AI Agents

NP Ledger connects to AI assistants like Claude through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — an open standard for letting an AI assistant work directly with an application. Once connected, you can ask your assistant to look things up in your books and record transactions for you, in plain language. The goal is ease and accuracy: the assistant does the typing, your books stay in real double-entry fund accounting underneath, and a human stays in the loop.

Look things up (read). Ask questions in plain language and your assistant pulls the answer from your live books:

• Organization summary — name, fiscal year, plan, fund count
• Fund balances and your full chart of accounts
• Grant budget vs. spent for any project
• Unpaid vendor bills
• Transaction search and full transaction detail
• Financial reports — trial balance, statement of activities, statement of financial position, fund transactions

Keep the books current (write). With write access enabled, your assistant can record everyday bookkeeping for you:

• Record donations, in-kind contributions, other revenue, and expenses
• Receive and pay vendor bills
• Record payroll
• Match bank-statement lines to transactions
• Reverse (void) an entry — including one it just recorded by mistake — so it can clean up after itself instead of leaving the correction to you

Restricted-versus-unrestricted fund handling, double-entry balancing, and your chart of accounts are all applied automatically — you describe what happened, and NP Ledger records it correctly. After each entry the assistant gets the full journal entry it posted and the affected balances back, so it can confirm what landed and notice anything off (a fund driven negative, cash overdrawn) rather than moving on blindly.

NP Ledger works with hosted assistants like Claude (claude.ai on the web) and Claude CoWork through a one-click connection — no token to copy, no developer setup:

1. In your AI assistant, add a custom connector and enter the NP Ledger server URL: https://mcp.npledger.com/v1/
2. Click Connect and sign in to your NP Ledger account.
3. Choose the organization you want the assistant to work with.
4. Review the consent screen — it names the organization and the access being granted — and approve. You're connected.

For developer tools such as Cursor and Claude Desktop, connect with an access token instead of one-click sign-in:

1. In NP Ledger, go to Settings → AI Agent Integration and generate a token (read-only or read + write).
2. Optionally limit the token to specific tools and/or funds while creating it (for example, "read plus record donations only," or "General Fund only"). Anything you don't select becomes off-limits for that connection.
3. Add https://mcp.npledger.com/v1/ as the MCP server in your client and provide the token as a bearer credential.

Tokens are shown only once when created — store them in a password manager.

NP Ledger assumes an AI assistant can make mistakes, and builds the guardrails so that a confused or looping assistant can't quietly corrupt your books. Most of these are on by default and invisible until something looks wrong; the rest are one click to enable under Settings → AI Agent Integration.

Always on

• The right entry, or a clear error. Each tool only posts the kind of entry it's meant to — a donation can't land in an expense account, payroll can't post backwards, and an account named for the wrong role is refused. When the assistant gets something wrong, NP Ledger sends back a plain-language error that names the fix, so it corrects itself and retries rather than posting nonsense.
• Sensible dates and funds. The assistant can't post into a closed (locked) accounting period or a future date, and stale dates prompt a confirmation. Restricted-fund spending is automatically tied to its grant/project, and it's warned when a donor name doesn't match an existing contact instead of silently dropping the attribution.
• Duplicate protection. If an assistant tries to record the same entry twice in quick succession, NP Ledger holds the repeat and asks it to confirm before posting again — so a stumble or retry can't quietly double up your books. A genuinely intentional repeat still goes through.
• Runaway-loop guard. A sudden burst of writes (a loop or retry storm) is paused for confirmation, so a misbehaving assistant can't fire off dozens of entries unchecked. The threshold is set high enough that normal use never trips it.
• A complete audit trail. Every entry an assistant records is written to your audit log and tagged as coming from the connector, with the connection's name — so you can always see exactly what the AI did.

Optional — turn on under Settings → AI Agent Integration

• Require approval for writes. Hold every agent write — or only writes at or above a dollar amount you set — for an admin to approve before it posts. Nothing hits your ledger without a person's sign-off.
• Unusual-write guard. Flag a write that's out of character for your organization — an amount far larger than anything you've recorded before, or a never-before-seen account or counterparty — and hold it for confirmation. It learns from your history, so expect a few extra confirmations early on.
• Agent-write digest email. Get a periodic email summarizing what AI assistants recorded, each with a link to review or void it — a safety net to catch anything unusual after the fact.

Always your call

• You choose the access level. Connect read-only so the assistant can view and report but never change anything, or read + write so it can also record transactions.
• Limit a connection's reach. A token can be restricted to specific tools and/or funds, so a connection simply can't call anything outside what you allowed.
• Scoped to one organization. A connection is tied to the single organization you selected. It can't reach another organization's data.
• Explicit consent. The consent screen names the organization before any access is granted — only connect an assistant you control.
• Preview before posting. An assistant can ask for a dry-run that shows the exact journal entry it would record — accounts, debits and credits, fund — without posting anything, so it (or you) can check before committing.
• Disconnect anytime. Remove the NP Ledger connector (or revoke its token) in your AI client whenever you want it to stop accessing your books.
• Your data stays in NP Ledger. The connector lets an assistant read and write your books on request; it doesn't hand your financial data to anyone else. See our Privacy Policy for details.

Reading your books and running reports is available on every plan. Recording transactions and the more advanced tools (bills, payroll, bank matching, multi-organization access) are available on paid plans, with higher monthly usage on higher tiers. See pricing for the current plan details.

Questions about connecting an AI assistant? Email contact@70ware.com and we'll help you get set up.