MCP — Use BuildWorkPro from Claude and ChatGPT

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is Anthropic's open standard for connecting large language models to external tools and data. An MCP-aware client — Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, Cursor, your own agent — speaks one protocol, and any MCP server (BuildWorkPro included) can plug in. The model gets structured access to your records, with scoped permissions, instead of you copy-pasting screenshots into a chat.

What you get

The BuildWorkPro MCP server exposes the same domain you already use through the REST API, packaged for LLMs:

• 56 tools across 12 entity domains plus identity. Read your contacts, leads, bids, projects, pay applications, change orders, time entries, site logs, products, documents, webhooks, and team members. Create new records and drive workflow steps (send a bid, accept a bid, approve a pay app, approve a change order).
• 7 resources (bid://, project://, contact://, lead://, payapp://, changeorder://, and sitelog:// URI schemes) that let the model fetch a single record by id with one round trip and pin it into context.
• 11 prompts the model can call by name to compose useful workflows, including draft_bid_followup, summarize_open_projects, weekly_status_report, draft_lead_followup, explain_pay_app_math, and pipeline_weekly_summary.

Tools are scoped. Listing contacts requires contacts:read; creating a bid requires bids:write; sending a bid requires bids:send. The full inventory is in the Tools catalog.

How authentication works

The server uses OAuth 2.1 with Dynamic Client Registration (RFC 7591) — the same flow Zapier uses. You don't paste an API key into your AI client. Instead:

1. The MCP client (Claude, ChatGPT) registers itself with BuildWorkPro automatically the first time you connect.
2. You're redirected to the BuildWorkPro authorize page in your browser.
3. You see a consent screen listing the exact scopes the AI is requesting and choose what to grant.
4. The client receives a refresh token and exchanges it for short-lived access tokens.

Your AI assistant gets only the scopes you grant. Revoke access at any time from Settings -> Developer -> Connected apps.

Two install paths

• Streamable HTTP (recommended). The hosted endpoint at https://app.buildworkpro.com/api/mcp works with any modern MCP client. No local process to run, no Node.js to install. This is the path documented in the install guides below.
• stdio (local development only). A local Node.js process speaks MCP over stdin/stdout. Useful when you're hacking on the server itself or running on a machine without internet access. We don't recommend this for everyday use.

Note

The hosted Streamable HTTP transport is multi-tenant. Each authenticated request is scoped to your tenant — you cannot read data from another organization, even if both tenants share the same MCP client install.

Get started

Install in Claude Desktop The fastest way to try it. ~5 minutes, OAuth-based.

Install in ChatGPT Same OAuth flow, ChatGPT-specific install path.

Tools catalog Every tool, the scope it needs, and an example prompt.

Recipe: Ask Claude to draft a bid follow-up A worked example using the draft_bid_followup prompt.