After you connect the Payhawk MCP to your AI Assistant, you can ask questions about your spend and take actions on your Payhawk data directly from the chat, all in plain language. You don’t have to phrase a prompt exactly as your AI Assistant will work out what you mean.
These general patterns apply whatever your role. For the prompts that fit a specific role, see the article about best practices for role-based queries.
Asking everyday questions and taking actions
You can start with everyday lookups and actions anyone can use as suggested in the following table.
You ask | What your AI Assistant does |
|---|---|
"Show me my expenses from last month." | Lists your expenses for the period. |
"Which of my expenses are missing a receipt?" | Finds your expenses without a document and lists them. |
"What's on my company card right now?" | Shows your card and its recent transactions. |
"Is there anything waiting on me to approve?" | Summarizes your approval queue. |
"Freeze my card, I think I lost it." | Previews the freeze and, after you confirm, freezes the card. |
"Add a note to expense 4569 asking Maria for the invoice." | Previews the comment and, after you confirm, adds it to the expense. |
"Create a reimbursement for the 40 EUR taxi I paid for on Tuesday." | Previews the reimbursement and, after you confirm, creates it. |
Confirming changes
Any request that changes data, such as an approval or a recoding, always shows you a preview of what the AI Assistant is about to do. Nothing changes in Payhawk until you confirm.
Money movement (payments and transfers), card issuance, and access changes never happen through the MCP: it can prepare a request, but these actions stay in the Payhawk Web Portal and the Payhawk Mobile App.
Getting and understanding your results
The way the answer arrives depends on the size of the request:
Most questions are answered directly with a short summary, an interactive chart or table, and a confidence score. Charts appear as an interactive card in the conversation, and you can ask follow-up questions about any result.
For larger analyses, such as a full-year breakdown across every team and supplier, the AI Assistant runs a background job. It will let you know it has started and check back for you. Results typically arrive within 1–5 minutes. This is expected behavior, not an error.
You can also jump straight back into Payhawk from a result. Expense and card results include a link to that record in the Payhawk Web Portal, and when you ask what is waiting on your approval or review, you get one link that opens the Payhawk expense list already filtered to exactly that work. The links respect your existing permissions, so opening one shows only what you would normally see.