What is the analyst?

The analyst is the front door of Tideswell. It sits on your home page, you type a question in ordinary English, and it answers from your own live data: sales, stock, suppliers, purchase orders, decisions and marketing.

"How did we do yesterday, and what moved" is a question rather than a report you have to build.

Why is this different from a dashboard?

Because a dashboard answers the questions somebody anticipated when they built it, and the useful question is usually the next one.

A chart can show revenue down 12%. It cannot tell you that the drop is one product, that the product went oversold on Tuesday, that the purchase order covering it is nine days late, and that this mill has been late on six of its last ten deliveries.

The analyst reads all of those at once because they are all in Tideswell. That is the whole argument for having the store data next to the supply chain and the conversation.

What can it look at?

Live reads across your workspace, including:

• Sales: revenue, orders and average order value for today, the last 7 days and the last 30 days, each against the period before, plus a day-by-day series going back up to 90 days.
• Stock: what is running out, stock per location, days of cover, and how big the fulfilment backlog is.
• Products: what sells fastest and slowest, and one named product over any date range.
• Supply: who supplies a brand, a supplier's terms and on-time record, which purchase orders are open or late, and what a delivery cost landed.
• Marketing: your Klaviyo audience segments and lifecycle flows.
• Decisions: what your business decided, why, what was rejected, and what the outcome was.

See How to ask about stock, suppliers and marketing for how to ask about each.

What does it deliberately not do?

Two rules, and both are choices rather than gaps.

It only reads. The analyst can look things up and cannot change anything, in Shopify, in Klaviyo or in Tideswell. It will not place an order, move stock, edit a segment or create a record.

It works in aggregates. There is no way for it to look up an individual customer, an email address or a single order, and it will tell you so if you ask. Your customer data cannot leave through a question.

When you do want one person's history, that is the customer directory, per How to find a customer and read their history.

Can you check its work?

Yes, and you should. Every answer carries chips naming what it looked at, and a What I checked section holding its confidence, its caveats, and the actual figures it used.

That section is what makes the answers usable in a meeting. See How to check where the figures came from.

Two habits it keeps that are worth knowing. A figure it could not read is reported as missing rather than as zero, so a delivery with no recorded cost reads "not recorded" rather than nothing. And when it reports a decision alongside a measured outcome, it will not claim one caused the other.

Who can use it?

Every role by default, members included.

What it can answer varies with what you can see. Supplier, purchase order and decision questions need those areas' own view permissions, and the analyst refuses by name and tells you which one to ask for. Money figures you are not entitled to see are left out of an answer entirely rather than shown as zero.

Where to go next

How to use the one-click digest buttons is the fastest start: seven prepared questions, one click each. Then How to ask the analyst a question for asking your own.