emails and account-like numbers are masked**. The model sees "customer C-1042 owes 450,000", not the customer's phone. Your product names and amounts are the context the model needs; your customers' identities are not.

## 3. Tools, not memory

The model never answers from memory or estimation. It calls a **tool**, a defined function that reads your data through the same permissions as the user asking. "Sales yesterday" runs the same query the sales report runs; "who has not paid" reads the same aging the customer page shows. If the data is not there, a report for a month before you joined, a branch you cannot see, the tool returns nothing and Dash says so instead of filling the gap.

Two consequences worth knowing:
- **Dash respects permissions**: a cashier who cannot open the profit screen cannot get the profit out of Dash either.
- **Every answer is traceable**: the figure in Dash's answer is the figure on the corresponding screen, so you can verify any answer by opening that screen.

## 4. Changes wait for you

When you ask Dash to *do* something, "raise the price of X to 3,000", "record 215,000 from Hajj Ahmed", "adjust the stock of Y to 12", it does not do it. It shows an **approval card** with the exact change. You approve or dismiss; nothing happens until you approve, and what you approve is written to the audit log under your name.

## 5. What Dash does every day without being asked

- A **morning summary** on the home screen built from six signals (yesterday's sales, margin, low stock, overdue customers, drawer variance and anomalies), each in one line.
- **Cards ranked by importance**, each with a button that takes you to the action.
- **Anomaly detection**: a negative-margin invoice, an outsized discount, an unbalanced entry, flagged before it becomes a loss.
- A **14-day cash projection** with a high and low band, and the overdue card with the count and the total owed.

## The caps

Messages are capped by plan: **10 an hour on the free plan, 100 on the yearly plan**. The cap is there because each question costs us a model call, and a runaway loop should not be able to burn through a shop's month.

## What Dash cannot do: by design

- It cannot invent a number. If it did, that would be a bug we would fix, not a feature.
- It cannot act on its own: no price changes, no payments, no deletions without an approval card.
- It cannot see what you cannot see.
- It does not work offline: the cashier does; Dash needs a connection.
- It does not send messages to your customers, and it does not read your WhatsApp.
- It is not a bookkeeper: it explains the books, it does not replace the accountant's judgement at year end.

## Where your data goes

Your data stays in Dashing; only the question and the necessary context are sent to the AI model, after masking. Every AI request is recorded in its own log. The [security page](/security) has the full picture, including what we have not done yet.

## Sources

- Dash, https://dashing.krd/en/features/dash (accessed 2026-09-14)
- Security, https://dashing.krd/en/security (2026-09-14)

## Other languages

- العربية: https://dashing.krd/blog/how-dash-answers-without-inventing-numbers

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Dashing · https://dashing.krd/en