Connect Claude

Overview

AMS exposes your business data to Claude through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — an open standard Anthropic created so AI assistants can talk to external systems. Once connected, Claude can answer questions about your products, retailers, leads, and sales without you having to copy-paste data.

Connecting takes about a minute. You generate a long-lived token from your AMS account, paste a one-line snippet into Claude, and you're done. Tokens are revocable from the same page where you create them.

Before You Start

• You must be a business admin in AMS to generate a token. (Employees can be granted MCP access in a future update.)
• Your AMS subscription must be active or in trial. Canceled or past-due accounts won't be able to authenticate.
• Claude.ai web isn't supported yet. Web support is coming in a future release. For now, use Claude Desktop (free).

Generate a Token

1. From any AMS dashboard page, click your name in the top-right and choose Profile.
2. Scroll to Connect Claude and click Manage Claude connections.
3. Click Generate token.
4. Give the token a memorable name (e.g., "My MacBook" or "Work laptop") so you can identify it later in the list.
5. Choose your scopes. read is always included. The two write scopes (write:leads and write:outreach) are opt-in:
   • read — Search and view all your business data. Required.
   • write:leads — Let Claude create new leads on your behalf. Conversion flags are forced off — Claude can't accidentally convert a lead into a retailer.
   • write:outreach — Let Claude log outreach against leads, retailers, podcasts, or collabs.
6. Click Generate token. AMS will show you the plaintext token once. Copy it immediately.

Important: The full token is only displayed at creation time. AMS stores a one-way hash, so we can't recover the plaintext later. If you lose the token, revoke it and generate a new one.

Connect Claude Desktop

Claude Desktop only supports local-subprocess (stdio) MCP servers in its config file, so we use mcp-remote — Anthropic's small npx-launched bridge that connects Claude Desktop to a remote HTTP MCP server. The snippet in the modal already includes it; you don't need to install anything manually because npx grabs the package on first run.

1. Open Claude Desktop and go to Settings → Developer → Edit Config. This opens claude_desktop_config.json in your default editor.
2. Locate where the mcpServers block should live in your file:
   • If mcpServers already exists (you've connected another MCP server before), add "ams": {...} as a new entry inside that existing block.
   • If mcpServers does NOT exist yet (most common for first-time MCP users), add "mcpServers" as a top-level key — a sibling of any keys you already have like preferences. Separate it from the previous key with a comma. Don't wrap it in extra braces — that's the most common mistake.
3. Paste the JSON snippet from the Claude Desktop tab (pre-filled with your token) into the spot you identified above.
4. Save the config and restart Claude Desktop.

After restart, Claude will list AMS as a connected server. The next conversation will have access to the AMS tools.

If Claude doesn't see AMS after restart, your JSON is most likely malformed. Common signs: an extra { before mcpServers, a missing comma between the previous key and mcpServers, or an extra } at the bottom. Run the file through a JSON validator (e.g. jsonlint.com) to spot the issue. The token-display modal's full-file example (under "Show full-file example") shows the exact placement.

Connect Claude.ai Web

Not supported yet. We're working on it — support is coming in a future release. For now, please use Claude Desktop with the token above.

Advanced: Claude Code (terminal)

If you use Claude Code from a terminal, you can connect AMS with a single command — no config file edits needed. The modal doesn't surface this option because most artists use Desktop, but power users can run:

claude mcp add --transport http ams https://app.artistmanagementstudios.com/api/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer ams_pat_..."

Replace ams_pat_... with the token shown when you click Generate token. The next Claude Code session will have access to your AMS data.

What Claude Can Do

Claude has access to the following read tools:

• Search — find products, retailers, leads, podcasts, collabs, tasks, or events by name.
• Get record — fetch the full details of a single row, including key related data (e.g., a retailer with their recent orders and outreach history).
• List recent — see the most recent rows for any entity.
• Sales summary — total revenue, COGS, profit, and transaction count for the last 7, 30, or 90 days, or year-to-date.
• Top products — rank products by revenue, units, or profit over the same periods. Good for "what are my best sellers this month?" or "which products made the most profit last quarter?".
• Lead pipeline — leads grouped by status with last-touch dates and pending-outreach flags.
• Retailer relationship — a full retailer view: orders, outreach timeline, transaction history.
• Goals review — your annual revenue and metric goals for a year, each with year-to-date actual vs. target, percent to goal, months on track, the pace needed to finish, and a month-by-month breakdown — the same numbers as your Goals page. Claude can optionally reconcile your manually-entered revenue against what AMS recorded from transactions (wholesale, consignment, events). Great for prepping a year-end goals meeting.

Claude can also use a guided prompt, "Annual goals review", which walks it through pulling your goals and writing a meeting-ready executive report (what's on track, what's at risk, and recommended actions). In Claude Desktop you'll find it where the app lists prompts from connected servers.

With write scopes, Claude can also:

• Create lead — add a new lead from a conversation (e.g., after Claude helps you draft a cold-outreach email).
• Log outreach — record an outreach interaction against a lead, retailer, podcast, or collab.

Anything Claude creates is tagged with a Claude badge in the dashboard so you can always see what was added through the connection.

Managing Connections

On the Connect Claude page in your profile, the Tokens tab lists all tokens for your business. Each row shows:

• The token name and the admin who created it
• The scopes granted to that token
• The token prefix (the first 12 characters of the plaintext)
• When the token was last used
• When the token was created

Any business admin can revoke any token in the business — useful when a colleague leaves the company or if a token is suspected of being compromised. Revocation is immediate.

You can have up to 25 active tokens per business. Revoking one frees the slot.

Activity Log

Switch to the Activity tab to see exactly what Claude has been doing on your business's behalf. Every tool call and resource read is logged with:

• The timestamp (in UTC)
• Which token made the call (and which admin owns it)
• A friendly action label ("Searched", "Created lead", etc.)
• The status (success, error, or denied)
• A one-line summary of the arguments

Filter by token, status, or date range. The activity log is business-wide — every admin sees the same data.

Security

• Tokens are stored as one-way hashes. AMS only stores a SHA-256 digest of each token, plus the first 12 characters for display. The plaintext token is never recoverable from our database.
• HTTPS only. All traffic to the MCP endpoint is over HTTPS. Never send a token over plain HTTP.
• Scope enforcement. Claude only sees the tools permitted by the token's scopes. Without write:leads, the create-lead tool isn't even visible to Claude.
• Per-token rate limits. Each token is capped at 60 requests per minute. Excess requests return a 429 with a Retry-After header.
• Revocation is immediate. Once revoked, the next attempt to use the token returns 401.
• Multi-tenant isolation. Every query Claude runs is scoped to your business_id, derived from the verified token — never from anything Claude sends.

Troubleshooting

401 Invalid or revoked token — The token doesn't match any active record. Either it was mistyped, revoked, or never copied correctly. Generate a new one and replace it in your Claude config.

403 Subscription not active — Your AMS subscription is canceled or past due. Renew on the Subscription page and try again.

403 Tool requires scope — Claude tried to call a write tool, but the token only has read. Generate a new token with the needed write scope (and revoke the old one).

429 Rate limit exceeded — More than 60 requests in a minute. Claude usually backs off automatically; if it persists, your usage is unusually heavy and may need investigation.

401 / "Server unavailable" in your Claude client — The MCP server returns a precise auth-error message in the WWW-Authenticate header and JSON body (e.g., "This token was revoked at..." or "Token not found..."), but some bridges hide that detail and just show "Server unavailable". If you're seeing the generic error and tool calls are failing, the most likely cause is a revoked token. Check the Tokens tab on Connect Claude — if your token is marked Revoked, generate a new one and update your Claude client config.

Claude doesn't see the AMS tools — Restart Claude after pasting the config, or verify the URL and Authorization header match what's shown in the token display modal exactly. (Claude.ai web isn't supported yet — use Claude Desktop.)

Claude Desktop shows "Some MCP servers could not be loaded" / "skipped: ams" — The config likely has an old url+headersshape from an earlier version of these instructions. Claude Desktop only accepts stdio configs, so the snippet must use command + args with mcp-remote. Generate a fresh token (or regenerate one) and copy the current snippet from the Claude Desktop tab — it uses the correct shape.