This guide walks you through pointing Claude Desktop (or Cursor, or any MCP-compatible AI assistant) at your Captainbook Statistics MCP server. After setup, you can ask the assistant questions like "How was revenue last weekend?" or "Which products had the highest occupancy this month?" and get answers grounded in your real booking data.
Prerequisites
A Captainbook account on Starter, Extended, Ultra, or Corporate plan (Free and Legacy plans don't include MCP).
The user creating the token must have the View Reports permission.
Claude Desktop installed (or any client that supports the Model Context Protocol).
Step 1 — Generate a connection in Captainbook
Open Captainbook and click your avatar (top-left).
From the dropdown, click MCP Connections.
Pick Statistics from the Integration dropdown.
Read the preview card to see example questions you can ask.
Give the connection a name that helps you remember which device or assistant uses it (e.g., "Claude Desktop — laptop").
Pick the business unit you want this connection to read data from. Each token is pinned to one business unit; create a separate token if you need a different one.
Click Generate.
A modal opens with two pieces of information:
Token — a long string starting with a number, then
|, then a random tail (e.g.,7|yg09kP...). You'll only see this once.Configuration — a JSON snippet ready to paste into your AI assistant.
Step 2 — Paste the configuration into Claude Desktop
Copy the entire Configuration block from the modal.
Open Claude Desktop's settings → Developer → Edit Config.
Paste the snippet inside your
mcpServersobject. If you already have other MCP servers configured, add this one alongside them — don't replace the existing ones.Save the file.
Quit Claude Desktop completely (not just close the window) and re-open it.
Claude will now show "captainbook-statistics" in its list of available tools when you start a new chat.
Step 3 — Ask your first question
Try one of these:
"How was revenue last month compared to the same month last year?"
"Which products had the highest occupancy last weekend?"
"Which weekday is our busiest by booking count?"
Claude will pick the right metric and date range automatically. The data Claude sees is scoped to the business unit you picked at Step 1 — no other BUs are accessible through this token.
Managing your connections
List active connections — back at MCP Connections, you'll see every token you've issued, when it was last used, and which integration + tier it's for.
Revoke a connection — click Revoke next to any row. The next call from Claude using that token returns 401 Unauthenticated; revocation is immediate.
Plan downgrades — if your subscription drops below Starter, your Statistics tokens are auto-revoked and you'll receive an email explaining why.
Troubleshooting
Claude says "tool not found" — Quit and re-open Claude Desktop. Tool discovery happens at startup.
Claude says "subscription required" — Your tenant's plan no longer includes the Statistics MCP. Upgrade or revoke and re-issue on a covered plan.
Claude says "rate limit reached" — You're hitting our per-token throttle (20 requests / 5 seconds, or 60 / minute). Wait and retry.
Claude returns weird data — The token is pinned to one BU. If you expected another BU's data, revoke and re-issue with the correct BU selected.
What this connection can do
Query 11 statistics metrics: summary, revenue, bookings, occupancy, products, channels, gift certificates, discounts, customers, resources, extras
Filter by date range (max 1 year), product, channel, location, day of week, time of day
Compare a primary period to a comparison period (year-over-year, etc.)
Sort and limit ranked metrics
What this connection cannot do
Modify any data (Statistics is read-only)
Access data from a different business unit than the one the token is pinned to
Bypass your plan's subscription tier
Survive plan downgrades (auto-revoked)
For inventory editing capabilities (update pricing, manage availability, refund bookings), see the Inventory MCP setup guide.