What Ask Paddy can do for you

Ask Paddy can set up routines, book visits, draft paperwork, chase your team and build an audit pack. Here is what to ask for.

5 min readUpdated Today
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Ask Paddy answers questions for anyone on your team. If you are an owner or manager it will also do the job for you. Say what you want in your own words, check what it proposes, and confirm.

You do not need to learn any commands. The examples below are just the sort of thing people actually type.

Find out what needs doing

The quickest thing to ask, and a good place to start the day.

  • What needs my attention today?

  • Anything overdue at the Brighton site?

  • How many open alerts have we got, and which are critical?

  • Which documents are expiring in the next month?

  • Who on the team is non-compliant?

  • How are we doing on compliance this week?

Routines and tasks

  • Duplicate the opening checks for the new site

  • Set up a weekly deep clean on Mondays for the kitchen team

  • Move the deep clean to Friday

  • Assign the closing checks to the bar team

  • Add a one-off task to sort the stockroom before Saturday

Recurring beats one-off. If you want something to happen every week, ask for that rather than a single task. Paddy will set up a routine or an automation rule so you do not have to ask again.

Scheduling, maintenance and equipment

  • Book a pest control visit next Tuesday

  • Schedule the PAT testing for the first week of next month

  • Raise an urgent plumbing job for room 214, the cistern is running

  • What maintenance is overdue?

  • What is on Dave at the moment?

  • Give the cellar cooler job to the maintenance team

  • Put it on hold, we are waiting for parts

  • Move the gas safety check to next Tuesday

  • Which rooms have the most open work?

  • Record that the dishwasher was serviced yesterday

  • Add a new under-counter fridge in the kitchen, 1 to 4 degrees

Paddy will not mark a maintenance job as complete. The notes, photos and cost on a completion are the record of work somebody else did, so the person who did it enters it on their own phone. Paddy will book the job, give it to someone, park it and move it. See Maintenance Jobs & Appointments.

Sales and the rota

  • How busy is Saturday at the Anchor?

  • What did we take last week at Brighton, against the week before?

  • Are we over-covered at lunch on Tuesdays?

  • Draft next week for the Anchor

  • Add an open bar shift on Friday from seven till close

  • Publish the week at the Anchor

Sales answers come with the expected figure, the likely range and how accurate the forecast has been at that site. A site without eight weeks of takings gets told how many days it has and how many it needs rather than a guess. Paddy only answers sales questions for people who could open the sales pages themselves; see Who can see sales and labour cost.

Drafting a week creates open shifts as drafts, never published, and shows the card first. Publishing is a separate request and its card lists any shift inside your notice window. See Letting Paddy suggest a week.

Your team

  • Invite jane@example.com as a manager at Brighton

  • Create a Door Staff team

  • Add Jo and Sam to the kitchen team

  • Assign the allergen training to the kitchen team

  • Log a visitor: Dave from the brewery, here to service the lines

  • Deactivate Sam, they have left

Paddy deactivates people rather than deleting them, so their history and records stay intact.

Compliance paperwork

Paddy drafts the document. You review it and sign it.

  • Write a risk assessment for the new fryer

  • Draft a COSHH assessment for the oven cleaner

  • Write an SOP for closing down the bar

  • Add oven cleaner to the COSHH register, signal word Danger, H314, gloves and goggles

  • Add fish and chips to the menu with fish and gluten

Alerts, handovers and complaints

  • Acknowledge the fridge temperature alert

  • The dishwasher wear warning is sorted, mark it resolved

  • Write up a handover: fridge 2 is playing up, we are low on gloves, delivery was late

  • Log a complaint: customer said the chicken was undercooked on Saturday

  • That complaint is resolved, we refunded them and apologised

Suppliers and recalls

  • Add Bidfood as a supplier, contact orders@bidfood.co.uk

  • Bidfood have recalled a batch of chicken, high severity

  • We have quarantined 12kg from that recall

  • Mark batch 4471 as disposed

When the inspector is coming

One request that would otherwise be an afternoon of gathering paperwork:

  • The EHO is coming Thursday, get me an audit pack

  • Audit pack for Brighton, just HACCP and temperature records, last six months

Paddy builds the ZIP and gives you a link to download it while you are signed in.

Set something up to happen on its own

For anything ongoing, ask for a rule rather than a task:

  • Every Friday remind the closing manager to log the fridge temps

  • When someone checks in, show them the weather and tide

  • Turn off the weather rule for now

Paddy will ask which sites a rule applies to. It will not switch one on everywhere by default.

What it will not do

Paddy never fills in a compliance record, never completes a check, and never signs anything. That work stays with the person who did it. See Knowledge Hub and Ask Paddy for the full list of limits, and Ask Paddy cannot answer a question if it declines something you expected it to do.

Nothing happens until you confirm it. Every action is shown to you first. See Confirming and cancelling Paddy actions.

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