Who this is for. Everyone, and particularly administrators scoping a rollout. See Roles and Access Reference.
SmartResearch answers from the connections behind the selected SmartFlow instance. The system of record and, where the agent has one, the connected mailbox. Nothing else is in scope unless it has been connected explicitly.
This matters more than any other single fact about the product. A question about data nobody has connected cannot be answered however well it is phrased, and the failure looks like a product limitation rather than a configuration gap. Knowing what is in scope turns that into a five-second diagnosis.
First-party sources
Which of these sources applies to you depends on the connection behind your instance; each brings a different set of records into scope.
Table 1. First-party sources that can be connected
Source |
Covers |
|---|---|
Workday |
AP and finance records, including AP Vendor Bills. |
Oracle Fusion AP |
Procure-to-Pay records and curated AP analytics. |
Oracle Fusion AR |
Order-to-Cash records. |
NetSuite and other connected ERPs |
Where configured for the tenant. |
The connected mailbox |
Where the agent instance includes one. |
Which of these applies to you depends entirely on the instance selected in the header. A tenant with several instances has several different scopes, and switching instances changes what a question can reach.
External data sources
External feeds are selected per instance, under External Data Source. They add public reference data for context (comparing your own payment timing against an economic series, for example), and none of them carry your company’s data. See Configure a SmartResearch Instance.
Table 2. External feeds
Source |
Covers |
|---|---|
Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) |
US macroeconomic series. |
Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) |
Labor and price statistics. |
Census Bureau |
Demographic and business statistics. |
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) |
Public company filings. |
Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) |
National and regional economic accounts. |
How scope is decided
Four things narrow an answer, and they compound. A question can be perfectly phrased against fully connected data and still return less than you expect because one of these is set.
Table 3. What narrows an answer
Control |
Effect |
Where it is set |
|---|---|---|
SmartFlow instance |
Chooses the system of record and mailbox. |
The header |
Default entities |
Limits which entities are counted. Empty means all. |
|
Default time range |
Limits the period. The default applies unless the question says otherwise. |
User Preferences |
Your role |
Limits which rows you are entitled to see. |
Set by your administrator |
Because these compound, an analyst and a controller can ask an identical question and get different totals without either being wrong. When two answers disagree, compare all four before assuming a data problem.
When the data you need is not connected
If a question cannot be answered because the underlying field is not connected, that is a request rather than a fault. Raise it through Support with the field name, the system it lives in, the questions you want it to answer, and any metric you expect it to feed. See Auditoria Support.