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A skill is your firm’s process, remembered, that Answers follows every time. No code, no developer. And you do not write it. Ask Answers to create it for you.

Done the same way every time

The steps, the order, the format. Consistency you cannot get by asking nicely.

Your senior people scale

The partner explains it once. Everyone else gets it right.

Found on its own

Nobody has to remember the skill exists. A matching request pulls it in.

Becomes an automation

Once it is a skill, scheduling it is one sentence. See Automations.

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Creating one

The best moment is right after Answers has done the thing well, because the conversation already contains the process.
That’s exactly right. Save this as a skill called “Monthly close checklist”.
Answers drafts it from what just happened and confirms before saving. Steer it in the same breath (“have it always ask which client and period first”), or change it later from any conversation (“update the monthly close skill to skip cash reconciliation for basic-package clients”).
Every skill is created private to you, however it was made. Sharing it with the firm is a separate step on the Skills page, so nothing lands in a colleague’s Answers by surprise.
Answers → Skills → New skill. Four fields, and they are the same four Answers fills in for you.Trigger is the field that matters. It is the only text Answers reads when deciding whether the skill fits, so describe the request, not the steps, and include the words your team actually uses.Scope lives under Availability. A new skill always starts Private; change it by editing the skill once it exists.The skill editor showing three sections: Name with a display name and the derived technical name, When to use it with the Trigger field and a 952 of 1,024 character counter, and What it does with the Instructions field in Markdown.

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How Answers picks one

Each skill carries a description of when to use it. Answers matches that against your request and loads the one that fits. To choose deliberately, open the + menu and pick from Skills. The plus menu open beside the message box, showing Web Search, Upload files and a highlighted Skills item, with a submenu listing skills by name and the first line of each trigger description. Note what the picker shows under each name: the first line of its Trigger. That is the text Answers itself matches on, so if a skill reads oddly here, it will match oddly too. The picker hides skills needing a connector your firm has not set up, and flags ones whose connector is merely switched off for this message.

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What makes a skill good

The common failure is firing on the wrong requests. Add an exclusion: “Do not use this for quarterly reviews.” This is how the Denari skills that overlap stay out of each other’s way.
The value is in what a new hire gets wrong: which document wins when two conflict, what counts as close enough, when to stop and ask. Those are rarely in the conversation you are saving, so say them.
“A two column table, client and amount, sorted descending” beats leaving it open.
A skill that does three things matches poorly on all three. Split it.

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Building your firm’s brain

The Denari skills below are generic by necessity. They know accounting; they do not know your firm. Firm-scoped skills are where that difference gets written down. Your firm’s knowledge currently lives in a partner’s head, a wiki nobody opens, a templates folder that carries the format but not the thinking, or review comments retyped every engagement. None of those reach you while the work is happening. A firm skill does, because Answers reaches for it on its own. Knowledge that is retrieved, not looked up. That is the whole difference.

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What is worth writing down

If a competent new hire would get it wrong and a partner would get it right, it belongs in a firm skill.

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Where to find your backlog

You do not need a documentation project. It shows up as onboarding (anything explained to every new hire), repeat review comments (the note you have left three times), and the question asked twice. Each takes a conversation, not an afternoon.

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It compounds

One firm skill saves one person some retyping. Ten of them change what the product is at your firm: Answers stops answering like a generically competent accountant and starts answering the way your firm answers, with your thresholds and your judgment about the edge cases. New hires inherit that on day one instead of absorbing it over two years.
A monthly cover letter. Pulls the client’s address from the firm’s practice management system and the period and prior-year figures from QuickBooks Online, then renders the letter on the firm’s letterhead as a .docx. It orchestrates three other skills; the firm-specific part is only the letterhead and house wording.A scope check. Answers “is this work in scope for this client?” from their signed engagement letter. Leads with yes or no, names any cap, and quotes the clause.Neither needed a developer. Both encode judgment that used to live with one or two people.
Only the person who created a skill can edit it, so give each one an owner who still does the work. When a process changes, the skill encoding it is now wrong, and it will stay confidently wrong until its owner updates it.

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Skills that ship with Denari

Denari skills are assigned to firms individually, so your firm will have some and not others. Ask Answers “which skills are available to me?” for your real list, and talk to your Denari contact about turning on anything else.

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Who can change a skill

The Skills page lists everything you can reach, filterable by All, Private, Firm, Global, with each skill’s scope and what it requires. The Skills page listing skills in a table with columns for the skill, who can use it, and what it requires. Entries range from a private Acquisition Data Review requiring the demo database and Documents, to global skills like budget-review and capacity-management requiring Practice CS. Editing, disabling or deleting is limited to the person who created it, plus Denari support. Being a firm admin does not grant control over a colleague’s skill, so a firm skill that needs changing goes back to its owner.

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Next

Automations

Put a skill on a schedule and stop asking for it.

Connections

What your skills can reach.