Packaging Products - Greentree and Sales Data, Asked in Plain English

Packaging Products supplies packaging to businesses across New Zealand, with account customers in their Greentree ERP and cash sales through their websites and Shopify store. We had already built them a sales reporting platform that turns those web orders into dashboards, customer histories and growth reports.

The dashboards answered the questions they were designed for. But the questions people actually ask change every day: who used to buy die-cut boxes and hasn't for three months, how this month compares with last, what one customer ordered in spring. Each one meant clicking through screens or exporting to a spreadsheet.

Greentree has no official connector for Claude or ChatGPT, and uploading exports to an AI chat means stale numbers and company data in spreadsheets on people's desktops.

We built two connectors, both using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and both read-only.

The first connects Claude to Greentree itself. It's hosted, so it works in Claude on the web, desktop and phone. Each person signs in with their own account, and the connector only ever asks for read access.

The second gives Claude 15 read-only tools over the live web sales system. When someone asks a question, Claude picks the right tools, pulls the figures and explains them. Every call is a read against the same system the dashboard uses, so the answers always agree with it.

That one runs on each person's own computer as a Claude Desktop extension, with no extra servers to host. Between them, the ERP's account data and the web sales data are both a question away.

Read-only wasn't a setting we switched on. Neither connector has any tools that write, delete or send, and the Greentree one only ever grants a read scope. Logins are the same ones staff already use for the dashboard, and passwords never sit in a config file. Large answers are trimmed so Claude never chokes on a big order list, and paging still works for the full set.

• Greentree connector: a hosted MCP server on AWS with its own sign-in, granting a read-only scope only.
• Sales connector: one local MCP server with 15 read-only tools.
• Existing API: every tool is a single signed-in request to the sales platform's own API, so there is no second copy of the data.
• Packaging: a Claude Desktop extension and a step-by-step install guide written for non-technical staff.

The team asks Claude what they would otherwise dig for in Greentree or the dashboard: lapsed accounts, product trends and customer histories, answered in seconds with the same numbers as the dashboard, and without anyone exporting a spreadsheet.