AI Knowledge Base · NZ Wholesalers
An AI knowledge base built on your own information — product specs, supplier terms, your processes — so your team gets instant, sourced answers instead of interrupting the one person who knows everything. For NZ wholesale and distribution.
Half the questions that fly around a wholesale business already have answers. What's the lead time on the X range? What pricing tier is this customer on? Which product superseded the discontinued one? How do we handle a return on that?
The answers exist — but they're scattered across spec sheets, supplier emails, a messy shared drive, and the warehouse manager's head. So people interrupt each other all day, new staff take months to get useful, and the day your most experienced person is on leave, everything slows down. Worse: when they leave for good, the knowledge walks out the door with them.
A shared drive doesn't fix this. Storing a file isn't the same as being able to find the answer inside it.
Two things people reach for, and why neither does the job:
A shared drive or wiki stores documents. It doesn't answer "what's the lead time on the X range?" — you still have to know which file, open it, and read it. And most SME wikis are six months stale because nobody has time to maintain them.
Generic AI like ChatGPT knows the internet, not your business. Ask it about your products, your suppliers, your pricing, and it'll either shrug or make something up.
A proper knowledge base is grounded in your documents, answers in plain language, and — the part that makes it trustworthy — shows you where each answer came from, so a person can check it. That's the difference between a confident guess and an answer you can act on.
Note: if your challenge is turning inbound documents — emailed orders, remittances, packing slips — into structured data in Cin7 or Xero, that's a different problem. See AI document processing.
Gather the sources.
Docs, PDFs, spreadsheets, SOPs, spec sheets, even past supplier emails and support tickets. Part of this is deciding what's actually authoritative — and getting what's only in someone's head written down.
Make it answerable.
The information is indexed so an AI can find the right passage and answer the question in plain language, instead of someone hunting through folders.
Ground every answer.
It points to the source it used, so people can verify — and it says "I don't know" rather than guessing when the answer isn't in your material.
Put it where people work.
A chat box, Slack, or your internal tool — wherever the questions actually get asked.
Honest version, because this is where AI projects go wrong: a knowledge base is only as good as what you feed it. Garbage or stale information in, garbage answers out — so curating what's authoritative, and keeping it current, is part of the job, not an afterthought.
AI can be confidently wrong. That's exactly why grounding answers in your sources, citing them, and letting it say "I don't know" are non-negotiable. Anyone selling you an AI that never admits uncertainty is selling you a problem.
Some knowledge should stay with a person — the judgment calls. The knowledge base handles the factual lookups so your expert is freed up for the things that actually need them. And because it can touch sensitive information, who's allowed to ask what gets scoped properly — covered in the audit.
Some of the saving is hours — the time your team loses hunting for answers and interrupting each other. The calculator covers that side.
The bigger cost is harder to put a number on: the weeks it takes to get a new hire useful, and the genuine risk that your business runs on knowledge living in one or two heads. A knowledge base is how you stop that knowledge being a single point of failure.
Work out the time side in 30 seconds — plug your hours and hourly rate into the calculator and see what the answer-hunting is costing annually.
Open the calculator →At a distributor, almost every product and lead-time question went to one veteran on the team — and stalled whenever he was out. We built a knowledge base from their spec sheets, supplier emails and process docs, so reps could self-serve accurate, sourced answers in seconds. New staff got up to speed faster, and the veteran stopped being interrupted every ten minutes.
Step 1
From $750 — credited toward the build
I work out what knowledge is worth capturing, where it lives, and what it's costing you to not have it findable. Fixed fee. You walk away with a plan whether or not you go further.
Step 2
$4,000–$12,000 fixed price
I assemble the knowledge base on top of your own material. Scoped from the audit, fixed price, no surprises. Handed over with plain-English documentation.
Step 3
From $400/month · cancel any time
I keep it current as your products, suppliers and processes change — because a knowledge base nobody maintains goes stale fast, and a stale one is worse than none. Month-to-month — no lock-in.
The TimeBack Guarantee
If the build hasn't cut the time on these tasks — the answer-hunting and the repeated interruptions — to under 20% of what you spend today within 3 months, I refund the audit fee in full. On top of it already being credited toward the build.
The audit pins the baseline first, so the guarantee is tied to exactly what we scoped.
ChatGPT knows the internet, not your business. A knowledge base is grounded in your own documents, answers about your products and suppliers, and cites where it got each answer so you can trust it.
It's built to answer only from your material, show its source, and say "I don't know" when the answer isn't there. You're never relying on a guess — you can check the source it points to.
Docs, PDFs, spreadsheets, SOPs, spec sheets, supplier emails, past tickets — if it's reference knowledge, it's a candidate. The audit works out what's authoritative and worth including.
Access is scoped. Sensitive information stays restricted to the people who should have it — sorted before anything goes live.
It will, if it's ignored — which is why keeping it current is built into the Care Retainer rather than left to chance. A maintained knowledge base earns its keep; an abandoned one doesn't.
See what the answer-hunting is costing — then decide.
Timeback Systems Ltd · gettimeback.co.nz · The audit fee is credited toward your build — and refunded if these tasks aren't cut to under 20% of today's time within 3 months.