AI Assistants (MCP)

Connect an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT directly to your billing platform. A connected assistant can answer reporting questions in plain English, look up records, and - where you deliberately allow it - carry out platform actions on your behalf.

The connection uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard supported by Claude, ChatGPT, and a growing number of other assistants.

What a Connected Assistant Can Do

You choose what each connection is allowed to do when you approve it. Access comes in separate levels, and each is also controlled by permission flags on your own user account:

Reporting KPIs (read-only aggregates)

The assistant can answer dashboard-style questions from the platform’s KPI data:

Revenue and invoicing by month, quarter, or year
Payments received, by method and period
Direct Debit collection performance, including failures and retries
Outstanding debt aged by how overdue it is
Customer, number, and feature growth and churn

It only sees aggregate figures at this level, never individual records.

Individual records (read)

The assistant can find and read individual customers, numbers, features, services, invoices, payments, transactions, notes, tickets, contacts, and TODOs. It can search customers from a name, account number, postcode, or phone number, and filter flexibly - including by parent-customer criteria such as “invoices for customers added in the last 12 months”.

It also reads the payment records behind a balance - card collection attempts with their provider decline detail, how each payment was allocated across invoices, and expected payments where that module is active - and the pricing behind a charge: tariffs and their rates, fixed fee tariffs, discount plans with their allowance buckets and usage, feature discount schemes, call types and carrier tariffs. For call rates it reads the effective rate sheet the operator screens show, not only the rate lines defined directly on a tariff.

A customer’s own money position comes from the customer record rather than from adding invoices up: the balance, overdue amount and exposure, average spend over three, six and twelve months, lifetime spend and lifetime payments, the monthly equivalent of the recurring charges, payment terms, how long the account has been open, and whether each payment method is usable. A number’s inbound rate figures read the same way. Each of these needs access to whatever it is derived from, exactly as it does on the platform’s own screens.

Lists return compact summaries by default, with full record detail available on request.

Call data (read-only)

Granted separately from ordinary records, and in two levels: aggregate call summaries (counts, minutes, data, retail and wholesale cost, grouped by period, direction, call type, number type, dealer or site) and full per-call detail. Neither level lets an assistant change call records.

Individual records (create, edit and actions)

Where you deliberately grant it, the assistant can create and update records and run the platform’s own workflow actions: suspending a number, emailing an invoice, raising a refund, writing off debt, and so on. Actions go through exactly the same workflows and validation as the platform interface.

Two families sit behind their own grants. Financial covers creating and updating expected payments, re-running a payment’s allocation and cancelling a pending card collection attempt. Pricing covers changing tariffs, price books, discount plans and call types, including running an annual price increase.

Write access is never granted by default. It must be ticked separately when you approve the connection, and it needs the corresponding flag on your user account.

How Access Is Controlled

The connection is designed so that an assistant can never see or do more than the person who approved it:

Your own login: each member of staff approves their own connection through the normal platform login and a two-factor authentication code. No passwords or keys are ever shared with the assistant.
Your own permissions: everything the assistant can see is limited by your account’s own access rights, including customer scoping.
A personal-data boundary: individual records for personal customers are excluded unless the Personal Customers access is deliberately granted, so a connection can work through your business base without personal data leaving the platform. Where you do grant it, the assistant must be on a commercial plan (Claude Team or Enterprise, ChatGPT Business, Enterprise or Edu) rather than an individual subscription such as Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus, even one paid for by the company.
A platform-wide ceiling: your platform’s MCP settings cap what any connection can reach, with separate read and write kill switches for the whole platform.
Short-lived credentials: connections use rotating tokens (one-hour access tokens with a rolling sixty-day renewal), and replayed or stolen tokens are revoked automatically.
Full auditability: you receive an email whenever a connection is approved or revoked, and everything an assistant does is recorded in the activity log, flagged separately from API activity.
Revocable at any time: you can review and revoke your connections from the AI Assistants (MCP) page on the platform’s Advanced menu.

Working with the CRM

Where the CRM is in use, an assistant can read every CRM record family, and act on it where the right access levels are granted at approval.

Access level	Allows
Pre-Sales	Moving and closing deals, generating and sending proposals, working deal products
Credit Control	Working chase cases, recording promises, managing holds
Outreach	Replying on cases and steering the email queue

Two high-impact actions need more than the CRM access on its own: bringing a deal live also needs Service Lifecycle, and writing off a chase case also needs Financial.

An assistant also inherits the connected user’s CRM sections and permissions. Where that user does not hold CRM Case Sending, the assistant’s case replies are saved as drafts for a person to review and send, exactly as they would be for the user themselves.

Connections can be approved on the CRM sign-in as well as the backend, so a CRM-only user can connect an assistant without backend access. See Machine access.

Getting Started

Initial setup - what you need, and how to connect Claude, ChatGPT, or another assistant
Using AI assistants - what to ask, and how to manage your connections

Want a billing platform your AI assistant can talk to? see how the SAFE Billing Platform connects to Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI assistants