MCP Server for Accounts Receivable: Connect Your AR Data to Claude

Finero runs an MCP server for accounts receivable, so an AI assistant can read your AR directly instead of waiting for someone to export it. Connect it once and you can ask what is overdue, which buyers paid this week, or whether last night’s ERP sync finished, and get the answer from live data rather than a spreadsheet somebody built on Monday.

It offers twenty-two tools. Most of them read. The few that act are limited to admins, and each one names the record it changes. Setup takes a few minutes, and the session is scoped to the person who approved it rather than to the whole workspace.

What is MCP?

The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for how AI assistants request and receive data from other systems. Before it, every assistant needed its own integration with every tool, which is why so few of them could reach anything useful. MCP replaces that with one contract: a system publishes an MCP server, and any compatible assistant can speak to it.

For finance software this matters more than it does for most categories. AR data sits behind a login by necessity, it changes hourly, and the questions people ask of it are rarely the ones a dashboard was built to answer. A protocol that lets an assistant fetch the current answer, rather than a report of what was true yesterday, changes how the data gets used.

What the Finero MCP server for accounts receivable can do

Reading your receivables

Any connected member’s assistant can:

• summarise aging, break it down by customer, and drill into the installments behind a bucket;
• list invoices, and total them by collection status, with the customers owed the most;
• retrieve a single invoice together with its installments;
• list confirmed payments, and show which processors collect for the workspace;
• list payment links and scheduled payment-link emails, or fetch one link by ID;
• report on automation workflows: what each one does, what triggers it, and what it actually did per invoice;
• list ERP connections and sync runs, and retrieve a specific run.

Acting on request, admins only

Six tools change something, and only an assistant connected by a workspace admin can use them. That rule lives in the database, so an assistant connected by anyone else is refused however it is asked. An admin’s assistant can:

• create a payment link for one installment, and deactivate one;
• reschedule a pending payment-link email, or cancel it;
• start a fresh pull from the ERP;
• release payment receipts the workspace is holding for the ERP.

The machine-readable entry point carries the authoritative tool list and argument schemas, and an assistant can also ask the server what it offers.

Aging figures you can defend

An assistant quoting your aging back to you is only useful if the number would survive a controller asking where it came from. Finero ages the payment schedule rather than the invoice header, so an invoice split into three installments lands in three buckets by each installment’s own due date, counted in the workspace’s time zone.

Credit balances and installments with no due date are reported on their own rather than folded into a bucket. Totals are always per currency: the server never adds euros to dollars, so an assistant has nothing to sum that it should not.

Payment links: what an assistant can and cannot cause

A payment link can collect an installment in full or take a share of it, and it can carry its own due date. The database will not let the links on an installment, plus what has already been collected, add up to more than the installment owes. An assistant that asks for too much gets a clean refusal, never a partial link.

A link is not a charge. It is a page your customer chooses to pay, so the worst outcome of a mistaken link is one nobody uses, and deactivating it deletes nothing. What the customer receives is your workspace’s own payment-link email, sent on the timing your workflow sets. The assistant can move or cancel a pending email. It cannot write one.

Releasing held receipts to the ERP

Some finance teams want a person to decide when collected payments reach the ledger. In Finero that is the manual push mode: receipts are queued when a payment settles and wait to be released. An admin’s assistant can release them, one or many, and gets a verdict for each.

The ERP receives exactly the receipt automatic mode would have sent. That is the only write into your ERP an assistant has, and it cannot switch the push mode itself; that stays a setting a person changes in Finero.

How the connection is authorised

Authorisation is OAuth 2.1 with PKCE. An unauthenticated request is refused with a challenge pointing at the server’s protected-resource metadata, and the flow is discoverable from there, so a well-behaved client can find its own way in without being told.

The part that matters for a finance team is whose access it is. An MCP session acts as the person who approved it, not as the workspace. It sees what that person sees, is bound by the same row-level rules, and is tied in the database to the one workspace it was approved for, even if that person belongs to several.

The consent screen names the agent, the workspace and each capability being granted. The agent’s name is its own claim and is marked as unverified; the screen also shows where the approval will be sent, which a lookalike cannot fake. When Finero adds a capability, every existing connection has to be approved again before it can use anything. Revoking a connection stops it on its next request rather than whenever a token happens to expire.

Connecting it in Claude

In Finero, a workspace admin opens Settings, then API and MCP, and turns on Enable new AI agent connections. Nothing can connect until that switch is on. There is no client ID or secret to copy, because the assistant registers itself.

In Claude, open Settings, then Connectors, then Add custom connector. Paste https://app.getfinero.com/mcp as the server URL, choose to register automatically, and approve the Finero consent screen once. The server is also listed in the official MCP Registry as com.getfinero/finero. Full setup detail lives in the API reference, which is generated from the API itself and is the source of truth if anything here disagrees with it.

What finance teams actually ask it

The useful questions are the ones that would otherwise mean exporting the aging report and filtering it by hand:

• How much euro AR is more than 60 days past due, and who owes most of it?
• Which invoices moved to paid since Friday?
• Show me everything outstanding for this customer, with the installment schedule.
• Did last night’s NetSuite sync finish, and did anything fail?
• Which workflows ran this week, and why did they skip the invoices they skipped?
• Create a payment link for half of the second installment on that invoice.
• Release yesterday’s held receipts to the ERP.

None of these are hard questions. They are questions the ledger cannot answer conversationally, so people stop asking them and settle for the weekly report instead. Lowering the cost of asking changes which questions get asked, which is the actual point.

What it will not do

The list of absent tools is as deliberate as the list of present ones. However it is asked, an MCP session cannot compose text a customer reads, take or refund a payment, move money, edit ERP records, change the sync schedule or push mode, manage members, API keys or integrations, or delete invoices, payments or payment links. Those tools do not exist, so there is nothing for a cleverly worded request to reach.

MCP server or API key: which one you need

Finero offers both, and they are not interchangeable. The difference is whether a human is in the room.

• MCP server. A person is present and connecting an assistant to their own workspace. The session acts as them and offers a deliberately smaller set of tools: mostly reads, plus a few admin-only writes around payment links, emails, ERP pulls and held receipts.
• API key. A system, script or agent runs unattended, with nobody available to approve anything. The key acts as the workspace, is configured once, and reaches every endpoint its permission allows, including settings the MCP session never touches, such as the ERP sync schedule and the payment push mode.

If you already hold an API key, use the HTTP API. The MCP session would give you strictly less.

Where this goes next

Reading came first, and the writes that followed were kept small on purpose. Each one is a specific action on a record you can name, taken by an admin’s assistant because someone asked for it.

The collection work itself already runs autonomously in Finero, which is a different thing from an assistant improvising over a chat session. For the reasoning behind that split, what autonomous AR means covers where judgment belongs and where it does not.

FAQ