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Chift Insights answering how cash moved in and out of a business, with a bar chart of cash in against cash out for each month and three more example questions alongside

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Ask your business a question

Connect your accounting software, your point of sale or your bank account to Chift Insights, then ask questions in the assistant you already use, the way you would ask your bookkeeper. You get the figure, and a chart when the answer is a trend or a comparison. Every number is calculated from your own records rather than estimated, so the same question gives the same answer twice.

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Before you connect anything

Reading and writing are separate

Answering a question only reads your records. The assistant can create or change records, such as an invoice, only in an area where you also allow writing. Tick Read only when you connect to keep it to questions.

You choose what it sees

Access is granted one area at a time, your books or your point of sale or your bank. Nothing is shared until you authorize it.

Chift does the sums

Chift sums the totals from your records before the assistant sees them, and amounts in different currencies are never added together. The assistant is instructed not to do arithmetic of its own, so a figure it works out in its own words is worth checking against the table.

It is not live to the second

Answers come from a copy of your records, refreshed once a day by default, so a sale from this morning may not be counted yet. Asking your software directly every time would use up the capacity it gives you and slow everything else connected to it. The exception is a question Chift Insights does not cover, which the assistant can send to your software instead, and that answer is live.
Your answers pass through your assistant. The figures Chift Insights returns are read by the assistant you connected it to, so they are handled under that provider’s terms and privacy policy rather than Chift’s. Chift decides what the assistant is allowed to ask for. It does not control what the provider then does with the answer.Questions it cannot answer are reported to Chift. When Chift Insights has no data for a question, the assistant sends Chift a sentence or two describing the question and what was missing, so Chift can see which questions to support next. The assistant is asked to leave out company names and amounts, and it is told not to mention the report in the conversation.

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Getting connected

Everything happens inside an assistant you already have. There is no separate app to install and no Chift page to find first: adding the address below is what creates your account, and the same flow is where you connect your software.
1

Add Chift Insights to your AI assistant

In your assistant’s connector settings, add this address:
Most assistants that support MCP let you add a server by its address, usually under connectors, plugins or tools in their settings. Where to find it:The wording differs between assistants and keeps changing. Claude calls them connectors, ChatGPT called them connectors and renamed them apps in December 2025, and you may still see plugins in older articles. They all mean the same thing here: a server you add by its address. On ChatGPT, custom ones sit behind developer mode, and on Enterprise or Edu plans an administrator has to allow them first.
2

Sign in, or sign up, on the page it opens

The first time your assistant connects, it opens a page for you to log in to Chift Insights.
The Chift page an assistant opens on first connection, headed Log in to Chift Insights, offering Google, SSO or email
The same button covers both cases: if you have no Chift account yet, logging in creates one. With email, Chift sends you a sign-in link, and the same email carries a six-digit code if you would rather type that in. Both expire after fifteen minutes, and there is no password to choose or remember.
3

Connect your software

Once you are signed in, Chift Insights asks for the software your business runs on.
The Chift Insights set-up card naming the assistant it will answer through, with three example questions and a Connect a tool button
Connect a tool opens the catalogue in a new tab. Pick your accounting package, your point of sale or your bank.
The Chift Insights connector catalogue, with a search box, category tabs and a Connect button on each application
The same tab then moves on to that provider’s own sign-in page, so you authorize Chift with the provider directly and your credentials are never typed into a Chift page.Chift Insights takes one connection per area and covers a single business, so one accounting package, one point of sale and one bank account.The catalogue also lists invoicing and e-commerce software. You can connect it, but Chift Insights only answers on accounting, point of sale and banking, so it will not answer questions about those other areas.
4

Choose what the assistant may access

Each area gets its own control. None shares nothing, All shares the whole area, and Limited lets you pick parts of it. The assistant only ever sees what you allow.Writing is allowed by default wherever your account permits it. Tick Read only on an area if you only want answers, and the assistant cannot create or change anything there.
5

Ask your first question

Try “how is cash moving in and out of the business?”. If your first data refresh is still running, you are told to try again in a few minutes rather than shown an empty answer.
The first refresh pulls your history and can take a while on a business with years of records. Until it finishes, Chift Insights says the data is not ready rather than answering from nothing.

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What you can ask

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Real-time cash flow

An assistant answering how cash moved in and out of a business, with a bar chart of cash in against cash out for each month
Cash in against cash out, month by month, without exporting anything. Ask which month was worst and why, or how the last quarter compares with the one before it.

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Customer follow-ups

An assistant listing customers with overdue invoices, showing how many invoices are overdue and how much each customer owes
Who is late, how late, and how much. Ask for the ones worth a phone call this week, or for everything over ninety days, and you get the names and the amounts rather than a count.

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Numbers that add up

An assistant breaking down quarterly revenue by ledger account, with exact amounts to the cent
Every total is summed from your ledger lines before the assistant sees it, and the table shows that figure as Chift computed it, not as the assistant re-typed it. A breakdown reconciles with your trial balance to the cent, and the same question asked twice gives the same answer, which is what makes it usable in a conversation with your accountant.

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On-demand reporting

An assistant charting monthly revenue as bars against a line showing costs over the same months
Revenue against costs, sales per location, a top-ten list, whatever you would otherwise ask someone to build. Ask in a sentence and read the answer, rather than waiting on a spreadsheet.

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One question, three sources

An assistant charting six months of revenue as three separate lines, one for point of sale, one for invoices posted in accounting and one for money into the bank
Ask what your revenue was and there are three honest answers. Your point of sale knows what you rang up. Your accounting knows what you invoiced and posted, which is what “invoiced” means in the chart. Your bank knows what actually arrived, late by however long card settlement takes and inflated by anything that was not a sale. Chift Insights asks each source its own question and lines the answers up on the month, so the gaps between them become the explanation. A loan shows up as bank money that never appears in sales. Card settlement shows up as a bank figure that trails the till by a few days. No single dashboard can show you that, because each one only knows its own source. Ask which of your channels is growing, whether last week’s takings reached the bank, or whether everything you sold has actually been invoiced.

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Reading an answer

Most answers come back as a table. When the question is a trend, a comparison or a ranking, a chart comes with it, and you can switch between the two. A few things the answer tells you that are easy to miss:
  • Amounts in more than one currency never get added together. If your records hold euros and pounds, the answer splits them and gives you a switch between the two. A single total across currencies would be meaningless, so Chift Insights does not produce one.
  • The wording of the measure carries the detail. “Customer revenue” and “customer revenue, excluding VAT” are different questions with different answers. The assistant states which one it used, and it is worth reading that line before quoting the figure.
  • An empty answer is not always a zero. The assistant says when a query returned no rows, which is different from a total of nothing.

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If something looks wrong

Your first refresh has not finished. This resolves on its own, usually within a few minutes for a small business and longer if you have years of history. Ask again rather than reconnecting.
Waiting will not help with this one. The area you are asking about was connected but never opened up for questions. Contact your Chift contact and it can be switched on.
Check the timing first. This is the most common cause by a wide margin: answers come from a copy of your data that refreshes once a day by default, so anything posted since the last refresh is not counted yet. Ask again after the next refresh before assuming the number is wrong.If the gap survives a refresh, the measure is probably not the one you assumed. Ask the assistant which measure it used and over which period, since “revenue” and “revenue excluding VAT” are different questions.
Chift Insights declines rather than approximating. Usually nothing you connected holds the data, so connecting the missing source fixes it.It can also happen on a question that combines two sources with nothing to line them up by. Point of sale takings and revenue invoiced in your accounting compare fine because both sit on a month. Two figures that share only a currency usually cannot be combined, and two that share neither a date nor a currency never can. Asking about each separately always works.
Chift Insights reads through the Chift platform. If you build software and want to put this inside your own product, see the MCP documentation and the Insights endpoints in the API reference, starting with Get Catalog.