Support Built Into Every Screen — And AI Paste Everywhere Else

Ritzy is a large system, and the answer to "how do I do this?" is usually somewhere in a manual nobody has read yet. That has always been the honest weakness of deep software: the capability is there, but finding it costs a phone call, and the phone call costs a morning.

So we put the answer in the product. There is now a support assistant in the top bar of every screen in Ritzy Shipping and every one of the phone apps — and alongside it, the AI paste window that used to live only on the job card now works on every entry screen in the system.

A Headset Button, Beside the Help Button

The two do different jobs, and it is worth being precise about which is which. Help opens the manual for the screen you are on. Support answers a question.

Click it and a panel opens down the right-hand side. The screen behind it stays where it is, so you can read the answer and follow it at the same time — no modal to dismiss, no losing the half-entered voucher underneath.

Ask the way you would ask a colleague at the next desk. Full sentences are fine; so are half sentences.

• "How do I post a purchase voucher against a job?" — a how-do-I question, answered with a link to the exact page of the manual.
• "My trial balance does not agree with the ledger — where do I look?" — a symptom, not a diagnosis. You do not need to know which screen is at fault; that is the thing you are asking.
• "Should a customer deposit be revenue or a liability?" — a question about accounting practice rather than about software. It answers those too.
• "Can I reverse a batch of vouchers in one go?" — and if the answer is no, it files the feature request with us directly.

It remembers the conversation, so the follow-up "and for a credit note?" does what you would expect.

It Knows Where You Are. It Cannot See What You Have.

Two properties matter here, and they pull in opposite directions.

The assistant is told which module and screen you had open when you asked. That is what makes "how do I add a line here?" a sensible question instead of a riddle. You never have to explain where you are standing.

It cannot read your data. Not your ledger, not your jobs, not your customers. It answers questions about Ritzy — so it can tell you how to find an invoice, but not what that invoice totals. For figures, you use the Reports menu or the Ask Ritzy app. Your question and your user name go to Ritzy so we can answer it and follow up; nothing is read out of your database to do it.

Dictation follows the same rule. Speak instead of typing and the words are turned into text by the browser on your own machine — no audio is sent to us. That works in Chrome, Edge and Safari, and on Android and iPhone. Firefox has no speech recognition of its own, so the microphone button simply does not appear there rather than pretending to listen.

When It Is Not a Question: Raising a Ticket

Some problems are not questions about the software at all. "Our invoice print shows the wrong branch address" is not something an assistant can answer — only somebody inside your company can open Company settings and fix it.

So there are tickets, raised from the Ritzy Support app on your phone. One line describing the problem, what you expected and what happened instead, a priority, and — the most useful thing you can attach — a photograph of the screen. Up to six. A picture of "it looks wrong here" explains more than a paragraph ever does.

The ticket gets a reference of its own, stamped with the screen you were on and the build you are running, so nobody has to ask you which version you have. Your administrators are notified immediately, and when somebody answers, you are notified back — in the desktop notification centre, and on your phone if you have Ritzy Notify installed.

Anyone can raise one. Needing help is not a permission, and the people who most need to ask are usually the ones with the fewest rights — so raising a ticket requires nothing to be granted to you. Answering is restricted to administrators.

When It Turns Out to Be Our Fault

Some tickets are not your administrator's to answer either. If the software itself is wrong, they can pass the ticket to us from Tools → Support Tickets with Send to Ritzy.

Your ticket then shows With Ritzy and carries our reference, so you know who you are waiting on — the single most annoying thing about support queues is not knowing whose desk a problem is sitting on. When we reply, the answer appears under Reply from Ritzy, word for word as we wrote it, not relayed and softened by someone in between.

If your site is offline when the button is pressed, the ticket queues and sends itself when the connection returns. The text goes first and any screenshots follow, picking up by themselves if the connection drops part-way. Nothing is lost and nobody has to remember to try again.

This is also the one and only place where anything from your installation reaches us — whatever was typed into that ticket, and any screenshot deliberately attached to it. It is never automatic, and an administrator has to choose to send it.

Ritzy Support: The Seventh Phone App

The assistant reaches your phone in two forms, and they are the same service underneath — so an answer rated helpful on a phone improves the answer the next person gets at a desk.

• Ritzy Support, an app of its own. For the question with no screen behind it — you are at home, in a meeting, or new enough not to know which app to open. It is the only place that keeps a History, so last week's answer is still there this week. Tap a past question to reopen the whole conversation.
• The headset button inside the other apps. In Track, Dues, CRM, Delivery, Notify and Ask Ritzy it sits in the top bar and opens a sheet over what you are doing, so the assistant already knows which app and which tab you mean.

On Ritzy Dues — the app you hand to your own customers — it is deliberately scoped narrower. It will help them find an invoice or share a document, and when asked about the balance itself it says plainly that it cannot see the account and points them back to you. An assistant that guesses at a customer's ledger would be worse than none.

That takes the companion range to seven apps, all installed from a QR code in Tools → PWA Apps.

AI Paste, Now on Every Entry Screen

When Ritzy Shipping launched, AI paste did one job: drop in an enquiry email, get a job card filled in. It was the most-used new feature in the product, which told us something — so it is now on every entry screen in the system, not just the job card.

Sea and air jobs, import and export. Quotations, vouchers and billing documents. Liner, marine, transport, warehouse and shipchandling entry. Purchase and journal entry, post-dated cheques, recurring journals, payroll runs. Tariff rate cards, milestone templates, cost allocation. Customer, supplier and employee masters.

Paste an email, paste an extract from a spreadsheet, or dictate it. Ritzy reads out the fields and shows you what it found before anything is committed — you confirm, you do not discover.

Behind the same window is CSV import, with a template you can download to start from. The tedious half of going live — loading masters somebody keeps in a spreadsheet — stops being a support engagement and becomes something you do yourself in an afternoon.

On the CRM app there is a smaller version of the same idea: photograph a visiting card and the contact is read off it and filed, which is roughly the whole point of taking the card in the first place.

Nothing to Switch On

The assistant needs no permission granted and no setup. It appears for every user on a licensed installation with a route out to the internet. If your site cannot reach the support service — the connection is down, or we are updating it — your own server answers instead and marks the reply as an offline answer, so you know to treat anything naming a specific screen or field with more care and check the manual.

The thumbs up and thumbs down under each answer are not decoration. They are how it gets better, and the improvement is central: a correction from one site improves the answer everyone else receives.

See It Against Your Own Data

The fastest way to judge any of this is to put your own jobs and your own questions through it. Tell us which lines you operate and we will show you a build with those modules switched on.