Connect an AI assistant
Finput runs an account MCP server. Point an AI assistant at it and the assistant can price deals, check where they will be approved, look up ABNs and read or save your scenarios — against your real rate cards, your real permissions and your real plan.
This is not the docs server. The account server answers questions about your account; the docs server searches this reference site. See Two different MCP servers below.
What you need
- A Pro or Max plan. Connecting is not available on Free.
- An AI client that speaks MCP over HTTP — Claude (desktop, web or Claude Code), ChatGPT or Cursor.
If your Finput account has no Settings → Connections tab, the feature is not switched on for your organisation yet.
Connecting
You paste one address and nothing else:
There is no token to generate, copy or paste. There is no client id, no secret, no config file to edit.
Claude desktop or web
Claude Code
ChatGPT or Cursor
The Claude desktop app and claude.ai share one list of connectors, so adding Finput in either adds it to both.
Name it and paste the address
Name: Finput. Remote MCP server URL:
https://api.finput.com.au/mcp. Leave the advanced settings
empty — there is no client id or secret to enter. Click
Add.
Connect
Click Connect next to Finput. A browser tab opens at Finput; sign in if you are not already signed in, and you land on the consent screen.
On a Claude Team or Enterprise plan, an owner may need to add the connector under Organization settings → Connectors before members can connect it.
Connections start in your assistant, not in Finput — that is why the Connections tab has no “Add connection” button.
What the consent screen asks
The consent screen is the only page a human reads in this flow. It shows:
- Who is asking. The name the application reported for itself, quoted. Any application can call itself anything, so only continue if you started the connection yourself.
- Who you are. The email you are signed in as, your organisation and your plan. The connection is bound to that organisation.
- What the assistant will be able to do, as a list derived from your actual permissions and plan — not a generic blurb. If you cannot run the approval Matrix, the Matrix line is not on your screen and the tool is not offered to the assistant.
- What it will never be able to do. Sign in as you or change your password, add or remove users, see or change your billing, card or plan, create API tokens, connect or disconnect assistants, read your analytics, or see any other organisation’s data.
- Access level — read only, or read and write.
Read only vs read and write
Read only is the default and the right choice unless you want the
assistant to save scenarios for you. Everything else it can do — every
tool in the table below bar save_scenario — works on a read-only
connection.
The access level is enforced on the credential, not on the tool list. A read-only connection is refused every write the API offers. A read-and-write connection is permitted every write you are permitted, whether or not a tool exists for it — bounded only by your own permissions and by the never-list above.
Rate card editing (financiers)
If you are on a financier account, you already have permission to edit rate cards by hand, and you choose read and write, the consent screen adds a separate rate card editing checkbox, off by default. Under read only it does not appear at all — that is not a fault.
Leaving that checkbox off keeps rate-card tools out of the assistant’s list. It is accident prevention, not a security limit: the credential is an ordinary API token, and anything holding it can still call the rate-card endpoints directly. Treat a read-and-write connection as something that can change your rates, whatever the checkbox says.
What the assistant can do
Seven tools are available today. Which of them you see depends on your permissions, plan, organisation type and access level.
The first six are read-only. save_scenario is the only one that
changes anything, and it is offered only on a read-and-write
connection — on a read-only connection it is not merely refused, it is
not in the assistant’s list at all.
Results respect your plan. On a plan with masked calculator results,
the assistant sees the same masked results you do; find_approvals
needs the Matrix entitlement, the same as the Matrix screen. A scenario
the assistant saves is an ordinary saved scenario: it shows up in your
scenarios list and you can delete it there.
find_approvals returns possible for a deal a financier has not
ruled out — a blank criterion means not checked, and a blank input
means possible, never a violation. “Possible” is not “approved”. Do
not repeat an assistant’s summary to a customer as an approval.
Connections expire after 30 days
Every connection lasts 30 days from the moment you approve it, and then stops working. Your assistant will notice, and ask you to approve it again — the same one-click consent screen, no address to re-paste.
This is deliberate. Finput issues no refresh tokens, so there is no credential that quietly keeps working forever in a client you have forgotten about. A connection you actually use costs you one click a month; one you have abandoned dies on its own.
Settings → Connections lists every connected assistant with the access level it was granted, when it was connected, when it was last used and when it expires. Connections in their last few days are flagged there.
Disconnecting
- Go to Settings → Connections.
- Find the assistant and click Disconnect.
Access stops immediately. The assistant cannot undo this — disconnecting is one of the things no connection is ever allowed to do.
A connection is an API token underneath, so the same row also appears
under Settings → API Tokens, badged MCP. Revoking it there has the
same effect.
Two different MCP servers
Finput runs two, and they do different jobs.
Pointing an assistant at the docs server and asking it to price a deal will not work: that server can only search these pages. Pointing an assistant at the account server and asking how an endpoint is shaped will not work either. Connecting both is perfectly reasonable — give them different names in your client so you can tell them apart.
Troubleshooting
“Settings → Connections isn’t there.” The feature needs a Pro or Max plan, and it is being rolled out gradually. If you are on Pro or Max and still cannot see the tab, contact support.
The consent screen says an application you don’t recognise is asking. Cancel. The name is self-reported by whatever called us; only approve a connection you started yourself.
The assistant stopped working after a month. That is the 30-day expiry. Ask it to use a Finput tool again and it will walk you through reconnecting.
A tool you expected isn’t offered. The tool list is filtered by your permissions, plan and access level. A tool you are not entitled to is not hidden behind an error message — it is simply not there.