What the AI assistant (MCP) can do

The AI assistant answers questions about your clients, tasks and hours. The assistant makes everyday changes on your say-so, within the limits of your own Uku access.

Ask the AI assistant about your own work in Uku in plain language, the way you would ask a colleague. With a personal assistant key it answers from your own view of Uku.

• Your day — “what is on my dashboard?”, “what is overdue?”, “what is in my catch-up?”, “what did I park for later?”
• Find a client — “find the client Apple Ltd” searches your client list by name.
• Find anything else — “find John’s contact details”, or “which tasks mention the annual report”. One search covers contacts, tasks, notes, suppliers and contracts at once. Invoices join that search only on a connection with financial access.
• Hours — “how many hours did I log on Apple Ltd this month?”, “show logged hours by client for June”.
• Performance figures — total hours, billable hours, utilisation, on-time rate, tasks done, tasks overdue and active clients. Ask for them as a headline, as a trend over time, or broken down by client, member, topic or service. Ask “which figures can you report?” and the assistant lists the ones it accepts by name, so you need not guess the wording. The assistant also offers a link that opens the same figures in Uku, which you open as yourself. Money metrics such as revenue are left out unless the connection has financial access.
• What happened — “who changed the due date on this task?” Or “what happened on client Apple Ltd this week?” With a personal key the assistant sees your own actions only, never a colleague’s. The activity trail covers roughly the last hundred days. Ask about something older and the assistant searches the window it has, then tells you which range that was.
• Responsibilities — “who is responsible for what on this client?” The assistant reads back who holds which workflow role there, and can work out which of the roles that client’s workflow uses nobody holds yet.
• Templates and teams — “which workflow templates do we have?”, “what is on the monthly bookkeeping template?”, “who is in the payroll team?”

If a question has no matching data, the assistant says so plainly rather than guessing.

The AI assistant reads this Uku Help Center live. A “how do I…” question therefore comes back with an answer from a real article rather than an invented one.

Ask a plain question. Examples are “how do I set up a contract?” and “where do I change a client’s billing day?” The assistant answers from the matching article and links to it, so you can read the full page. Write in Estonian, or ask for the Estonian article, and it searches and cites the Estonian Help Center instead.

Two questions get an answer straight away, without the assistant going and looking.

“Can you do X?” The assistant keeps a map of its own abilities and reads it instantly. The answer goes entity by entity — whether it can read, create, change or delete that kind of record. When the answer is no, it also says why it is no, and where in Uku you can do the thing yourself. Ask before you plan a piece of work, rather than finding the edge halfway through.

“Is our Uku set up for this?” Uku sells apps such as Billing, Business Analytics and Workforce Management on top of your plan. In one answer the assistant reports which apps your firm has active and which are not. The answer gives the reason each inactive app is off, and names what is still missing before invoicing, workforce or performance figures will work.

The reason an app is off matters, because only one of the three is something you can fix from where you are:

• Never activated — the app can be switched on.
• Subscription lapsed — the app is activated, but the subscription is not current. Switching it on again does not help.
• Not in your plan tier — the tier does not include it. Changing the plan is the only route.

Ask the assistant to activate an app and it previews the change first. Some apps switch on others with them. Workforce Management brings four more, and Emailing brings Mailbox. The preview names every app that would be activated, not only the one you asked for. Read that list before you agree.

The assistant will not activate an app as a side effect of some other request. Activation happens only when you ask for it in your own words. The rule exists because the assistant reads text written by people outside your firm.

Anyone with a working Claude connection to Uku can use the assistant. What it reaches is decided by the credential the connection uses, not by a separate setting.

Path: Settings & Apps → Public API → Public API

• A signed-in connection is the usual one. You sign in to Uku from Claude, and Uku creates a personal key for the connection through a consent screen. The connection acts as you, and the consent screen is the one place financial access can be granted.
• An assistant key — what the Connect an AI assistant (Claude) panel generates — is also personal, and is meant for machines with no browser. Uku mints it with read and write access only, so it never carries financial access.
• An integration key is company-wide rather than personal, so it reaches every client in the firm. Such a key carries financial access if it was created with Include financial data ticked.

Setting each of these up is covered in Connect Uku to Claude.

A personal connection never reaches further than you do. In a named set of places it deliberately reaches less, listed under What the assistant deliberately will not do.

Every request the assistant makes goes through the same permission checks as the app itself. Your access level, your client permissions and your workflow rights all apply exactly as they do when you work in Uku. Asking Claude to create a team, for example, still needs the Company Owner or Company Admin rights that action needs anyway.

An integration key is not limited that way. The key acts for the whole company, whoever is chatting.

The AI assistant writes to Uku in two tiers. Small, single-record writes that are quick to undo happen on the first ask, because a confirmation round trip on each would be pure friction. Everything else previews first: the assistant shows exactly what would happen and changes nothing until you say yes.

Acts as soon as you ask (and tells you plainly what it did):

• Logging time against a task.
• Creating a task.
• Adding a checklist item, or ticking one off.
• Adding an internal comment to a task.
• Uploading a file into a client’s documents folder.
• Refreshing the performance figures — immediate, but not small: see the note under Ask about your work.

Previews first, then waits for your OK:

• Completing and reopening tasks, setting a task’s recurring schedule, and deleting a task.
• Correcting or deleting a time entry, so a mistaken log can be taken back.
• Changing many tasks at once. Reassign, reschedule, mark done, flag as important or extra work, archive, or park for later. One request covers up to 200 tasks. The assistant reports how many succeeded and which ones failed.
• Creating and editing clients, contacts, notes, projects, topics, client groups and suppliers, and deleting the ones deletion is allowed on.
• Linking one task to another as a dependency.
• Maintaining the firm’s reference lists that other records point at. The lists are custom fields, product fields, workflow roles, the job titles members are given, and the reusable text behind notes, automated emails and invoices. The assistant creates, edits and deletes them.
• Setting a client’s Client Manager and workflow roles.
• Building and applying client workflow templates — create a template, edit or delete its tasks, then apply or push it to many clients at once.
• Applying and pushing project workflows, which create the projects directly. They behave differently from client workflows — see the caution below.
• Creating and managing teams — membership, team lead, and deleting a regular team. As in Uku itself, this needs Company Owner or Company Admin rights.
• Giving someone access to a client, setting up a task delegation for an absence, recording a calendar absence entry, and creating task automations.
• Setting up a client’s documents folder in a connected Google Drive or OneDrive, and applying a folder template to it.
• Sending a client’s documents out for digitisation. The assistant sends one email whatever the number of files, so check the list in the preview before you agree.
• Posting a message that your client can see. An ordinary task comment is internal and posts straight away. A client-portal message is emailed to your client and cannot be recalled, so that one always previews.

Two of these run as background jobs rather than finishing while you wait. They are applying or pushing a client workflow template across many clients, and changing members across many clients. The assistant tells you the job is queued, and can check back on it later.

A few things the assistant starts but cannot finish. The assistant records a calendar absence request — vacation, flextime, sick leave or time off — and can decline one. Approving that request stays in Uku, because approval debits the member’s leave credit. Signing off a member’s flextime period is the same kind of case: the assistant reports the balance, and the sign-off itself stays in Uku. The assistant can also add a task dependency but not remove one, so unlink tasks in Uku.

Here is what three real asks look like, and what comes back. Each one shows where the AI assistant stops and hands the last step to you.

“Close out the June work on the Apple Ltd bookkeeping task.” The assistant finds the task, showing you the candidates to pick from if more than one matches rather than guessing. The assistant then adds the checklist steps you name, ticks off the finished ones, and logs your hours against the task. The completion is previewed before the task is marked done. Completing finishes the task for everyone assigned unless you ask to be taken off it instead, and the preview says which one will happen. Finally it reports the hours actually booked for the period and what is still open. The two numbers are the part of a month-end close worth knowing.

“Roll the monthly bookkeeping template out to these twelve clients.” The assistant reads the template back to you first, showing its task list so you can confirm it is the right master plan. The assistant then previews the rollout with the exact client count. Applying a client workflow template runs as a background job. The assistant tells you the job is queued, and reports the per-client result when you ask it to check.

“Set up the new client Apple Ltd.” The assistant creates the client, adds the contact, and gives the colleagues who need it access. Next it sets the Client Manager and workflow roles, then applies your onboarding template, previewing each of those. Then it stops. Nothing in the assistant sends a Client Portal invitation. The assistant tells you to send that from the client’s Contacts in Uku, rather than letting you assume the invitation went out.

Financial access is a separate permission in Uku, not part of read or write access — the same rule that governs API v3 keys. Financial access decides whether a connection can see invoice totals, rates, contract values and budget figures at all. Holding financial rights in Uku does not switch it on for you. The access is granted key by key, and only by someone who holds those rights. See the caution below.

The assistant key generated by the Connect an AI assistant (Claude) panel does not carry it. Uku mints that key with read and write access only. On such a connection the assistant declines financial questions. The refusal is the key’s permission doing its job, not your own rights being doubted.

One route to money is an integration key created with Include financial data ticked, pasted into the Claude configuration instead of an assistant key. The checkbox sits beside the scopes rather than inside them. Read + financial data is enough for the money reads. Sending an invoice or setting a rate also needs a scope that writes. Use Edit + financial data, or All, which ticks the box for you and locks it on.

A second route is a browser connection to claude.ai, where you sign in to Uku instead of pasting a key. The consent screen carries a checkbox: “Also share financial data — invoices, budgets, contracts.” Ticking it is the one way a personal connection reaches money. The checkbox is shown only to someone who holds the account-management right. See Connect claude.ai, the Claude desktop app or mobile.

With financial access, these become available:

Area	What the assistant can do
Invoices	List and read invoices; raise a new one with all its rows; edit an invoice, including changing and deleting rows; move a draft on to created; send it; mark it paid or unpaid
Contracts	List and read billing contracts; create one with its lines; edit the contract, its lines, and each line’s own price periods; apply a contract template across many clients at once
Products	Read the products and services catalogue with prices; create a product; edit it and its price list
Taxes	Create a tax rate. Editing and deleting one stays in Uku
Billing defaults	Read the firm’s invoicing defaults and change them
Budgets	Report a budget’s live usage, remaining balance, and whether it is over its warning limit
Flextime	Report a member’s flextime balance. Signing a period off stays in Uku
Cost rates	Set a member’s cost and sales rate for a period, their office and remote share, and their working hours for each weekday
Performance figures	Money metrics — revenue and the rest — alongside the hours-based ones
Accounting software	Read the invoices your accounting system holds; send an Uku invoice to it; ask it whether an invoice has been paid

A firm’s billing is a chain, and the assistant follows it. Create the product, then put that product on the client’s contract. Generate the invoices from the contracts, then move each draft on to created so it can be sent.

A one-off invoice is a different tool for a different job. Use it for an ad-hoc charge, never for work a contract already covers. On contracted work it produces billing that looks correct and reconciles to nothing. Ask for a one-off invoice for a client who has an active contract, and the assistant names that contract in the preview before it writes. The preview states the position rather than refusing, because charging a contracted client for something extra is perfectly normal.

Editing invoices and prices is part of what the assistant does, and three consequences are easy to miss. The preview names each one, and they are worth knowing before you get there.

One more timing rule catches people out: a price is picked at the moment its period starts. A period beginning in the middle of a month does not apply to that month.

The assistant can reach the accounting software your firm bills through. You never say which one: it uses whichever your firm has connected in its billing settings, so the same question works whoever you are with. If nothing is connected, it says so rather than guessing.

The three actions do not all cover the same systems:

• Filing an Uku invoice and checking whether it has been paid work with every connected system except the three below — Xero, QuickBooks, Fortnox, Tripletex, Directo, e-conomic, Smart Accounts and Merit Aktiva all included.
• Reading the invoices your accounting system already holds works with Merit Aktiva today. With another system the assistant says it cannot read them back, rather than returning an empty list.

FreeAgent, Scoro and Trigon are out of scope for all three actions. A firm on one of those gets a plain refusal, and that is deliberate rather than a fault to report.

Two things are worth knowing, because they are easy to mix up:

• “Send the invoice” and “put it in the books” are different actions. Sending emails the invoice to your client. Exporting files it in your accounting software. If you mean both, ask for both.
• Invoices read from the accounting software are not Uku invoices. They are that system’s own records, and the assistant cannot open, edit or send them. Ask it about an Uku invoice by its number if you want to act on one.

Asking whether an invoice has been paid checks with your accounting software and updates Uku from the answer. The check only ever moves an invoice to paid. If the accounting system shows less paid than Uku does, nothing is undone automatically. Ask for the invoice to be marked unpaid if you need to reverse a payment.

Connecting an accounting system, and importing its tax and product codes, stay in Uku itself. Both need credentials, and the assistant is deliberately kept away from them.

All of these still preview before they write. Invoice actions and rate changes are also checked against the record’s current version. If someone edits the invoice or agreement in Uku while the assistant is working, the write is refused rather than overwriting them.

Without financial access, the products and services catalogue is still readable, but prices come back blank rather than as an error. If the assistant tells you a price is hidden, that is the connection’s permission at work, not a missing price.

Changing members across many clients at once means adding, replacing or removing members, teams and workflow roles on up to 200 clients. The job is firm-wide rather than financial, and needs an integration key rather than a personal one. A personal connection is refused whatever it holds, because the job changes access across clients you may not be on.

A short list of actions is absent from the Uku assistant entirely, by design rather than by a missing confirmation step. The assistant cannot:

• Change anyone’s company access level or status, including deactivating or reactivating a member.
• Invite or remove members.
• Change your subscription or plan.
• Create or delete a company.
• Change a team’s permissions. The assistant manages who is in a regular team, but never what that team is allowed to do. Built-in system teams such as Administrators and All users are out of reach entirely.
• Create or delete API keys or webhooks.
• Delete a client or a project — it can deactivate a client or archive a project instead.

The reason is worth knowing. The assistant reads content that other people wrote: task titles, note bodies and comments. Some of it comes from outside your firm, because Client Portal contacts author task and note content too. Text like that must never be able to talk the assistant into granting someone access. For anything that changes who can do what, a confirmation step is not protection enough, so those actions do not exist for the assistant. They stay in Uku itself, where a person does them deliberately.

A few more things are missing for plainer reasons:

• Sending or resending a Client Portal invitation — no action in the assistant sends that email. Send it from the contact’s row on the client’s Contacts.
• Starting or stopping a timer. There is no timer to run from a chat. Log the finished duration instead.
• Uploading or deleting files attached to tasks, notes or projects. Uploading needs a file transfer the assistant cannot compose. A deleted attachment can be an e-signed document’s source, which is unrecoverable. The assistant can still list and read what is attached.

When the assistant hits one of these edges, it names where in Uku you can do it yourself rather than leaving you stuck.

A few habits make the Uku assistant’s answers noticeably better.

• Ask what it can do. “Can you add a client?” gets an instant, definite answer. The assistant keeps a map of its own abilities and does not have to go and find out.
• Say who or when. “My overdue tasks this week” beats “show tasks”.
• Be precise with the immediate writes. Time entries, tasks and checklist items are created as asked, so name the task, the day and the hours you actually mean.
• Read the preview before confirming. The preview is the last point where a misunderstanding is free to fix.
• Ask whether a list is complete. Long lists come back shortened. The assistant says when it has shown you only part of a list, and how to see the rest. Read that line before treating a list as everything.
• Write in your own language. Ask in Estonian and it answers in Estonian and can cite the Estonian help articles.

The connection does not carry financial access, and that will not change on the connection you have. An assistant key is minted with read and write access only, and a key’s permissions cannot be edited afterwards. Financial reads and writes need an integration key created with Include financial data ticked, pasted into the Claude configuration in its place. See Financial and firm-wide work.

Logging time, creating a task and ticking a checklist item are deliberately immediate. Each is a single record that is quick to undo, and a confirmation round trip on every one would slow ordinary work for nothing. Ask the assistant to remove or change what it just made. The assistant can edit and delete a time entry, and delete a task. Everything bulkier, destructive or money-related previews first, so this applies to that short list alone.

With a personal assistant key the assistant sees exactly what you see in Uku. A record outside your access is not there for it, in the same way it would not appear if you searched for it yourself. Ask a Company Owner or Company Admin to check your access to that client.

The activity trail is searchable for roughly the last hundred days. Ask about an older change and the assistant searches the most recent window rather than the period you named. The reply says which range it actually covered. Read that line before treating an empty answer as “nothing happened”. For older history, open the record in Uku.

Company-wide figures are read from a pre-calculated snapshot rather than being computed on the spot. If the period you asked about has not been prepared yet, the assistant says the figures are not ready rather than showing zeros. Ask it to refresh them, then come back in about ten minutes, or open the numbers directly in Uku.

Changing access levels, statuses, subscriptions and team permissions is deliberately impossible for the assistant, not a temporary gap. See What the assistant deliberately will not do. Make the change in Uku under Settings & Apps → Members.

Applying or pushing a client workflow template to many clients, and changing members across many clients, run as background jobs. Ask the assistant to check the job. The report says whether the job finished, and how many clients succeeded or failed. A finished job does not automatically mean every client succeeded, so ask for the counts. A project workflow is different. The rollout does not queue at all, and reports at once which clients it created projects for and which it skipped.