Workflow guide | Charter

Private pilotCharter is invite-only, ahead of its first customer pilot. Everything on this page is built, and the page describes how a workspace behaves. Checks against a live mail provider, a live mailbox, a live model and a live property data service are recorded separately, and none has been completed so far.

Which path you are on

There are two ways to set Charter up. Almost everyone wants the first.

Switches: You have a website inquiry form, an email account, and nothing else: no customer database, no calendar tool, no project tool. You answer four questions and turn switches on and off. There is no workflow to draw and no model account to open. The rest of this guide, until the last section, is about this path.
The workflow builder: Your work does not fit a switch, or you want to shape the steps yourself. You describe the outcome, read the steps Charter proposes, edit them, simulate, and activate a version. This is the configurable tier. It is still real and still supported, and the last section of this guide covers it.

Both paths end in the same place: a saved workflow version, a run record of what was read and prepared, and a review before anything reaches a customer. The switches are built on the same checks, not around them.

Set up in four answers

Setup is four answers and an email address. Nothing else is required, and nothing is filled in on your behalf.

Where you work. The towns, cities or postal codes you cover. Charter checks each inquiry against this with a plain deterministic check rather than a judgment call, and routes anything outside it to a polite decline you review.
What you do. The services you offer, in your own words. A request for work you do not do takes the same route.
How customers book time with you. A scheduling link, or the wording you use to propose times. A drafted reply uses what you gave and never invents a date or an availability you did not supply.
A ballpark rate, if you want one. Optional. Leave it out and Charter never attaches a figure to anything.

Then email, one of two ways.

A Charter address: Point your form's notifications at an address Charter gives your workspace. There is no account to connect and no permission to grant. Charter emails the finished draft to you, and you send it from your own mail.
Your own mailbox: Connect the Gmail or Microsoft 365 account that receives those notifications. Charter can then send the approved reply itself and watch that conversation for an answer. Connecting a mailbox is subject to the provider's own verification and consent requirements; the Charter address is subject to neither, which is why most owners start there and connect a mailbox later.

Charter supplies the model. You enter no provider key, no token prices and no model choice, and there are no model settings in your workspace to maintain. Usage is metered in credits against your plan allowance, and every run still has its own caps.

The quote switch needs one thing more before it will turn on: a rate card it prices from, written in your own words. A tax percentage, if you charge one, sits beside it and is what the arithmetic applies. Both live with your four answers.

See it on your own inquiries

Before any switch is on, Charter takes your recent inquiries and shows you what it would have written for each one, beside the original. Not a demo account and not a sample business: your own messages, in your own words, answered the way Charter would have answered them. If the drafts are wrong, you have spent a few minutes finding out.

A replay reads your most recent messages, up to twenty, from your Charter address or from the mailbox you connected, narrowed by a subject filter if you set one. A message the switch cannot accept, an empty body or one far too long, is listed as skipped rather than quietly replaced.

This runs in preview, which is a real run with its outside edges removed.

Step	In a replay
Reading the inquiry and writing the reply	Runs for real, with the same caps and the same credit charge as a live run.
Looking a property up	Substituted. Nothing is requested, so a preview draft never carries a ballpark figure.
Asking you to approve	Not asked. No approval is created and no email is sent to you.
Waiting before a follow-up	Returns at once instead of waiting.
Sending, and every other external action	Substituted. Nothing leaves Charter and no customer hears anything.

Every draft a replay produces is named and labeled as a preview, so it cannot be mistaken later for something that went out. A replay activates nothing, and a finished preview does not count as the simulation a switch needs before it can be turned on.

Because the writing is real, a replay uses credits. Charter works out what the batch could cost before it starts, replays as many of the newest messages as your remaining credits cover, and tells you which ones it left out and why. If the balance will not cover a single run, it replays nothing and says so rather than starting something it cannot finish.

Turn on a switch

A switch is a curated workflow with a fixed shape whose settings are your answers. Turning it on is one sequence, checked by the server at every step.

You choose the switch and its settings. Where the work comes in, a subject filter if your form's notifications need one, how many days to wait before a follow-up, whether the ballpark is on and the size above which you would rather look yourself, and where the finished document goes.
Charter builds the version and saves it. Your four answers and those settings become a new workflow version, saved inactive.
It runs the required simulation. A simulation substitutes model results and external actions and labels them as simulated throughout the record. It proves the shape holds together. It does not tell you whether the writing is any good, which is what the replay is for.
It activates that exact version. Only the version that just simulated cleanly, and only through the activation checks every workflow goes through.

Turning the switch off pauses the workflow, so nothing new starts. Runs already under way keep their own controls. Change a setting later and Charter saves and simulates a new version before that change takes effect; nothing is edited underneath a running workflow.

If something is missing, the switch stays off and names it rather than starting halfway.

No model is available to the workspace.
An answer the switch needs is blank: your service area and services for replies, a rate card for quotes, a ballpark rate if you turned the ballpark on.
Email is not set up. Charter has to be able to send you a draft, and a switch that reads a forwarding address needs that address to exist.
The mailbox you picked is no longer usable, because access was revoked or removed.
The simulation did not complete. The switch reports itself blocked with the reason, and stays off until you turn it on again.

Approve by email

Every message to a customer waits for you. Charter emails you the exact draft it intends to send, and does nothing further until you answer.

Send it: Reply YES, APPROVE or OK.
Do not send it: Reply NO or REJECT. Charter records the decision and does not perform the action.
Change it: Send your corrected version back between the two marker lines Charter puts in the message. Charter saves it as a new revision of the draft, invalidates the approval you were answering, and emails you the new version for a fresh review. Nothing goes out on the strength of the old approval.

An approval is bound to the exact content you were shown. A changed price, recipient or attachment means the approval no longer applies and Charter asks again. The corrected-version reply works for drafts and documents Charter prepared; a review that approves an action rather than a document takes YES or NO, and you make that kind of correction in the workspace Inbox instead.

Charter accepts a reply only from the email address on your account, and only when it answers the review it was sent for. It does not check the sending provider's authentication results, so the reply address should be treated as private, the way you would treat a private link.

The Inbox is the durable record and holds the same reviews: the draft, its revisions, who approved it, what was actually dispatched and what the provider confirmed. You can approve, edit or reject there instead of by email, and email approval is a setting you can turn off. Three controls there do different things.

Reject: Declines the proposed action. The run records the decision and does not perform it.
Pause: Suspends progress. Nothing further happens until you resume.
Cancel: Stops all future authorized work for that run. What already happened stays on the record.

Pausing or turning off a switch stops future automatic starts. That is separate from controlling a run that is already in progress.

The five switches

Switch	What it does	What it needs
Reply to inquiries	A form submission becomes a drafted reply, checked against the area you cover and the work you do. Out of area, or work you do not offer, becomes a polite decline for you to review. A message that is not an inquiry finishes with no draft at all. If Charter sent the reply from your connected mailbox, it follows up once after the number of days you set, unless the customer has already replied.	Service area, services, booking method
Add a ballpark	A setting on the reply switch. Where the message gives an address, Charter looks up the property's recorded living area and attaches a clearly labeled ballpark below your size threshold. Above it you get a visit brief and the reply carries no figure. Recorded living area is not measured paintable surface, a ballpark is never called a quote, and no recorded living area means no figure at all.	A ballpark rate and a size threshold
Quote from visit notes	Email your notes after a visit, or start one from the workspace. Charter reads the scope and quantities from what you wrote, prices only what your notes or your rate card cover, and returns a note naming what is missing rather than inventing a figure. The arithmetic is deterministic and never comes from model output.	A rate card
Invoice from an accepted estimate	Name the job. Charter finds the estimate in your records, copies its lines, quantities and prices without re-rating anything, adds only extra work you stated yourself, and prepares the invoice for review with both records linked. If it finds no estimate, or more than one, you get a note naming the problem and no invoice.	An estimate recorded as sent or accepted
Chase quiet quotes and unpaid invoices	Once a day, Charter drafts a reminder for each quote that has gone quiet past your interval and each invoice past its due date. A detected reply or a status you set stops it. After the number of reminders you allow, it hands the document back to you once and leaves it alone.	Your reminder intervals

Each switch asks where the finished work goes: Charter emails it to you with the file attached, or, if you connected a mailbox, sends it to the customer from your own address after you approve that send. No switch can send to a customer without your approval of that exact message, and reminders arrive as a daily batch of drafts rather than as sent mail. The capabilities reference covers every step behind them, with its inputs, its permission boundary and its current limits.

Your record book

Every estimate and invoice Charter prepares is recorded: a draft number of its own, the customer, the total, and a status you move from draft to sent, accepted, declined, paid or void. That record is what the invoice switch searches and what the chase reads, and it is why Charter can find the Smith estimate when you ask it to invoice the Smith job.

A draft number is Charter's own reference for finding and discussing a document. It is not accounting issuance. Charter posts nothing to an accounting system, takes no payment and moves no money. Marking something paid records what you told it, and Charter never marks anything paid by itself. Where Charter hands a document to you instead of sending it, the record says it was handed to you, because only you know whether it went anywhere after that.

Follow-up and recovery

A follow-up waits durably, checks the relevant conversation, and rechecks the current reply state immediately before sending. If a reply has arrived, that one send is dropped and the run carries on with whatever is next. Reply checks and provider confirmations arrive on their own schedule, so the run record shows what Charter saw, what it did, and when.

If access fails or an external outcome is uncertain, inspect the error and the action receipt. Repair the connection, then resume or recheck. Before retrying, Charter checks the recorded action against the provider and continues that same action rather than starting a fresh send. Email providers offer no universal guarantee that a message goes out exactly once, and a send a provider accepted is accepted, not delivered. A failed network response does not mean the provider did nothing; assume nothing until the receipt says so.

Versions and limits

Saving a change creates a new inactive version, and a new version needs its own simulation before it can be activated. Runs already under way continue against the definition and version they started with. If a newer version has been saved elsewhere, Charter asks you to review it before older changes are applied; it does not overwrite silently.

Charter supplies the model for these workspaces. Usage is metered in credits against your plan allowance, and per-run caps still apply: every run carries its own ceiling on steps, model requests, tool calls and spending, and a run that reaches one stops instead of continuing. When the allowance is used up, runs stop and say so rather than carrying on quietly, and a replay checks the balance before it starts rather than halfway through.

How managed model access and each switch are priced is still an open decision, which is why no price appears anywhere on this site. We will tell you where that stands before a pilot begins.

Build your own workflow

This is the configurable tier. If your work does not fit a switch, you can describe the outcome you want and build the workflow yourself. It is the same engine underneath, with the same review gate, the same run record and the same limits, and it is available to any owner who asks for it.

Describe the outcome. Say in plain language what you want handled: a reply to an inquiry, a handoff for a shoot, a campaign document for a new collection, a sourced answer to a customer question. Your saved conversations and the workflow library stay available alongside.
Answer the questions. Charter asks about your business name, the facts it should use, where the result should go, and any email or follow-up details. Anything it does not know, such as a price, an availability, a commitment, a recipient or a source, stays visible as an open question rather than being filled in.
Inspect the proposed steps. Guided setup is the default. It builds the plan from supported templates and your explicit answers, with no model charge. A workspace that holds its own model configuration can opt into model-assisted interpretation, which uses those settings and that spending allowance. That can incur a real model charge and is not a simulation.
Review it in the workflow editor. Check the name, trigger, inputs, connections, instructions, conditions, timing, brand material, permissions and limits. This readable review is the primary view; advanced definitions sit behind it.
Save. Save the proposal and return to the conversation, or save from the editor. Unsaved edits travel with you between pages but are not kept across a reload until a save succeeds, and the workspace warns before you leave with unsaved changes. Saving links the conversation to one inactive workflow and its versions.
Simulate with realistic sample input. A simulation substitutes model results and external actions and labels them as simulated throughout the record, so you can inspect every step and artifact. Nothing is sent to a provider or spent, and the simulated run is kept as a record, marked as simulated.
Activate that version. Explicitly, after a completed simulation. A real run needs a configured model, and every required connection has to be working.

Typing in the conversation never connects an account, sends a message or activates a workflow. Those take explicit controls, and Charter verifies each one before it takes effect. When you ask for something Charter does not support, it names the missing capability so you can revise the request or choose a document Charter can prepare, such as a brief or a draft, as the outcome instead.

Saved conversations and recovery

Messages and proposals are stored in your workspace once they are saved, so you can leave, sign in again and continue where you stopped. Each reply is labeled guided or model-assisted, and a pending or failed state describes the actual status of the request rather than a hopeful one. If a model reply is interrupted, recover or retry the saved reply: Charter keeps its original intent and reuses a confirmed result rather than paying for it twice. When a charge is uncertain, it stays reserved until you review what the provider reported and explicitly authorize a retry. Starting another paid attempt does not resolve the earlier unknown outcome. A conversation also has a length limit; when you reach it, review the current proposal or start a new one.

Inputs and permissions

A manual run accepts plain-language notes and optional named inputs. The upload formats accepted today are text, Markdown, CSV, readable PDF, PNG and JPEG. Existing logos and photos can be referenced in branded output; Charter does not generate original images. Anything you upload is read as information, never as instructions. A customer message that tells Charter to do something is treated as content to consider, the same as any other fact in the file. It cannot change what a workflow is permitted to do; only you can, in the editor.

External actions require review by default. The conversation and a saved proposal grant no permissions. In the editor you may permit an exact action for one step, one capability, one connection and one exact input, and editing a step removes any permission that step had to act on its own.

This path also has the full connection catalog, including retained knowledge from Aether and current work from Scoped, which a switch setup never asks about. Retained knowledge is not necessarily a current operational fact, so check prices, stock, availability, orders, invoices and payments in their authoritative systems before making a commitment. Where Charter has no supported connection to one of those systems, it says so instead of guessing. See the connections guide for what each connection permits, and request a pilot if this describes your business.