AI access

Overview

Panelque speaks the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the standard AI assistants use to read data from an app. Connect one and you can ask questions in plain language – "which products lost money last month?", "what is sitting in my warehouse?" – and get answers from your own numbers instead of guesses.

By default the connection is read-only: an assistant can look at your costs but cannot change anything. You can give an assistant permission to add records too — see Letting an assistant add records below. Either way it never touches your Shopify store, and it can never delete anything.

AI access is included with every paid plan.

There are two ways to connect, and which one you use depends on the assistant rather than on you. Claude Code and Claude Desktop read a configuration file, so they take a token you paste in. ChatGPT and Claude.ai on the web don't offer anywhere to paste one – their connector forms ask you to sign in instead.

Claude Code and Claude Desktop

Go to Settings > AI access
Give your token a name (for example "Claude on my laptop") and select Create token
Copy the token – it is shown once and never again
Under Install in your assistant, copy the command for Claude Code or the configuration for Claude Desktop. Both arrive with your new token already in them

Come back later and the install example is still there, but with a YOUR_TOKEN placeholder instead of your token – Panelque never stores the token itself, only a hash of it. If you no longer have yours, create a new one.

Create one token per assistant. If a device is lost or you stop using an assistant, revoke just that token and the others keep working.

ChatGPT and Claude.ai

These sign in rather than taking a token, so there is nothing to copy and nothing to keep safe.

In ChatGPT, open Settings > Apps & Connectors > Advanced and turn on developer mode
Go to Settings > Apps & Connectors > Create
Paste the connector address shown under ChatGPT and Claude.ai on the AI access page, and choose OAuth as the authentication
A Panelque page opens asking which store to connect. Enter your .myshopify.com address and sign in with Shopify
Approve the connection

The assistant then appears in your token list marked Connected. Revoking it there disconnects the assistant, the same as revoking a token.

You will be asked to sign in with Shopify because that is the only way we can be sure the person approving the connection is the one who runs the store. Approving grants read access and nothing else.

What the Assistant Can Read

Shop profile – your currency, VAT basis and plan
Cost analysis – revenue, order costs, expenses and profit for any period, with advertising efficiency and a comparison against the period before
Daily metrics – one row per day: orders, revenue, costs, profit and that day's ad spend
Product costs and margins – selling price against build cost, thinnest margin first
Product cost breakdown – the bill of materials behind one product's unit cost
Product sales – what each product actually sold in a period: units, returns, revenue and the profit left over
Customer metrics – how much of a period came from new customers and how much from people who had bought before
Refunds and returns – what came back, and what those orders cost you anyway
Inventory value – what the stock on hand is worth, per item and in total
Stock forecast – what is about to run out, with the estimated reorder date
Alternative items – which items you have linked as interchangeable, and what each group holds between them
Additional cost templates – your reusable packing, postage and printing costs, and what each adds
Operating expenses – expenses in a period, with category totals
Inventory write-offs – stock written off in a period
Orders with costs – revenue, costs and profit per order
Order cost breakdown – every cost line of a single order
Data health – gaps in your own records that would make the other answers look better than they are

Letting an Assistant Add Records

When you create a token, Let this assistant add records is off. Leave it off and the assistant can only read. Turn it on and it can also:

Record an expense – rent, salary, accounting, a supplier payment, so it counts in your profit
Apply an additional cost – attach one of your cost templates (packing, postage, printing) to orders that are missing it, for when the automation stopped running and a stretch of orders went out with nothing recorded
Edit alternative items – link items that can be shipped in place of one another, or unlink ones that can't, so their stock is pooled for every shortage check

It still cannot delete a record, and cannot touch your Shopify store. Unlinking is the one thing it can take away, and it takes it away for the whole group rather than for one item – which is why it is the only change your assistant is told never to make on its own initiative. Like every other change, it is described to you first and happens only if you approve it.

Nothing is ever recorded in one step. When an assistant goes to change something, the first call only describes it and gets back a short-lived confirmation. The change happens when that confirmation comes back – and only for exactly what was described, so an approval cannot be moved onto something else. An assistant that skips the asking simply hasn't changed anything.

This is enforced by Panelque, not left to the assistant's good manners.

Seeing what an assistant did

Under What assistants have done on the AI access page you will find every change an assistant proposed, when, through which token, and whether it went through. Proposals nobody approved are listed too – if something is repeatedly trying to do something you did not ask for, that is where you will see it.

Tokens created before this existed can only read. Permission is granted when the token is made, never afterwards, so nothing you handed out in the past can start writing on its own. Connections made by signing in ask for the permission on the approval screen, where it appears as its own line.

The page lists these under What the assistant can read, so you always know what a connected assistant has access to.

Things to Know

Amounts come back in your shop's currency, on the same VAT basis as the rest of the app: net of VAT if you are VAT-registered, gross otherwise
The numbers match what the app shows. Orders beyond your plan's daily limit are left out here too
Refunds land days or weeks after the sale, so a recent month always looks better than it will once returns settle
Packing and postage are recorded when an order ships, so orders still waiting to be picked carry no costs yet – that is a queue, not a gap, and the assistant is told to check before calling it a problem
Revoking a token, or a connection, takes effect immediately
Anyone holding a token can read this store's data – treat it like a password
A retry after a lost connection cannot create the same record twice: a confirmation works once, and expires after fifteen minutes if it goes unused
A connection made by signing in expires after 30 days and renews itself in the background, so you will not be asked again unless you revoke it

Managing Tokens

From Settings > AI access you can:

See every token and connection with its name, when it was created and when it was last used
Create a token for another assistant
Revoke a token, or disconnect an assistant, you no longer need

Connections made by signing in are marked Connected and show "Signed in" instead of a token, since there is no token to show.

Tips

Ask the assistant to start with the cost analysis for a period, then drill into products or orders that look wrong
Ask it to check data health for the same period before you act on a number – a missing packing cost or an incomplete recipe makes profit look higher than it is
"Last used" tells you whether a token is still in use – revoke the ones that are not
If an assistant reports it cannot connect, check the token has not been revoked and that your plan still includes AI access