Scout Assistant
Scout is currently in Early Access. Its understanding of your business improves as you use it. Scout chat is a paid add-on ($39/mo for 500 messages) — it is not included in any plan. See Account and Billing.
Scout is the in-app AI copilot built into ContractorScope AI. It rides along on every page, ready to answer questions about your business and make changes for you — without you having to hunt through menus. Open the Scout panel, type or speak what you need, and Scout does the work.
Think of Scout as an assistant who knows your contacts, projects, estimates, and schedule. You can ask it things ("How many leads do I have in 80906?") or tell it to do things ("Add a site visit for the Johnson project next Tuesday at 9").
What Scout Can Do
Scout works across your whole account — it has well over a hundred individual skills spanning every part of the app. You can ask it to:
- Manage contacts (CRM) — create a new contact, update an existing one (email, phone, status, address), add notes, and link contacts to projects. Scout checks for existing matches before creating a contact — see Scout Avoids Duplicate Contacts below.
- Manage projects — create a project, link it to a contact, and update its stage, dates, or price.
- Schedule your calendar — add site visits, calls, and production starts, or reschedule an existing event.
- Build and edit estimates — add, remove, or re-price line items, adjust markup and waste factors, change the job tier, regenerate or duplicate an estimate, and save and load templates. (Converting an estimate to a work order is a base "Convert to" toolbar action available on every plan, not a Scout-specific capability.)
- Send proposals and change orders — create and send proposals, and create, update, and send change orders to a customer.
- Handle invoices and financing — create and send invoices, mark an invoice paid, and send a financing link.
- Send emails and SMS — draft and send a message to a customer, and reply to an incoming communication.
- Update company settings — adjust company profile details, pricing and markup tiers, lead-capture and finance toggles, and voice-agent hours when you ask.
- Work with QuickBooks — adjust sync settings, send an estimate to QuickBooks, and manage the connection.
- Run imports — parse, preview, and execute a contact or estimate import on your behalf.
- Read and list your data — pull up contacts, projects, notes, communications, invoices, proposals, and upcoming calendar events, and run analytics on your business.
- Answer questions from your knowledge base — Scout draws on your company's saved policies, procedures, and pricing approach to give answers that fit how you work.
- Navigate the app — jump you to the right page when you ask where something is.
That's a partial list — Scout has roughly 150+ skills in total. The two things to remember are simple: it can read anything in your account instantly, and every change it makes is confirmed by you first.
Changes Are Confirmed Before They Happen
Anything that changes your data — creating or editing a record, scheduling an event, sending a message — is shown to you first. Scout describes exactly what it's about to do and waits for you to click Confirm (or Cancel). Nothing is created, edited, or sent until you approve it. Reading and answering questions happen right away; only changes are gated behind confirmation.
You can speak to Scout as well as type. When voice is on, Scout won't auto-send a one-word "yes" to confirm a change — you'll always tap the Confirm button so a stray word can't trigger an action by accident.
Starting a New Conversation
Click New chat (the ↺ icon in the Scout panel header) to start over with a clean conversation. If your prior conversation had any actual back-and-forth, it isn't deleted — it's archived so you can pick it back up later. A conversation you start but never actually send a message in has nothing to save, so New chat simply clears it.
On the full Scout page (/voice-assistant), archived conversations show up in the Chat History panel alongside the chat — click one to reopen and continue it.
Scout Avoids Duplicate Contacts
When you ask Scout to create a contact, it checks your existing contacts first so you don't end up with the same person twice.
- Matching email or phone — Scout treats this as the same person and updates the existing contact instead of creating a new one.
- Matching name, or the same street address and ZIP — Scout doesn't create a new contact automatically. It tells you a similar contact already exists (naming it, and noting "at the same address" when the address is what matched) and asks whether you want to update that contact or create a separate one anyway. Say something like "create it anyway" to have Scout create the new contact despite the match.
This applies whether you spell out the details in your request or just say something short like "create contact Dana Reyes" — either way, Scout runs the same duplicate check before it creates anything.
If a contact's address is incomplete when it's created (for example, missing a city or ZIP), Scout still saves what you gave it and adds a short note in its reply so you know the address needs filling in — it won't hold up the contact or grill you for the missing pieces up front.
What Scout Won't Do
Scout is deliberately limited to the things it should be doing for you. For your safety, it will not:
- Touch billing, subscriptions, or payments. Scout has no billing tools at all — it can't change your plan, charge a card, issue a refund, or alter your subscription. Those stay in Settings > Billing & subscription, where you're in full control.
- Delete or switch your account or company. Scout can't delete your account, remove you from a company, or create and switch between companies. Those are deliberate actions you handle yourself in Settings.
- Delete your records. Scout never deletes contacts, projects, estimates, or notes — there are no tools for it. If you ask Scout to delete one of these, it points you to where you can do it yourself, so nothing important disappears on a misread request. (Scout can make narrow, confirmed cleanups within a record you're editing — for example, removing a line item from an estimate draft, removing a custom field, disconnecting a calendar, or deleting a voice recording — but it never deletes the contact, project, estimate, or note itself.)
- Email people who aren't your contacts. When you ask Scout to send an email, the recipient must be a contact already in your CRM. Scout won't send to an arbitrary outside address you type in — this keeps your customer information from being sent out in bulk to people who aren't in your records. To email someone new, add them as a contact first.
- Go off-topic or unsafe. Scout politely declines requests that fall outside running your contracting business, and it won't act on prompts that try to trick it into unsafe behavior.
These limits aren't bugs — they're guardrails. The most sensitive actions in your account stay manual on purpose.
Scout Is Honest With You
Scout is built to tell you the truth about what it can and can't do. If you ask for something outside its abilities — like a billing change or a deletion — it says so plainly instead of pretending the job is done. You'll never get a cheerful "All set!" for an action that didn't actually happen. When Scout finishes a task, it tells you what succeeded; if part of a request failed, it tells you that too, in plain language. This includes updates: if you ask Scout to change a field it isn't able to save, it tells you that field wasn't saved instead of just saying "Done!" while quietly skipping it.
Scout always answers in plain language. Even when it's working with your data behind the scenes, you'll get a readable, human reply — never a raw block of technical output.
Tips for Getting the Most From Scout
| Tip | Example |
|---|---|
| Give details up front | "Add contact Olivia Reyes, email olivia@example.com, status lead" |
| Name the record you mean | "Update the Johnson project — push the start date to next Monday" |
| Ask before you dig | "Do I have any follow-ups due this week?" |
| Confirm changes | When Scout shows a confirmation card, review it, then click Confirm |
| Stay on task | Scout is best at estimating, CRM, scheduling, and questions about your business |
Troubleshooting
| Issue | What to try |
|---|---|
| Scout asks me to confirm every change | That's by design — every data change is confirmed before it happens. Click Confirm to proceed. |
| Scout says it can't do something | Some actions (billing, account/company changes, deletions) are intentionally off-limits. Handle those in Settings. |
| Scout didn't make the change | Look for a confirmation card — the change waits until you click Confirm. If you clicked Cancel, just ask again. |
| "Rate limit reached" message | You've sent a lot of requests quickly. Scout shows a short countdown; try again when it finishes. |
| "Message too long" message | Each message you send to Scout is capped at 5,000 characters. Shorten your message or break it into smaller requests. |
| "I hit a formatting problem processing that" message | Scout ran into trouble putting together its reply that time. Nothing was changed — just rephrase your request and try again. |
| Scout won't email a new person | Email recipients must already be a contact in your CRM. Add them as a contact first, then ask Scout to email them. |
| Scout says a similar contact already exists | It found a contact with a matching name or address and is checking before creating a duplicate. Tell it to update the existing contact, or say "create it anyway" to create a separate one. |
| Voice "yes" didn't confirm | One-word voice confirmations are intentionally disabled for changes — tap the Confirm button instead. |
| Mic button clicked but nothing visibly happens | Your browser's microphone-permission prompt may still be open — check your browser's address bar and click Allow. The button shows "Requesting microphone access…" while it waits; if you don't answer within 20 seconds, it gives up and you can try again. |
Next Steps
Get more out of ContractorScope AI's AI features: