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 now 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.

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 two 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.

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. Three points matter here:

The ZEP Assistant is switched on by default. In ZEP Clock the switch has no effect while the pause lasts, see the section Product line availability. 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, with the receipt analysis next to it.

The AI Assistant page holds two switches:

The entry next to it controls whether ZEP fills in the receipt data automatically when reading PDFs and images. On that page you find the switch Use AI receipt analysis when uploading receipts, enabled by default. If you turn it off, employees still record their receipts, only without automatically prefilled fields. The entry appears as soon as receipts are available. The pause of the ZEP Assistant in ZEP Clock does not apply to receipt analysis, it keeps working independently. It belongs to receipt capture rather than to the assistant and appears only when the Receipts module is booked. When the receipt analysis is off, employees enter the receipt themselves as usual.

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, which makes questions about processing, storage and access entirely reasonable. The following sections answer them.

The assistant runs on Amazon Web Services in the Frankfurt data centre. Your requests do not leave the European Union, no transfer to third countries takes place, and no data goes directly to model manufacturers or other AI providers. The voice input is also processed through AWS in the EU.

The language model currently in use is Claude. ZEP reserves the right to use a different model in future in order to offer the best quality. Every model runs exclusively in the EU, so a change of model makes no difference to data protection.

The assistant is part of ZEP and inherits its security concept: a separate database per tenant, encrypted transmission between browser and ZEP, and the complete change log.

Your entries and the data the assistant processes in doing so are not used to train AI models. The operator does not store the requests beyond the processing itself. In practical terms: what you ask the assistant and what it answers feeds neither into a model nor into the results of other companies. Every request stands on its own.

No additional service provider is involved for the assistant. Amazon Web Services is already the hosting partner of ZEP today and is listed as a sub-processor in the data processing agreement. You find the agreement in the administration under Account.

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.

Absence reasons such as Sick are health data within the meaning of Article 9 GDPR. ZEP already processes this data today in absence management. The assistant is a further way of evaluating it and behaves like the familiar reports: it shows a person only the absences they may also see in the existing overviews. This creates no additional processing of health data, and no new health data is collected.

Your chat histories are stored in your ZEP database, not with the AI provider. Fixed periods apply to them:

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.