The AI Report Assistant lets you build a transaction report by simply describing what you want in plain English — typing or speaking — instead of setting every filter and column by hand. You say “total payments by category, by month, this year” and the assistant works out the report type, date range, grouping, and columns, shows you exactly what it plans to run, and fills in the builder for you when you approve.
The assistant is a helper for the report builder, not a separate report engine. Everything it produces lands in the normal builder controls, so you can review it, tweak it, save it, and export it exactly like any report you built by hand.
Where to Find It
Open a transaction report in the report builder. In the left-hand rail you’ll see an ✨ Assistant pane. Click it to open the chat.
The assistant is available on transaction and bill reports only (payments, gifts, bills). It does not appear on contact reports.
Your conversation stays with you while you work. If you flip over to Preview or another section of the rail and come back, the chat — including the report it just proposed — is still there.
How It Works
The assistant is conversational. It never runs anything behind your back: it clarifies, reads back exactly what it understood, and waits for you to press Run it.
- Describe the report. Type it in the box at the bottom of the pane, or tap the microphone and say it. Press Send (or Enter).
- Answer any questions. If something is ambiguous — for example the word “tuition” matches several categories — the assistant asks, and offers the real choices as clickable buttons. Click one, or type your own answer. (You can always answer by voice too.)
- Read the proposal. The assistant shows a short read-back of what it will run, plus any assumptions it made (for example, how it interpreted “this year”).
- Click “Run it.” The assistant fills in the builder controls — report type, dates, filters, grouping, columns, sort — and runs the preview.
- Review and refine. Look at the results in Preview. Adjust anything by hand, or just keep talking to the assistant (“now only credit cards”, “add the department column”). Save and export like any report.
Not sure where to start? When the chat is empty it shows a few starter prompts you can click to try. Use the ↻ (refresh) button next to them to see more ideas.
Speaking Instead of Typing
Click the microphone button and describe your report out loud. Your words appear in the box as you speak so you can review them before sending. Tap the microphone again to stop.
- Voice input works in modern browsers such as Chrome, Edge, and Safari.
- It needs a secure connection (which the CMS uses). If your browser doesn’t support voice, the microphone button simply won’t appear — just type instead.
- Dictation adds to whatever is already in the box, so you can type part of a request and dictate the rest.
What You Can Ask For
The assistant understands the same building blocks the report builder offers. You can combine any of these in one sentence:
| You can ask about… | Examples |
|---|
| Report type | “payments”, “gifts”, “unpaid bills”, “overdue bills” |
| Time period | “this year”, “last month”, “this quarter”, “the last 90 days”, “last 3 years” |
| Amounts | “payments over $500”, “gifts between $100 and $1,000”, “donors who gave more than $1,000” |
| Categories & funds | “building fund donations”, “tuition payments”, “everything except tuition” |
| Payment methods | “credit card payments”, “cash & check”, “all payments except cash” |
| People & groups | by solicitor, by department, from a specific mailing |
| Location | “donors in New York” (city, state, country, or ZIP) |
| Receipts | “payments still needing a receipt”, “payments with receipts sent” |
| Totals & breakdowns | “total giving by payment method”, “average gift by category”, “payments by category, by month”, “giving by category with years as columns” |
| Columns & sorting | “show donor name, amount and date”, “biggest first”, “newest first” |
It Chooses Sensible Columns For You
You don’t have to list every column. The assistant picks the columns a reader would actually want for that report — an overdue-bills report gets the billed, paid, and due amounts; a “call list” gets phone numbers. If you name the exact columns you want, it uses precisely those.
It Tells You the Truth
The assistant is designed to be honest rather than to guess:
- If your request is ambiguous, it asks rather than picking for you.
- If it genuinely can’t do something with a report (for example, a breakdown the builder doesn’t support), it says so and offers the closest option — it won’t pretend.
- If a report legitimately has no matching transactions, you’ll get a clean “no rows match” result — that’s a real answer, not an error.
- It only works with your organization’s data and only builds reports. It ignores off-topic requests and can’t be talked into anything else.
Teaching It About Your Organization
You can give the assistant a few standing instructions so it understands your organization’s language. A common example is a fiscal year:
If you tell it “our fiscal year runs July–June,” then a request for “this year’s giving” automatically uses your fiscal year instead of the calendar year.
Set these under Settings → Integrations → AI Assistant, in the instructions box. Keep them short and factual (fiscal year, what certain funds are called, etc.). These notes guide the assistant but can never override its safety and data rules.
Settings & Setup
Administrators manage the assistant under Settings → Integrations → AI Assistant:
- Enable / disable the assistant for your organization. When it’s off, the ✨ Assistant pane shows a short notice instead of the chat.
- Instructions — the standing notes described above.
- How it’s billed — use the built-in shared account, or bring your own AI provider account (see below).
Usage & Billing
There are two ways the assistant can be paid for:
| Mode | What it means |
|---|
| Shared account | The default. Usage is drawn from your CMS Cloud balance — the same prepaid balance used for SMS and address updates (NCOA). Each response shows a small cost, and your running balance appears at the bottom of the chat. |
| Your own account | Bring your own AI provider key in AI Settings. Usage is billed directly to your provider account, so no CMS Cloud balance is used and no per-response cost is shown. |
Under each reply you’ll see a small chip showing the tokens used (and, on the shared account, the cost). The footer shows “Powered by…” your active provider and, on the shared account, your current balance.
Running low? If your shared balance runs out, the assistant shows a red notice with an Add funds link. A small overdraft is allowed so a report in progress isn’t cut off, but once the balance is used up new requests are paused until you top up. Reports you already built are unaffected.
Good to Know
- You’re always in control. Nothing runs until you click Run it, and everything it does is an ordinary builder change you can undo or edit.
- Keep refining. After a report runs, just keep chatting to adjust it — change the date range, add a column, switch to totals, exclude a category.
- Save & export as usual. An AI-built report is a normal report: name it, save it, and generate the PDF or CSV the same way.
- Dates behave sensibly. “This month,” “last quarter,” and “the last 90 days” are calculated from today. If you’ve set a fiscal year in your instructions, “this year” follows it.
- Empty isn’t broken. A “no rows match” result usually means there really is no data for that period or filter — try widening the date range or removing a filter.