Connecting AI Tools (Claude, ChatGPT)

Flowtly Editorial Team11 min

You can connect an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT to your Flowtly organization and ask it questions about your data in plain language. Instead of opening Flowtly and navigating to the right screen, you can ask your assistant things like "What is our overdue invoice total this month?" or "Show this quarter's transactions for our main bank account" and get an answer drawn directly from your live Flowtly data.

The connection can read your data and perform a curated set of actions, such as creating or updating suppliers, clients, contracts, bank accounts and cost groups, logging work time, creating or updating tasks, uploading a document to a specific invoice, closing a sales prospect or deal, and onboarding a colleague — adding them, inviting them to sign in, and setting what they can access. It never does anything beyond what your own Flowtly permissions already allow, and every action is a specific, named tool — never a free-form "do anything" capability. It is built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard that AI tools use to connect to external data sources.

What you need

  • A Flowtly account with access to at least one organization.
  • An AI tool that supports custom MCP connectors (for example Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini Enterprise, on a plan that allows adding connectors).
  • The Flowtly connector address: https://mcp.flowtly.eu

How to connect

You set this up once, and it takes about a minute.

In Claude:

  1. Open Settings → Connectors (on a plan that allows custom connectors).
  2. Click Add custom connector.
  3. Paste the Flowtly address https://mcp.flowtly.eu and confirm.
  4. Click Connect next to the new Flowtly connector. A Flowtly sign-in window opens.

In ChatGPT:

  1. Open the connectors/integrations settings and choose to add a connector (an MCP server).
  2. Paste https://mcp.flowtly.eu as the server address and continue.
  3. When prompted, choose to sign in / authorize.

In Claude Code (command line):

  1. Run: claude mcp add --transport http flowtly https://mcp.flowtly.eu/mcp
  2. In Claude Code, select Authenticate for the new Flowtly server; a browser window opens.

In any other MCP tool (including Gemini Enterprise):

  1. Find where your tool adds a custom MCP server or custom connector. In Gemini Enterprise this is in the Google Workspace admin console.
  2. Give it the address https://mcp.flowtly.eu. For most tools that is the only detail needed — Flowtly registers your tool automatically, so there is nothing to request from us and no key to obtain.
  3. If your tool asks for more than an address, it is a standard OAuth setup and these are the values:
    • Registration: https://mcp.flowtly.eu/oauth/register
    • Authorization: https://mcp.flowtly.eu/oauth/authorize
    • Token: https://mcp.flowtly.eu/oauth/token
    • PKCE method: S256 (required)
    • Client secret: none — Flowtly connectors are public clients
  4. Continue to the sign-in step below.

If your tool shows you a client ID, copy it in one piece. It is a single long line with no spaces, and some admin forms wrap it when you paste, which stops the connection from working. If a connection fails right after pasting one, delete the value and paste it again rather than assuming the setup is wrong.

Then, the same for all tools:

  1. Sign in to Flowtly in the window that opens — your normal email and password, exactly as in the web app. If you are already signed in, this step is skipped.
  2. A consent screen appears, saying the assistant wants to access your Flowtly data, and showing exactly what it is requesting. Pick the organization you want to connect, then click Approve (or Deny to cancel).
  3. You are returned to your AI tool. The Flowtly connector is now on, and you can start asking questions about that organization.

Each connection is tied to one organization. If you work across several organizations, repeat the steps and pick a different organization each time; the assistant keeps them separate.

What it looks like in practice

After connecting, you just chat normally. For example, you type:

How much do we still have unpaid in invoices this month?

The assistant recognizes this is a Flowtly question, reads the invoice data for your connected organization, and replies with the figure — for instance "You have 4 unpaid invoices this month totalling 18,200 zł" — drawn from your live data. You did not open Flowtly, run a report, or export anything; you asked a question and got an answer. You can keep asking follow-ups ("which ones are overdue?") in the same conversation.

What you can ask

Once connected, your assistant can read the parts of your organization that you can already see in Flowtly, including:

  • Transactions — balances, recent movements, spending with a given counterparty over a period.
  • Invoices — outstanding amounts, what was paid or received, totals by status.
  • Contracts and their payment schedules.
  • Counterparties, suppliers, bank accounts, cost groups, and related reference data.
  • Resourcing — the plan set against the hours actually reported, per person per week; who is on the bench over a period; what is booked going forward; and the staffing requests that are open, along with what has already been decided on earlier ones. Where your access extends to them, the revenue, cost and margin figures behind the plan can be read too. Resourcing questions need the Resourcing module on your subscription.
  • Work schedules — the working-time patterns your organization defines, which of them are in force on a given date, and who is assigned to each.
  • Recruitment — open hiring requests and the candidates put forward for them.

Questions about a period need a start and an end date, so say which period you mean — "between 1 April and 30 June", or "for July". The assistant reads this information; the bookings, schedules and hiring requests themselves are still made and changed in Flowtly.

Useful questions to try:

  • "How much did we spend with [counterparty] last quarter?"
  • "List our overdue invoices."
  • "What is the balance on our main account, and the last five transactions?"
  • "For September, who is on the bench?"
  • "Between 1 July and 30 September, did the plan hold — planned against reported hours per person?"
  • "Which staffing requests are still open, and was any of this asked for and turned down before?"

The assistant only returns figures that exist in Flowtly, and every answer is based on your real, up-to-date data for the organization you connected.

Onboarding a colleague

Giving someone access has three parts, and a connected assistant can carry out all of them without you opening Flowtly:

  1. Add the person. The assistant creates their employee record.
  2. Invite them to sign in. The assistant sends an invitation to the email address you give it, and Flowtly emails the person an invitation written in your organization's interface language. The invitation stays pending until they open it and set up their own sign-in; the assistant cannot choose a password or sign in on their behalf.
  3. Set what they can access. The assistant assigns their permission groups.

The invitation and the permission groups are independent, so access can be granted before or after the invitation goes out. Note that the two are not substitutes: someone who has permission groups but has never been invited still has no way to sign in, and an invited person who has no permission groups can sign in but see very little.

Ask for it in plain language, for example "Add Anna Kowalska as an employee, invite her at anna.kowalska@example.com, and give her the same permission groups as the rest of the delivery team". Inviting someone requires the same permission as managing people in Flowtly. Asking to invite a person who already has a sign-in changes nothing — the assistant tells you they already have one rather than sending a second email.

For the same steps done on screen, see Invite your team, Creating a New Employee and Permission groups.

Closing a prospect or a deal

A connected assistant can close sales work as well as record it. It can close a prospect you did not win, close a deal as won or lost, and reopen either one afterwards.

Closing as lost asks for a reason, chosen from the fixed list your organization keeps rather than typed as free text — that is what makes lost work countable at quarter end. An optional note sits beside it. Ask in plain language, for example "Close the Acme prospect as lost — they chose a competitor", and the assistant matches what you said to an entry on the list. A reason that is not on the list is refused rather than recorded as written.

Two things are worth knowing before you ask:

  • Closing is its own step, not an edit. A prospect or deal is closed by a dedicated close action, not by editing a status field on the record — so ask to close it, rather than asking to change its status.
  • Lost is not the same as Do not contact. Do not contact is a suppression request and locks further logging against the company. Closing as lost records only that this particular opportunity did not come off, and leaves you free to approach the company again later.

Reopening behaves differently for the two, which is worth knowing before you ask for it. A reopened prospect resumes at exactly the funnel stage it held. A reopened deal returns to the first stage of the pipeline, not the stage it was in when it closed, so you move it forward again yourself.

Security and privacy

  • Reads your data, and can perform a curated set of writes. A connected assistant can create or update records such as suppliers, clients, contracts, bank accounts and cost groups, log work time, create or update tasks, upload a document to a specific invoice, close a sales prospect or deal, and add, invite and set access for the people in your organization — always through named, specific actions, and always limited to what your own account is allowed to do.
  • One action leaves Flowtly. Inviting a colleague sends them an email, so it reaches a person rather than only changing a record. It is available only to accounts that may manage people, it goes to the address you supply, and it grants nothing on its own — the invited person still has only the permission groups you assign.
  • Scoped to one organization. A connection only ever sees the single organization you selected when you allowed access. It cannot reach your other organizations.
  • Your own permissions apply. The assistant sees data through your account, so it is limited to what you are allowed to see in that organization.
  • You stay in control. Access is granted by you, for one organization, and you can disconnect the connector from your AI tool at any time to revoke it.

Frequently asked questions

Is this safe to give to an AI tool? Yes. The connection is limited to one organization and to your own account's permissions, and it uses the same secure sign-in as the Flowtly web app. The assistant can read your data and perform a curated set of actions (such as creating or updating suppliers, clients, contracts and bank accounts, logging work time, uploading a document to an invoice, and onboarding a colleague), but only what you yourself are allowed to do in that organization. The one action that reaches beyond Flowtly is inviting a colleague, which emails them an invitation to sign in.

Can it see my other organizations? No. Each connection is bound to the single organization you choose during sign-in. To work with another organization, add a separate connection for it.

How do I disconnect it? Remove the Flowtly connector from your AI tool. Once removed, it can no longer read your Flowtly data. If your session expires, you simply sign in again the next time you connect.

Which AI tools are supported? Any tool that supports custom MCP connectors — Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini Enterprise among them, on a plan that allows adding them. There is no separate Flowtly app to install per tool and no approval to request: point the connector at https://mcp.flowtly.eu and follow the sign-in steps above. A tool that is not named here works the same way, provided it supports the open standard.

For developers

Building an integration? See the MCP technical reference — the connector's tools (tools/list / tools/call) and JSON-RPC details.

Connection map

Refers toUses upDerived fromPart of
Documented hereDocumented elsewhere
invoice billed to counterparty. invoice taxed by tax-group. cost spends against budget. cost owed to counterparty. bank-transaction reconciled to invoice. bank-connection imports bank-transaction. contract schedules payment-schedule-line. contract agreed with counterparty. contract attached to budget. budget covers project. invoice billed from project. project linked to budget. lead becomes counterparty. deal sold to counterparty.billed totaxed byspends againstowed toreconciled toimportsschedulesagreed withattached tocoversbilled fromlinked tobecomessold toIInvoice — A sales document issued to a client: line items, dates, tax. It is created, reviewed, previewed and then sent.InvoiceCCounterparty — The other side of a financial document — a client billed, or a supplier owed.CounterpartyTTax group — The tax treatment applied to a line, so rates are set once rather than per document.Tax groupCCost — Money the organisation owes or has spent, tracked against a budget.CostBBudget — The financial envelope an engagement is measured against — what was planned, versus what has actually been spent.BudgetBBank transaction — A movement on a connected bank account. Matching it to an invoice or a cost is what makes the books agree with the bank.Bank transactionBBank connection — The consented link to one bank that transactions arrive through. It can stop working on its own — a consent expires or is withdrawn — so it reports whether it is still working.Bank connectionCContract — The financial terms of an engagement: a structured set of payment schedule lines, in one direction or the other.ContractPPayment schedule line — One dated amount on a contract, in a direction — money owed to a supplier, or due from a client.Payment schedule linePProject — The core organizational unit for a business initiative, client engagement or internal work. Everything tracked — time, cost, invoicing, profitability — hangs off one.ProjectPProspect — A company you are working but that is not a customer yet. It sits at New, Contacted or Qualified, and everything done to it is logged against it.ProspectDDeal — A sale in progress: a customer, an amount, and the stage it has reached. It cannot exist without a customer, and its stage is never blank.Deal