Connecting an AI assistant with the MCP connector

Synthelio ships with a Model Context Protocol server, which is a live connection between your workspace and any AI assistant that speaks MCP. Once it is connected, the assistant can read your engagements, timesheets, allocations, financials, invoices, and time off, and with your permission it can act: log time, submit a monthly timesheet, request leave, approve someone else's, add a person to an engagement.

The practical effect is that the questions you would normally answer by opening four screens and exporting a spreadsheet become one sentence in a chat you already have open.

What it is

MCP is an open standard introduced by Anthropic and now supported by a growing list of clients, including Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, and several VS Code and JetBrains integrations. If your tool advertises MCP support, the Synthelio connector works with it.

The endpoint is https://mcp.synthelio.com/mcp. Authentication is per user, over OAuth, so you approve the connection in your browser once and the assistant never sees your password. Scope is your tenant only.

Everything runs under your own Synthelio login. The assistant sees exactly what you see in the web app, nothing more. It cannot cross tenants, cannot raise its own permissions, and cannot route around the access controls you already have.

What your assistant can read

Anything visible to you in the interface is readable through the connector. Grouped by the question you would actually ask:

• People and teams. Who is on a team, one person's profile, who is free at a given percentage over a window, and which skills exist at which seniority.
• Engagements and allocations. Active client work filtered by status, account, manager, or unit. Full detail on one engagement including its SOW, PO, and financial linkage. Who is booked on it and for what period. Which engagements end next quarter.
• Timesheets. What you have logged this month, which of your reports have not submitted, company-wide submission state, and which timesheet codes belong to an engagement.
• Time off. Your remaining balance, team balances for the year, and who is out next week.
• Financials. Revenue, cost, margin, and PO coverage on an engagement. A revenue-only view. A rollup across a unit, broken out per currency. Utilization for a period, adjusted for time off.
• Contracts and billing. Signed SOWs and purchase orders by account, invoices issued in a period, and billing milestones still open.
• Notifications and audit. Your in-app notifications, and what changed on a given table, when, and by whom.

What your assistant can do

The connector does not stop at reading. Once you approve a write, the assistant can log a time entry against an engagement with a note, correct or delete one of your own entries, and submit your monthly timesheet. It can request time off, amend or cancel a pending request, and, if you are a manager, approve or decline one with a note.

Project managers get allocation writes as well: add someone at a role, seniority, and percentage over a date range, create an unassigned demand row for a position you are still hiring for, change a person's percentage from a specific date, end an allocation, or delete a demand row created in error.

Percentage changes split the allocation at the boundary rather than overwriting it, so the old figure stays on record. That is deliberate. An allocation history that gets rewritten every time somebody moves is not a history, and it is the reason most firms cannot answer what the plan looked like in September.

Every write lands in the standard Synthelio audit log with your identity, a timestamp, and before and after values. Nothing the assistant does is anonymous.

How access control works

The rule worth internalizing: the connector is not a separate permission surface. Row-level security in the Synthelio database is the source of truth, and the connector inherits it. If the app blocks you from seeing another team's cost rates, so does the assistant.

Beyond that:

• No service account, no shared secret, no pooled data. Every request runs as you.
• Tokens refresh automatically, so long conversations do not drop mid-way. If your session becomes invalid, because your role changed for example, the assistant prompts you to reconnect.
• Time entry writes are refused if the engagement does not cover you, if you were not assigned to it, or if the month is closed. Time off writes go through the same approval workflow the app enforces. Allocation writes refuse to orphan existing time entries.
• Contract values, cost rates, and other sensitive person-level fields are exposed only to admin and controlling roles, the same as in the app.
• Document sharing links carry access tokens, so the connector strips them by default. Ask explicitly if you need one.

Connecting it

The steps vary slightly per client, but the shape is the same everywhere. Open your AI client's connectors or MCP servers settings panel, add a new connector pointing at the endpoint above, and sign in when it redirects you to the Synthelio login screen. Review the requested access, approve, and return to the client. The connector will show as connected.

In Claude and ChatGPT this lives under Settings, then Connectors. In Cursor, Windsurf, and Zed it is either the MCP settings panel or your settings file. In VS Code and JetBrains it goes through the MCP plugin for your editor. Any client that follows the standard will work, so if yours is not listed, look for MCP or Model Context Protocol in its settings.

Then start a new chat and ask something real. Who is free 20 to 40 percent for two weeks starting Monday is a good first test, because the answer is immediately checkable against what you already know.

Prompts worth trying

• Weekly ops review. Status of every active engagement with revenue, cost, and margin percentage, flagging anything under 40 percent.
• Timesheet chase. Who on the team has not submitted this month, and how many hours each has logged against target.
• Capacity search. Who is available at 50 percent for a four-month window, including people already partly booked.
• Time entry after a call. Log the 90 minutes you just spent in a planning session, under the right code, with a note.
• Financial rollup. Unit financials for a quarter, per currency and per engagement inside the unit.

What it does not do yet

Worth knowing before you plan around it. File export is not there: the assistant can render data as CSV inline, but downloading it is a separate step. Publishing to Slack, Teams, or a calendar is your AI client's job through its other connectors, not this one. Bulk imports technically work but run one call per row, so 200 allocations belong in the app. Invoices and SOWs are read-only, because modifying signed financial documents should require the app. And project structure itself, creating engagements, changing managers, setting up billing rules, is not exposed.

Common questions

Can it see my colleagues' timesheets? Only if your role can. A regular user sees their own, a manager sees their team, an admin sees the tenant.

Can it edit someone else's time entry? No. Time entry writes are always self-writes, and the connector rejects any attempt to write as another person.

What happens when someone leaves? Deactivate the user in Synthelio and their access is gone immediately. The next tool call returns a 401 and the assistant asks them to sign in again.

Does my AI vendor see my data? Only what enters the conversation. Traffic runs directly between your AI client and the Synthelio MCP server rather than through the vendor's own backend. Whatever the assistant reads becomes part of the conversation the vendor handles. Whatever it never asks for stays in Synthelio.

How do I disconnect? From Synthelio, go to Settings, then Connected Apps, find the session, and revoke it. Or remove the connector from your AI client.

Does it cost extra? No. The connector is included with every workspace. You may need a paid tier of your chosen AI client to enable custom connectors, which is a question for that vendor, but Synthelio charges nothing for MCP access.