Obligations
Contracts, renewals and recurring deadlines, with reminders on your approvals desk and a prepared email that is never sent.
Last verified 2026-10-07
In the web app
Three kinds
An obligation is something you must send or do by a date: a Submission (for example your receipts and VAT claims to your bookkeeper every quarter), a Renewal (a contract that ends or renews and has a notice period) or a Deadline (a one-off date).
Under Obligations you press Add obligation and give the title, the kind, the role, how often it repeats (once, monthly, quarterly or yearly) and when it is due.
Nothing is created or changed without you: you add it yourself, or the assistant proposes it and you press Confirm.
How due dates work
A submission is due a number of days after the month, quarter or year ends, on a fixed date that repeats, or on the last working day of the period.
A due date that falls on a Saturday or Sunday moves to the Friday before; public holidays do not move it.
A fixed date keeps its day and moves to the last day of a shorter month, and the 29th of February moves to the 28th in a common year.
For a renewal you give the day the contract ends, the notice period in days and whether it renews automatically; you must cancel by the end minus the notice period.
Reminders on the approvals desk
A number of lead days before the due date (7 unless you change it), your approvals desk names the due date, the title and the counterpart and asks whether to create the checklist task; for a renewal it names the day to cancel by and how long the contract renews.
Approve creates one task in the obligation's role with the checklist in its title and the due date; Done already marks the period submitted; Reject leaves it without a task.
The reminder comes once per period, also when two screens are open at the same time.
zonask checks the dates whenever you open the desk or Obligations, and once a day before your morning summary.
When a period is overdue
A period not submitted by its due date shows Overdue in red, and Today shows how many obligations are overdue.
A few escalation days after the due date (3 unless you change it) you get one notice that says since when an obligation is overdue, without its title or counterpart, and your next summary carries it once; open it to see which one.
Mark submitted on the obligation's page ends the reminder and the notice.
Prepare email
Prepare email on a period saves a short email as a draft in Gmail, in the mailbox you chose for the obligation, addressed only to the counterpart's email address.
It holds the period, your checklist and, for a submission, links to the confirmed receipts of that period in Google Drive, in English or German; it has no attachments.
zonask never sends it: you open it in Gmail Drafts, check it and send it yourself.
Found for you
zonask also looks for obligations in your mail: only in an email it already sorted as a request or as invoices, contracts and administration, whose text it read once to sort it, and never in a role that keeps to headers.
It asks once more on that same text and fetches nothing more, about whether the email asks you to send documents, repeats on a schedule, names a date, or is a renewal, price change or termination notice of a contract.
When it finds one, your approvals desk shows, for example, "Found in mail from Treuhand Muster AG: Send receipts and VAT claims, every quarter, due 15 days after the period ends. Add this obligation?"
Newsletters that only mention dates and invoices to pay are not obligations, and nothing is created before you answer: Approve adds it with the sender as counterpart and the mailbox it came to, Edit opens the form filled in, Reject drops it and zonask does not propose the same sender and kind again.
A proposal is encrypted and gone after 30 days if you do not answer it; once you approve it, it is your obligation like any other.
Read from a contract on Obligations takes a PDF of at most 10 MB and 30 pages, and Find dates in this contract on an email in the Inbox about invoices, contracts or administration reads the email's PDF.
zonask reads the file once and finds who the contract is with, when it ends, the notice period and whether it renews, with the page of each value.
The proposal names the contract's counterpart, the day it ends, the notice period and whether it renews, and asks whether to add a renewal reminder.
Dates before 2000 and notice periods over 24 months are refused, and the file and its text are dropped after the read and not uploaded to Drive.
The page then says "Read. Nothing from the file was kept."
When you write to an obligation's counterpart between the start of one of its open periods and that period's due date, the desk asks once, naming the counterpart and the day you wrote, whether to mark the period submitted. A period already overdue is marked submitted on its page.
Approve marks the period submitted and ends its overdue notice; for that check zonask reads only the addresses and the date of the mail you send, never its text.
What zonask stores
The title, the checklist and the counterpart's name and email address are stored encrypted; the address is shown nowhere and leaves its encryption only inside the draft.
For each period zonask keeps only its dates, its status and the ids of its task and draft, the last 8 periods.
An obligation is kept until you delete it; Delete removes it with its periods, and the tasks made from it stay ordinary tasks.
Pause stops the reminders until you press Resume, and Delete all my data removes your obligations too.
In Claude or ChatGPT
Ask, for example, "What do I owe my bookkeeper this quarter?": list_obligations lists your obligations with the next due date and status.
Where the host supports it, the answer comes as a card with each obligation, its counterpart, role, due date and status.
create_obligation, update_obligation (change, pause, resume or delete) and mark_obligation_submitted change them after your confirm, on the change card.
prepare_obligation_email shows the email first and, after your confirm, saves it as a Gmail draft, never sent; reminders appear in list_approvals and you answer them with answer_approval.
With a contract attached to an email, ask, for example, "When can I cancel the Adobe contract?": find_obligations_in_document reads the email's PDF and answers with the end, the day to cancel by and whether it renews; it writes nothing, and create_obligation adds the reminder after your yes.
A chat cannot hand zonask a file you upload there yet, so the tool reads the PDF of an email zonask knows.
Obligations found in mail and contracts appear in list_approvals; answer_approval approves, edits or rejects them after your confirm.