MCP Server & Easy Crew

Imagine my distain when I realised that MCP server is not a rapper from the 90s. It's actually a standard way for AI tools to connect to other software, and in the last two months a lot of finance and tax vendors have started announcing them. Since 3 September (I have counted!), 13 finance and tax technology providers have announced some kind of access to an MCP server, via my emails annd its worth knowing what that is. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It's the standard plug between an AI assistant and another piece of software. Without it, connecting an AI to your tax engine meant someone building a custom link, and then another for your billing system, and another for your accounting package. With it, the vendor publishes one standard connection and any compatible AI tool can use it. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, created MCP and released it as an open standard in late 2024. In December 2025 it donated it to the Agentic AI Foundation, under the Linux Foundation, so it's no longer Anthropic's to control. Tools such as ChatGPT and Cursor support it too. The reason vendors are talking about it now is that their customers have started asking AI questions all day, and software that can't be asked gets left out. Avalara announced nine MCP servers back in May, covering tax calculation, returns, e-invoicing and exemption certificates. Sovos said in March that it was building a gateway. Then October arrived. Anrok launched one with 30 or so tools for transactions, filings and exemption certificates. Thomson Reuters said its latest CoCounsel release for tax, audit and accounting supports MCP natively. TaxDome and Financial Cents did the same for accounting firms. Dext, Tipalti, Cube, Mercury, Digits, Bookkeep and Payhawk announced connections of their own, and Intuit rolled out QuickBooks invoicing inside Claude and ChatGPT. Canopy said it's building one. The benefit to you is that it removes the copy and paste, mostly. But very quickly people are realising that a tax engine that can only be used through its own screen is a very expensive calculator. Connect it to an AI and you can find out which filings are due this month, which exemption certificates expire next week, or why an invoice charged 23% when you expected nothing, and the answer comes from your own data and not from a general guess. Here are two ideas, that might be useful for you if you have access to one. 1 - Governments announce new taxes with a start date and a reassuring line about how manageable it will be, and nobody knows the cost until the first return is due (looking at you California, you rascals). Give an AI read-only access to your tax engine and sales data, describe the new rule in plain English, and have it replay last year's invoices as if the rule had been in force. You get a first estimate in an afternoon, not after a month and a consultant's invoice. If it's a rounding error, you stop worrying. If it's seven figures, you've found out before you priced, registered or budgeted in the dark. The second is a compliance colander (you know I love a pun, Askcolm patent pending!). A colander lets the water through and keeps the pasta, and a tax team needs the same thing for transactions. Write your rules once in plain English: no VAT charged on a zero-rated item, no B2B invoice without a customer VAT number, no sale to an exempt customer on an expired certificate, no tax code that doesn't match the destination. Then let an AI run every transaction through them over an MCP connection on a schedule. Whatever passes is fine. Whatever is caught lands on a short list for a human, instead of surfacing in an audit eighteen months later. Health warning: Both ideas depend on keeping the connection read-only to start with, because several of these servers can also create and update records. The AI can still be wrong, so a person checks what it catches before anyone acts on it. I’d be interested to hear who is have any success with these new tools?