How to check where the figures came from

Every answer in the Agent panel (the orb on the right edge of every page) carries its own evidence: the steps it took sit above the text, and What I checked sits below it. This page is how to read both. For the Agent itself, see What is the Agent?.

What are the steps above an answer?

A list of what the Agent actually looked at, one row per step: "Reading sales", "Checking stock", "Reading purchase orders", "Reading Klaviyo segments", "Reading the help pages" and so on. Once the answer lands they fold under a line such as Worked for 4s or 3 steps.

Press that line to open them, and read them first. They tell you whether the answer is built on the thing you meant, and an answer about stock that never checked stock is answering a different question.

A step whose icon has turned amber is a read that failed. The answer was written without it, and that is exactly when to read the note under What I checked.

What is in "What I checked"?

Press What I checked under the answer and it opens three things:

• Confidence: high, medium or low, for how sure the Agent is about what it told you.
• Note: what it could not see. This is where a disconnected integration or a failed read gets declared.
• The evidence: a list of the specific figures the answer was built from.

The evidence is the part to use. When somebody asks where a number came from in a meeting, it is on screen rather than something you have to go and rebuild.

How should you read confidence and the note?

As the useful half of the answer.

A high-confidence answer with no note can be acted on. A confident-sounding answer whose note says the last 30 days of Klaviyo data were unavailable is a different thing, and the prose alone will not always make that obvious.

Check the note before you quote a figure to anybody. It takes five seconds, and it is the difference between an answer you can trust and one that merely reads well.

What does "not recorded" mean?

That the figure was never written down, as against being zero.

A delivery whose landed cost nobody entered is reported as not recorded rather than as no cost. A supplier with no scored deliveries reports no data rather than 0% on time.

Why are money figures missing from my answer?

Because you do not hold the permission that covers them, so they are left out entirely rather than shown as zero.

Order values and delivery costs need View purchase orders and the buying calendar. A zero would imply a cost was nothing, so the Agent says less rather than mislead you. See How to work out who can do what in your workspace.

What will it never claim?

That one thing caused another.

When it reports a decision beside a measured outcome, it puts them side by side and does not join them. "We ordered early from Kaimen Knitwear and sell-through was 18% up" is two facts, and only a person who knows the business should decide whether one explains the other.

That restraint is what makes the decision log worth reading, per What are decisions and track records?.

Can you get the underlying screen instead?

Usually, and it is worth doing when a number is going to drive a purchase. A product chip in an answer opens that product in your Shopify admin, in a new tab.

The same figures have full screens under Selling, covered in What is Store analytics? and What is Inventory?. Use the Agent to find what to look at, then look at it.