Connect an AI assistant
You can connect ChatGPT or Claude to Laabam One and then ask about your business in plain language — what is outstanding, who owes you the most, which invoices are unpaid this month, your cash position, profit and loss for a period, what is running low in stock.
Answers come from your live ledger, not from an export or a summary, so the figures match what you would see in the app.
An assistant can also do the work — raise an invoice, enter a bill, post a journal, run payroll, log a delivery round — showing you exactly what it will do first. Depending on your company's setting, a change is made when you confirm it in the chat, or waits for someone to approve it inside Laabam One. Anything that records money paid or received always waits.
Setup takes about two minutes and you do it once.
What "connecting" actually means
Laabam One publishes what is called an MCP server. MCP — Model Context Protocol — is an open standard for letting an AI assistant talk to a system like ours. Think of it as a socket: we expose a set of specific, named operations, and the assistant can call those and nothing else.
Three things follow from that, and they are the whole safety story:
It is not a data dump. We do not hand the assistant a copy of your books. It asks a question, we answer that one question, live. Nothing is uploaded or synced anywhere.
It can only do what we published. The assistant cannot run queries of its own or reach parts of the system we did not expose. There is a fixed list of operations and that list is the boundary.
It acts as you, not above you. Every operation checks the same permission the equivalent screen in Laabam One checks, against your role, on every single request. If you cannot open the bank balance page, an assistant connected as you cannot read your bank balance either. If your access to a company is removed, the connection stops working for that company immediately — it is not re-checked at expiry, it is re-checked each time.
Today the connection is allowlisted for ChatGPT and Claude only. MCP is an open standard and
other clients exist, but they will be refused at sign-in with a redirect_uri error. If you need
another client supported, contact support@laabam.app.
You can either add the connector yourself (the steps below), or install the Laabam.One app from the ChatGPT directory.
Adding it yourself reads our live list, so you get everything in What an AI assistant can do. The directory app is reviewed and published at version 1.1.1, and OpenAI reviews each new version before it is listed — version 2.0, with everything marked 2.0 on that page, has been submitted.
Claude only connects the first way, so Claude always sees the full list.
The steps below are the first way. Follow them and this distinction does not affect you.
Before you start
A paid plan on the assistant's side. ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Team or Enterprise; or Claude Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise. Custom connectors are not available on either free tier. This is their restriction, not ours.
A Laabam One login with access to the company or companies you want to connect.
The right permissions for what you want to ask. Your role decides what the assistant can see — the same as in the app. A role that cannot open Accounting in Laabam One cannot get a profit and loss out of the assistant either.
The address
Both assistants need the same one thing:
https://mcp.laabam.one/mcp
There is nothing to install and no file to download. Signing in, choosing your companies and issuing the credential all happen automatically the first time you add it.
Step by step: Claude
- Open Settings → Connectors.
- Click
+→ Add custom connector. - Name:
Laabam One - Remote MCP server URL:
https://mcp.laabam.one/mcp - Click Continue. Claude reads our configuration and fills in the rest.
- Authentication — leave it on Always required. Claude marks this Detected.
- OAuth client — choose No client ID — register one automatically.
- Leave Additional request headers empty.
- Click Connect. A Laabam One sign-in page opens.
- Sign in, tick the companies you want this connection to cover, and click Allow access.
Claude offers three OAuth client options and marks the first one Recommended:
| Option | Use it? |
|---|---|
| Use Anthropic's hosted client metadata | No — needs a server feature we do not implement |
| No client ID — register one automatically | Yes — Claude marks this Detected |
| Use your own OAuth client | No |
Recommended is Anthropic's general preference. Detected is what Claude actually found on our server. Trust Detected — our server registers clients dynamically, and the recommended option will fail.
Step by step: ChatGPT
- Open Settings → Connectors.
- Turn on Developer mode if it is not already on.
- Press
+to add a connector. - MCP Server URL:
https://mcp.laabam.one/mcp - Leave Authentication on OAuth. Leave the advanced OAuth settings blank — they are read from our server.
- Click Create. A Laabam One sign-in page opens.
- Sign in, tick the companies you want this connection to cover, and click Allow access.
/sse to the addressChatGPT's dialog shows an example address ending in /sse, which invites you to copy the pattern.
Our server speaks Streamable HTTP and the address ends in /mcp.
https://mcp.laabam.one/sse is a 404.
If you open https://mcp.laabam.one/mcp in a browser you will see a 405. That is also correct —
the connection uses POST, not a page load. It is not a sign the server is down.
Choosing your companies
On the approval screen you tick companies with checkboxes, and you can tick more than one — up to 20 on a single connection. Only companies you actually have access to are offered.
Once connected, you can say which one you mean in the question itself:
"What's outstanding for Darshan Driving School?"
and switch freely between the companies you approved. Group questions work too:
"Give me revenue for all my companies this month"
Totals for a group are reported per currency and never added across currencies.
You can change the companies later without re-adding the connector. Go to Settings → Security in Laabam One, find the connection, and add or remove a company there.
The list is fixed at approval and checked again on every request. Nothing written into a conversation — including text hidden inside a document you paste — can point the connection at a company you did not approve.
What you can ask
| Ask about | Examples |
|---|---|
| Receivables | "What's outstanding, and who owes me the most?" |
| Invoices | "Show me the unpaid invoices for this month" |
| Cash | "What's my cash position across all bank accounts?" |
| Profit and loss | "Give me the profit and loss for last month" |
| Expenses | "What did we spend on, by category, this quarter?" |
| Payables | "What do I owe suppliers right now?" |
| Stock | "Which products am I about to run out of?" |
| Products | "Which products have sold the most?" |
| Sales trend | "How does this month compare with last month?" |
| CRM | "How's my sales pipeline looking?" |
| Bookings | "How many bookings are there tomorrow?" "Who's free for a lesson at 10?" |
| Support | "What support requests do I have open?" |
| Lookups | "Find the invoice for Anand Traders and show me the details" |
| Daily catch-up | "Give me my briefing for today" |
Amounts come back already formatted in the company's own currency, symbol attached — ₹1,234.00,
A$1,234.00, RM1,234.00. Read the currency from the value rather than assuming one.
These are examples, not the boundary. For the complete list of everything an assistant can do — including bookings, CRM, stock, purchases and campaigns — see What an AI assistant can do.
How it makes changes
An assistant shows you a change before it makes it — the record, the figures, what it will post — and tells you what happened afterwards.
What happens when you agree is your company's choice, in Settings → Security → AI drafts:
- Confirm in the chat. The change is made as soon as you confirm. This is the default for the company's owners, for changes up to 50,000 in your currency.
- Approve in Laabam One. The change waits as a draft until someone opens Settings → Security → AI drafts, reviews exactly what was proposed, and approves or rejects it. Everyone else gets this by default, and so does any change above the limit.
Some changes always wait for approval in Laabam One: recording money paid or received, refunds, sending a campaign, approving or paying salaries, statutory remittances, opening balances, and imports of more than 50 documents. Most changes can be undone from the same screen.
Raising a support request (and replying on one) is made straight away whatever the setting.
That is deliberate. The worst case is a support ticket nobody needed, which is visible and easy to close; and a customer reporting a problem cannot approve their own draft, so holding it back would leave the report sitting unseen.
Two protections are worth knowing:
- The assistant cannot approve its own draft. Approving happens only in an authenticated Laabam One session. Nothing is returned to the assistant that could be used to complete the write.
- Approving is permission-checked per draft. The person approving must hold the permission that the specific action needs — approving a payment is checked against the payments permission, not against "can open this page".
What the assistant's provider can see
This is worth understanding before you connect.
The assistant is not part of Laabam One. Whatever it reads is then handled by whoever operates it — OpenAI for ChatGPT, Anthropic for Claude — under their privacy policy and terms, not ours. Once figures leave us in answer to your question, they can appear in that conversation and be retained by that provider under its own rules.
On our side we store the credential the connection uses, which companies it covers, which login approved it, and when. We do not store your conversations, the questions asked, or the answers returned.
Connect only assistants you are willing to give that visibility to. Our privacy policy covers this in section 3.2.
Managing and disconnecting
From Laabam One — go to Settings → Security. Every assistant you have authorised is listed, across all your companies, with the client name, the companies it covers, and when it was approved. From there you can:
- add or remove an individual company on a connection,
- revoke the connection entirely.
Revoking takes effect immediately. It does not wait for the credential to expire, and the assistant must ask for your approval again before it can read anything further.
From the assistant — removing the connector in ChatGPT or Claude stops that client using it.
Removing someone from a company also ends the connections that person authorised for it.
Troubleshooting
"redirect_uri is not a permitted redirect domain" The assistant's callback address is not on our allowlist. This fails closed by design, so it is a clear error rather than a security problem. If you are using ChatGPT or Claude and see this, contact support@laabam.app with the address shown.
The assistant says a tool "is not available" It has found the connection but was refused the specific operation. Almost always this is permissions: your role cannot open the equivalent screen in Laabam One. Check your role under Settings → Users, or ask whoever administers your account.
"This connection is not linked to a company" The connection was approved without any company being ticked. Remove the connector and add it again, ticking at least one.
"This connection is no longer permitted to access that company" The membership was removed, or the company was closed. This is the per-request check doing its job.
A 405 when opening the address in a browser
Correct and expected. The connection uses POST; there is no page to view.
Answers look empty Check which company the answer is for. If the connection covers several, name the one you mean in the question.
A draft never appeared Drafts are per company. Open Settings → Security → AI drafts while switched to the company the request was made against.
Still stuck?
Email support@laabam.app. Tell us which assistant you are using, what you typed, and what it said back — the exact wording of an error is usually enough for us to point straight at the cause.