The ZEP Assistant answers questions about your data in ZEP and, on request, also makes changes. You write or speak your question in ordinary language, the assistant gathers the relevant data and answers directly in the chat. It works exclusively with ZEP and always only with the data you are allowed to see yourself.

For a question about your figures, use the assistant. It also answers questions about how to operate ZEP and links the matching Help Center article, which opens directly inside ZEP. For a request to support, continue to use the help area.

You open the assistant using the chat button at the bottom of the window. Its width can be changed, so you can carry on working in ZEP alongside it.

Every conversation is saved and stays available through the history. Starting a new chat begins a conversation without the previous context, which makes sense when you change topic.

When you open it, the assistant suggests example questions as clickable tiles. A click puts the question into the input field, where you can adjust it before sending, for example the period.

If you do not know where to start, ask the assistant directly what it can do for you. It answers with suggestions that can also be clicked.

Besides typing, two further ways are open to you:

The assistant reaches into the areas you work with in ZEP. The following examples show the range but are not a complete list.

Questions about projects, work packages and recorded times are the largest area. You can narrow things down by duration, status, internal and customer projects, keywords and project members. For bookings, time windows are also possible, for example bookings starting before a certain time of day.

You ask about master data, absences and leave entitlements, for yourself and, if you have the rights, for your team. Typical questions are the remaining leave in the current year, planned absences within a period and who is away on a particular day. Without read access to an employee, the assistant gives no information on them.

Customer data, offers with status and validity, and invoices with payment state and dunning runs can be queried. This lets you find all offers expiring in the next few weeks, for example, or all open invoices of a customer. These areas require the corresponding modules, meaning quotation management and invoicing.

The assistant knows tickets, work items and resource planning. You can ask about the utilization of a team within a period, the open work items of a project or the processing state of tickets. Resource planning is not limited to reading: it can also create and change plannings. Here too the corresponding modules have to be booked, meaning the ticketing system and resource planning.

Receipts can be queried by billing state and category, as can their assignment to projects and trips. This shows you which receipts of a month have not been billed yet, for example. The assistant reads the receipt data, but it does not check receipts for content and does not replace a travel expense report. Reading date, amount and receipt type from an uploaded file is handled by the AI receipt analysis.

The assistant can not only read data but also write it. You can ask it to create a time booking or change a date on a project, for example.

One example is submitting bookings for approval when the Multi-level approval workflow is active in your account.

When booking times it observes the settings of your company: it offers only projects you are assigned to and that may be booked on, and it checks the configured minute grid. If a time you name does not fit the grid, it asks before saving. For bookings across several days you can give an end time instead of a duration.

It presets the Work Location like the project time form, with the location of your last booking if the project allows it, otherwise with the project's first location. If you name a work location, it books that one. It takes over Location Project-Relevant from your last booking only for the same work location; for a different work location the option is set.

The recording period follows the same rules as recording in ZEP: you create and change your own bookings within your recording period. Anyone allowed to edit other employees' project times, for example as department manager, can change their bookings through the assistant outside this period as well. Approved periods, month closings and billed times block a change in both cases.

Before every change, the assistant shows what it intends to do and waits for your confirmation. Only then does it write the data. What you are allowed to change follows your rights in ZEP, the assistant grants no additional permissions. When you confirm, ZEP checks the permission again. In the change log such changes are marked as having been made through the assistant, so it stays traceable who changed what and when.

The assistant is deliberately limited to ZEP. These points matter here:

The ZEP Assistant is switched on by default. Whether it is available in your company is decided under Administration > ZEP AI Features > AI Assistant. The menu group carries every AI feature as an entry of its own. Next to it is the entry Receipt Analysis, described in the article AI receipt analysis.

The AI Assistant page holds two switches:

The switches take effect immediately for all employees. Opening the page and saving it are two separate rights in the administration area.

The assistant works with your company data. The following sections explain who gets to see what, and how long chats are kept.

The assistant always works with the permissions of the person logged in. It sees only data that this person may open in ZEP anyway. Your roles and permissions concept continues to apply unchanged.

It also becomes active only when someone addresses it. It does not search your data on its own in the background and makes no automated decisions about employees. How the preview and the confirmation before a change work is described in the section Changing data.

The assistant is a further way of evaluating absence management and behaves like the familiar reports: it shows a person only the absences they are also allowed may also see in the existing overviews.

Fixed periods apply to your chat histories:

You find your own data processing agreement in the administration under Account, described in Account – Administration.

Below every answer you can indicate whether it was helpful. This feedback goes to the ZEP team and serves to improve the assistant. It does not trigger any handling of your request.

If you consider an answer wrong and need clarification, contact ZEP Support through the help area.