Cortesso in plain words: how to get your first answer in three minutes, what to do when something looks stuck, and what every word on the screen means.
Start hereAskingWeekly briefBooksEnginesRoundtableStop, find, notifyReceiptsPicturesPrintForecastUndoPhoneTeamsTokensFilesKeys and moneyConnecting an appImportingLeavingThe wordsStuck?Support
Or try it before step 3: every account gets ten answers a month on Cortesso's own accounts with nothing to paste. After that, positions run on your own keys — Cortesso is $10 a person a month for everything, and the engine bill is yours at the vendor's price. A key of your own always takes precedence if you add one.
Answer now (Enter) runs the position here, with your key, and the answer lands in its thread in a moment. Add as task parks the request on the position's board for its own app to pick up later: use that only for work that has to happen on your computer (a position connected to Claude Code editing your actual files). If you parked something by mistake, press Answer now on it.
Ask everyone sends one question to every ticked position; each answers on its own, in its own thread, and none of them sees the others' answers unless they share a project. That is how you get a CFO's view and a designer's view side by side.
Positions remember the last several exchanges with you, so "which would you fix first?" refers to what they just said. They see only what is in Cortesso: your memory, the board, checkpoints and the files you upload. They cannot see your bank, email or folders, and they are told to say "I don't know" rather than guess.
Today → Weekly brief → Brief me now. Every position with a key answers one standing question ("what changed, what needs my decision, what would you do this week") and the answers land on one card, each with its cost. Reply to any of them from its Office thread. Under Settings → Weekly brief you can turn on a schedule (a day and an hour in your time; the first one comes the following week, never a catch-up) and change the question. Positions that cannot answer (paused, or no key for their AI) are listed with the reason rather than left out.
Today → Books. Export a statement from your bank or card as CSV and import it with an account name ("Chase checking"). Dates, descriptions and amounts are recognized whatever the bank calls the columns, and importing the same statement twice never double counts. File each transaction under a category (or tick "remember" so a rule files that vendor from then on), or press Ask the CFO to file these. The P&L by month and the cash per account are then computed from the ledger, and the CFO cites "the ledger" when it uses them. If the statement has a Balance column, Books sets the account's opening balance from it and, on every later import, checks the ledger against the bank's figure ("reconciled", or "off by $5.12: transactions missing or counted twice"); without one, type the opening balance once under Cash. Set a monthly budget per category and the P&L shows the variance. Write the monthly close asks the CFO for last month's close (P&L against the month before and against budget, cash and whether it reconciles, what needs you); under Settings → Weekly brief you can have it written on the 1st of every month. On any answer in the Office, Second opinion from… sends it to another position to agree, challenge or add.
A position runs on the engine you pick when you hire it: Claude, GPT, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity, Mistral, DeepSeek, Groq (Llama, GPT-OSS, Qwen) or OpenRouter (one key, hundreds of models). Add the vendor's key under Settings → Engine keys and the model list comes from the vendor itself. Mix them freely: a CFO on Claude, a researcher on Perplexity (every answer web-grounded with citations; it reads your memory from its brief but cannot save facts or read files itself), a drafter on DeepSeek. When a vendor refuses a call, the message ends with the one thing to do: a fresh key, another model, wait a minute, top up.
Office → Roundtable. One question to the whole table: every position answers on its own engine; then each reads the others and says where it agrees, disagrees and what it would change; then the chair (the first at the table, or the one you pick) writes the synthesis — where the table agrees, the real disagreements and who is right on the evidence, and the one next step. Three rounds, each an ordinary run on the position's key or your plan, all counted under Tokens. A table of four takes a few minutes; the page fills in as they speak.
Stop: while a position is answering, its bubble has a Stop button; the run ends at its next step, the tokens used so far are counted, nothing is filed, and Ask again starts fresh. Find: the box at the top of the Office searches every thread at once — asks, answers and questions from every position, newest first — and jumps to the bubble. Notifications (Settings): by email when a position needs a decision, when a run finishes (off by default), and the weekly brief; in a team, "needs you" reaches everyone, a finished run reaches the person who asked. While Cortesso is open in a tab, a finished run or a question pops up on any screen; allow browser notifications under Settings for a notice even when you are in another tab.
Cortesso installs like an app: on iPhone, open cortesso.com/app in Safari, Share → Add to Home Screen; on Android, Chrome's menu → Install app. Full screen, an icon, the same account and memory as everywhere else — nothing to sync. A store-listed app is the same app in a wrapper and comes after launch.
Books → Add a receipt: a photo of a receipt or an invoice becomes one transaction — date, vendor, total, the lines as the memo. A photo added to a project (Office → Add a file, or Projects → Files) becomes a file whose text is the transcription, and every position can read it. The reading is done by your own engine (a Claude, GPT or Gemini key, or your plan), so it costs a few hundred tokens and shows under Tokens; check figures against the paper. A PDF with no text layer is a scan: photograph or screenshot the pages and upload those.
A position can make a real picture — a logo, a mock-up, an illustration, a diagram — when your house has a GPT or Grok key (the keys card says which ones draw). Ask for one in the Office in plain words: "design me a logo", "mock up the pricing page". It arrives in the thread under the answer; click it to see it whole and save it. The picture is also a file on that project, so every other position can see that it exists and what it was drawn from. It is drawn on your own key and priced per picture, not per token — roughly 4¢ on GPT, 7¢ on Grok — and it shows in Tokens like any other spend. A position on an engine that cannot draw will tell you so rather than describe a picture and call it done. Editing a picture ("same one, wider") is not there yet; ask for a new one.
Memory → Print: one page of everything Cortesso knows about you, grouped by kind, ready for paper or a PDF. The full portable export (Yours → Export) is still the complete thing, with every detail and where it came from; this is the version you can actually read.
Books → The next eight weeks. Cortesso looks for what repeats in the ledger — rent, payroll, subscriptions, a customer who pays monthly — needing three occurrences at a steady rhythm before it believes one. It then adds those to the weeks ahead, assumes everything else keeps netting what it has netted over the last twelve weeks, and shows the closing cash per week and the lowest point. It counts only accounts with a known balance (set an opening balance under Cash, or import a statement with a Balance column). The CFO reads the same figures and cites them as the forecast from the ledger.
Forgetting a fact is undoable: the toast has Undo for ten seconds, and Memory keeps a Bin for thirty days — restore anything from there, or delete it for good. After thirty days the nightly pass removes it, and Delete for good never goes to the bin.
A person adds helpers and keeps to-dos; a business hires positions and delegates tasks. Same machinery, two vocabularies: Cortesso picks from the door you came in, and you can change it under Settings → The words.
At the top of the dashboard: Personal / your teams / + New team. A team is a second house — its own shared memory, positions, board, Books and weekly brief — so your personal memory never mixes with the company's. Team → People: invite someone by email with a title ("Ops lead"). They sign in with the normal six-digit code, with the address you invited, and land in the team as a human position. Inside the team, anything they ask a position runs on their own engine key if they have one, otherwise on yours (or your plan); every fact they write says who wrote it. You can also ask a person the way you ask a position: open them in the Office, or tick them in Ask everyone. The question waits on their Today (and reaches their inbox); their answer lands in the thread. They can leave; you can remove them, retitle them, rename or delete the team (type DELETE). Only the owner exports, imports into or deletes a team. When a weekly brief finishes, every person of the team gets it by email — the Monday meeting, without the meeting.
Today → Numbers → Every run, by project →. Every run a position made: when, who asked, the position, the project, the ask, the engine and model, tokens in and out, the cost at list price, and whether it ran on a plan or on a key of your own. Filter by period, project, position, engine and (in a team) person; totals by project, position and person; Download CSV for a spreadsheet. The numbers are what the engines reported for each run. Context Cortesso handed to apps you connected (Claude Desktop, ChatGPT) is a different number and stays under Numbers on Today.
Projects → the project → Add a file, or Office → "Add a file to that project". PDF, Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), CSV, text, Markdown, JSON and HTML, up to 8 MB. Excel comes in sheet by sheet; PDFs need a text layer (a scanned photo of a page does not work yet). Every position on that project can read the file; put company-wide documents on Company. Positions can leave files too (a memo, a table).
A key is your own account with the AI vendor. Cortesso uses it only for answers you ask for, shows an estimate next to each answer (tokens and dollars), and the vendor sends you the bill. Each key has a daily cap per position and a daily total across all positions (so "Ask everyone" and the weekly brief cannot spend the cap several times over); if either is reached you see "has used today's budget" or "has used today's total". Change the model, the cap, or web research under Settings → Engine keys. Web research lets a position look up public facts (competitors, prices, news); the vendor bills about a cent a search on your key.
Numbers (on Today) shows tokens burned, reported spend, finished work and turnaround for 7, 30 or 90 days.
You only need this if a position should work inside Claude or ChatGPT on your computer, for example editing the real spreadsheet in a folder. Open the position → Connection → follow the steps for its app: add Cortesso as a connector by pasting one URL, and on the page that opens choose which position the connection is for. No codes to copy. For Claude Code there is a "folder kit": two files to drop in the folder the position may work in.
Is it automatic after that? Claude reads Cortesso's instructions on its own and saves facts and checkpoints as it goes. ChatGPT and others do it dependably when you paste one paragraph into the project's instructions — the Connection card has it with a Copy button ("Make it automatic"). No app copies your whole chat history through a connector; to bring history in, export it once (below).
Memory → Import a ChatGPT or Claude export. In ChatGPT: Settings → Data controls → Export data; in Claude: Settings → Privacy → Export data. You get an email with a zip; drop the zip (or the conversations.json inside it) on Memory. A Claude Code or Cowork session file (.jsonl) works too. Conversations become memory every position can search; keys and passwords that were pasted into chats are redacted on the way in; importing the same file twice changes nothing.
Settings → Export everything gives you one readable zip. Settings → Delete everything (type DELETE) removes memory, positions, files, keys, books, connections and the encryption key for your account, at once, with no email. Both work on every plan.
Email hello@cortesso.com. Say which position, what you asked, and what came back (or did not). We never need your key or your files to help. Everything you store is yours to export or delete at any time from Settings; see Trust.