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Ask the finance question instead of running the report

Finance questions are usually one number away from an answer, and four screens away from the number. Month-end does not need more reports; it needs faster access to the ones already there.

NgageChat — projects & finance IFS Cloud connected

What is project P-2041 costing against budget?

search_ifs_pages project cost, budget
ifs_read_data ProjectCostSet + BudgetSet, grouped by cost element

Project P-2041 — Boiler House Refit is at 78% of budget with 62% of activities complete.

  • Sub-contract is the only element over budget — driven by two variation orders raised in July
Cost elementBudgetActualVariance
Labour180,000164,200+15,800
Material240,000221,500+18,500
Sub-contract95,000118,400−23,400

This user’s IFS permission set grants project cost but not payroll detail, so labour is shown in total only.

What can NgageChat do with IFS projects & finance?

NgageChat answers IFS Cloud finance and project questions conversationally — supplier invoice status, project cost against budget, expense sheets awaiting approval, cost element breakdowns and period balances — reading live from IFS. It can also create and progress expense and invoice records using IFS action imports, always inside the signed-in user’s permissions.

Last reviewed 3 August 2026 · NgageChat by EX10

What you can ask it

  • Supplier invoices by state, supplier or due date
  • Project cost against budget and revenue recognition position
  • Expense sheets and their approval position
  • Cost element and account breakdowns for a period
  • Sub-project structure, activities and progress

What it can change in IFS

  • Create an expense sheet and add expense lines
  • Progress wizard-style flows via IFS action imports
  • Update project activity dates, budgets and attributes
  • Create or update project and sub-project records
  • Attach supporting documents to finance records

Every write is shown to you as a complete summary and only executes after you approve it — then runs under your own IFS login, inside your own IFS permissions.

Try it like this

Things people actually type

Which supplier invoices are awaiting authorisation?
What is project P-2041 costing against budget?
Show my expense sheets that have not been approved
Create an expense sheet for the Manchester site visit
Break down project P-2041 cost by cost element
Which invoices from supplier 1042 are unmatched?

Why it matters

The friction this removes

None of this is a failure of the ERP. It is the cost of a very large system being used occasionally by people who were trained on it once.

Month-end is a queue at one desk

The people who can extract numbers are the constraint, and everyone else waits.

Approvals stall in the dark

Nobody knows an invoice is waiting on them until someone chases. The state is in IFS; the visibility is not.

Expense entry is a chore people defer

And deferred expenses distort the project cost picture for weeks.

IFS objects this typically touches

ProjectHandlingProjectCostSupplierInvoiceHandlingExpenseSheetHandlingSubContractHandling

Exact projections depend on your configuration and IFS release — NgageChat resolves them from its index of the IFS Cloud data model, with your custom fields read live from your environment.

FAQ

Questions about projects & finance

Can NgageChat create an expense sheet in IFS Cloud?
Yes. Expense flows in IFS are wizard-style and use unbound action imports such as CreateExpenseHeader and AddOtherExpense. NgageChat calls those imports directly, gathering the fields conversationally first and confirming the whole sheet before it commits.
Will it show finance data to people who should not see it?
No. All reads happen with the signed-in user’s IFS token, so IFS applies the same projection-level permissions it applies in Aurena. Restricted data simply does not come back.
Is it a replacement for our reporting?
No, and it should not be. NgageChat is for ad-hoc questions answered in the moment. For scheduled, shareable, repeatable reporting, build a durable report — that is what NgageCode is for.

Early access

See it do this against your own IFS environment

Bring one real scenario from your system. Thirty minutes, no slideware — we run it live and you watch every step.