Housecall Pro MCP Server

An open-source MCP server for the Housecall Pro API. Connect Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible AI agent to your Housecall Pro account, so you can ask for what you need instead of clicking through reports.

Independent project, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Housecall Pro. We run a service company on Housecall Pro ourselves, which is why it exists.

Install

Needs Node 18 or newer and a Housecall Pro API key. API access comes with the MAX plan and is not available on lower tiers.

Claude Desktop. Open Settings, then Developer, then Edit Config, and add:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "housecall-pro": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "housecall-pro-mcp"],
      "env": { "HCP_API_KEY": "your-api-key-here" }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop and the Housecall Pro tools will appear.

Claude Code. Add it directly:

claude mcp add housecall-pro -e HCP_API_KEY=your-api-key-here -- npx -y housecall-pro-mcp

Or install it as a plugin, which prompts for the key (stored in your keychain, never in a config file) and exposes the read-only and toolset switches as install-time options:

/plugin marketplace add hcpapi/housecall-pro-mcp
/plugin install housecall-pro@hcpapi

Cursor, Codex, and other MCP clients. Any client that speaks MCP over stdio works. Use npx as the command, ["-y", "housecall-pro-mcp"] as the arguments, and put HCP_API_KEY in the environment.

Getting a key takes about a minute and is described under Getting your Housecall Pro API key.

Related MCP server: invoiceninja-mcp

Housecall Pro API quirks, and what this server does about them

These are the edges of the Housecall Pro API itself. Each one is a place an integration built from the documentation alone gets a wrong answer rather than an error.

Never trust a 2xx on a Housecall Pro write. Read the record back. Several routes answer 200 without changing anything, which is why the rows above exist.

Documented routes that do not exist

Housecall Pro's published documentation describes these. They are not there. An integration built from the docs alone ships broken code paths for each one.

What you can ask

• "How much did we invoice in June, grouped by service?"

• "List this week's scheduled jobs with outstanding balances"

• "Pull up the customer record for the Smiths on Elm Street"

• "Which customers are tagged 'Service Plan'?"

• "Export Q2 invoices as CSV"

• "What's in our price book for water heaters?"

• "When is job_123 booked, and who is going?"

• "Show me invoice_123 the way the customer sees it"

• "Add a new customer: John Baker, 22 Elm St, Springfield IL, +1 555 123 4567"

• "Draft a good/better/best estimate for cus_123: water heater replacement at $2,400 / $3,100 / $3,900"

• "Book Tuesday 8-10am on job_123 for Mike"

• "Move that visit to Thursday morning and put Dave on it instead"

• "Dispatch Mike and Dave to job_123"

• "Reprice every labor line on job_123 in one go"

• "The customer went with the middle option on that estimate - mark it approved"

• "What hours do we work, and what's free next week?"

• "Default our jobs to 90 minutes with a two-hour arrival window"

Getting your Housecall Pro API key

1. Sign in to Housecall Pro as an admin. Office staff logins cannot generate keys.

2. Open My Apps, the grid icon in the top bar

3. Click Go to App store, search for API, and open API Key Management. It will usually not be sitting in the My Apps menu already, because that menu lists a subset rather than the whole catalogue.

4. Click Generate new API key, name it, and choose its access level:

   • Read-only, for reporting, lookups and exports. It refuses writes across the account with one exception we have measured: the price-book routes under /api/price_book/ are not covered by that gate, and a read-only key can create and delete price-book categories there. If you want a guarantee rather than nearly one, run this server with --read-only, which does not register a write tool at all.

   • Full access, which also allows creating customers, jobs and estimates.

5. Copy the key. Housecall Pro keeps it visible on that page afterwards, so you can come back and copy it again. What you cannot do is edit a key: changing the access level means generating a new one and deleting the old.

The walkthrough with screenshots is at https://hcpapi.com/mcp/#key.

The access level you pick is the real boundary. This server follows whatever you generated, so a read-only key cannot reach the write tools at all. If you want an assistant that only answers questions, generate a read-only key and Housecall Pro enforces that limit for you.

Only an admin can generate a key, and admins have full account access, so the key reaches the whole account rather than one person's slice of it.

Tools

95 tools. Reading works with any key; writing needs a full-access one. They are grouped into toolsets, so an install can register only the groups it needs - see Choosing which tools to register.

Reading

Writing

Needs a full-access key.

Shop defaults

Three preferences are kept: how long a job is scheduled for when nobody says otherwise, how wide an arrival window is by default, and the name of the line item most jobs start from. They save answering the same question twice.

They live in a file the server owns. HCP_MCP_DEFAULTS_PATH names it outright if you set it; otherwise it is %APPDATA%\housecall-pro-mcp\defaults.json on Windows and $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/housecall-pro-mcp/defaults.json elsewhere, falling back to .config/housecall-pro-mcp/defaults.json under your home directory. That location is per machine and not per Housecall Pro account: the file belongs to the installed server, so a shop running this on two computers sets its defaults on each. Nothing in it is sent to Housecall Pro, and the keys it accepts are a closed set, so nothing about a customer or a job can be parked in it.

The business profile is the bigger sibling, made for skills that run a setup interview: five sections - shop, vendors, pricing, payroll, comms - covering who the shop is, who they buy from and how their documents arrive, margin and rounding rules, pay-week and commission rules, and how outbound messages should sound. A skill reads it before asking setup questions so nothing is asked twice; each section records the date it was last confirmed, and sections are replaced whole, which is why a skill saves only after reading the section back for a yes. Same file conventions as the defaults (HCP_MCP_PROFILE_PATH override, profile.json beside defaults.json), same privacy posture: per machine, never transmitted, closed section set, nothing about any customer - and a vendor account_hint refuses anything that looks like a full account number.

Building the desktop bundle

manifest.json describes this server as an MCP bundle, which installs into a desktop client by drag-and-drop with no Node install and no config file to edit.

npx -y @anthropic-ai/mcpb pack .

That writes housecall-pro-mcp-<version>.mcpb. .mcpbignore keeps build-time dependencies out of it; without those rules the bundle carries the TypeScript compiler and is nearly three times the size. The bundle asks the user for their API key, and optionally for read-only mode and a toolset list, in the client's own settings interface rather than in a file.

Choosing which tools to register

Every tool the server registers is a tool the client has to hold in context before it does any work, and a longer list makes a client choose worse among the tools that matter. So the surface is selectable.

# Only what a reporting session needs, and nothing that can change anything
npx -y housecall-pro-mcp --read-only --toolsets=reports,invoices,customers

Groups: company, customers, jobs, estimates, invoices, pricebook, schedule, reports, admin. Also all, and default for the default set.

admin is tag, job-type and price-book structure maintenance - the writes that reshape those registries. It is not in the default set, because a booking or reporting session never needs it and leaving it out keeps the starting surface smaller. Ask for it by name, or use --toolsets=default,admin. Listing tags and job types is not admin: those reads are how ordinary job data gets interpreted, so they are always in the default set.

A misspelled group name stops the server with a message naming the valid ones, rather than starting with tools missing. An install that quietly exposed nothing would look exactly like the API being unreachable.

--read-only is a second, independent thing from the access level of your key. A read-only key already refuses writes at the API. This refuses to register them at all, which is what you want when pointing an agent at a live account to look around: the write tools are not merely guarded, they are absent.

Without HCP_API_KEY the server still starts, keyless: only the tools that never call Housecall Pro register - hcp_render_report, hcp_api_notes and the business-profile pair - and nothing can reach a Housecall Pro account. That keeps the report renderer available when you are working from dashboard CSV exports rather than the API, and lets a skill's setup interview run before a key exists.

What the server tells the model up front

Two of this project's tables are compiled into the server rather than left in this README, because a README is read by people and never by the model.

• The connect-time instructions carry the rule that prevents the worst failure: never trust a 2xx on a Housecall Pro write, read the record back.

• hcp_api_notes answers a plain-language question about what the API actually does - a route, a field, or the thing you were trying to do - from the same verified table behind the two sections above. It makes no request, so it costs nothing. Ask it before concluding something cannot be done, and after any write that reported success but looks like it changed nothing.

• The same tables are also exposed as MCP resources (hcp://api-notes/quirks and hcp://api-notes/phantom-routes) for clients that can read a resource without spending a tool call.

How it behaves

The write tools only work with a full-access key. Call one with a read-only key and it fails with a plain message telling you why, rather than doing something you did not expect.

Every tool carries the spec's annotations, so a client can tell a read from a write, a write from a delete, and either from something that reaches the customer, without having to infer it from the name. hcp_dispatch_job and the estimate approve and decline tools are marked as possibly notifying the customer, because they are.

No tool here sends an email, a text or an estimate on your behalf. Drafting an estimate leaves it sitting as a draft, and sending it stays a deliberate action you take inside Housecall Pro.

Dispatching a crew is customer-visible. hcp_dispatch_job puts technicians on a job's work, and that route is one the customer can see: Housecall Pro may tell them who is coming and that someone is on the way. What it sends has not been watched either way, so treat it as reaching the customer rather than assuming it does not.

Recording an answer on an estimate option is the shop writing down what the customer said, not a request going out to ask. Housecall Pro's own word for the result is "pro approved" or "pro declined", which is what hcp_approve_estimate_options and hcp_decline_estimate_options record. Doing it emailed and texted nobody when it was exercised. That is not a promise for your account: Housecall Pro's automations and notification settings send on their own, whatever any single call does, and one account's configuration says nothing about another's. On an account set up to copy an approved option to a job, approving creates one and the response names it.

Changing several line items is one call. hcp_update_job_line_items hands Housecall Pro the whole list in a single request. hcp_update_job_line_item is one request per row, so a run of them can stop half way and leave a job part-repriced; use it when exactly one row is changing and the bulk tool when more than one is.

Booking a job is one call. Creating an appointment on a job also sets that job's schedule, so hcp_schedule_job_appointment books the work and dispatches it together: the job stops reading as needs scheduling, and the visit lands on the technicians you named. Call it again on the same job to add a second visit. Every appointment needs at least one technician, and one that names nobody is refused here rather than sent.

Moving a visit with hcp_update_job_appointment moves the job's schedule with it, so a reschedule is also one call. Undoing a booking is hcp_delete_job_appointment for a single visit, or hcp_unschedule_job to take every visit off and return the whole job to needs scheduling.

Before offering a customer a time, hcp_get_schedule_availability gives the hours the account works and hcp_list_booking_windows gives the slots it reports as bookable, so what you offer matches what the account actually does.

None of these calls emails or texts the customer itself. What Housecall Pro does send is its own appointment reminders as the date approaches, which depends on your account's settings rather than on this server. Automations you have set up in Housecall Pro run on their own, outside this server's control.

A failed write is never retried automatically, so a network hiccup cannot quietly create the same record twice.

Your API key goes only to api.housecallpro.com. The only other request this server ever makes is the version check described under Updating, which carries no account data.

Limitations

A few more edges that are shape rather than quirk.

Appointments belong to a job. There is no account-wide appointment list, so you reach visits one job at a time. Ask for a job's appointments, not for "every appointment this week". The account's own schedule does read account wide: hcp_get_schedule_availability returns the hours it works and hcp_list_booking_windows the slots it reports as bookable.

An arrival window has to be a width Housecall Pro accepts: 0, 15, 20, 60, 120, 180 or 240 minutes, where 0 means an exact time. It rejects any other number on the write, so the booking tools offer the accepted widths as a list rather than a free number.

A booking can be undone; the job cannot be deleted. hcp_unschedule_job takes the visits off and clears the schedule, leaving the job at needs scheduling with its customer, line items and notes intact. Housecall Pro's API has no route that deletes a job, so a job created by mistake is closed out in Housecall Pro itself.

A customer address is append-only. hcp_create_customer_address adds one, and no route changes or removes it afterwards. Get it right before adding it; a wrong one is corrected in Housecall Pro.

Taking a tag off a job is one tag at a time. hcp_remove_job_tag needs the job and the tag; there is no call that clears every tag from a job at once. It also needs a key whose permissions cover tag changes, so a 401 here means the key's access level rather than a missing feature.

Checklists must be asked for by job or estimate. There is no way to list every checklist on the account, and an empty answer means no checklist has been set up for those records rather than that something went wrong.

Tags are created and renamed, never deleted. Deleting a tag from the account is done in Housecall Pro. Create them sparingly.

Updating

On startup the server checks hcpapi.com for a newer version; the request carries the product name and installed version, and nothing else. If a newer version exists, the next tool response mentions it once. If the check cannot complete, the server just carries on.

To update, re-run the install command for your client; the npx setups in Install pull the latest published version. If your client is holding on to an older cached copy, change the arguments to ["-y", "housecall-pro-mcp@latest"] to force the newest release.

Troubleshooting

401 Unauthorized. Either the key is read-only and you called a write tool, or the employee who created it does not have permission for that data. Generate a full-access key, or check that employee's permissions.

Empty results where you expected data. Usually the same cause. An employee-scoped key only returns what that employee can see.

No tools appear in your client. Check that you have Node 18 or newer with node --version, and that HCP_API_KEY is set inside the MCP server's env block rather than in your shell.

Going further

This server covers the Housecall Pro API itself. We are building the layer that sits on top of it: reporting and export workflows, price book tooling, and webhook setup. If that sounds useful, email hello@hcpapi.com and we will tell you when it is ready.

Issues and pull requests

Bug reports and feature requests are welcome in the issue tracker, and the more of them the better — say what you asked your assistant to do and what came back.

Pull requests are closed automatically. Releases are validated against an internal test suite that a pull request cannot run, so there is no honest way to review one here. Telling us what is broken in an issue gets it fixed faster than a patch would.

License

MIT, copyright HCP API. Independent project, not affiliated with Housecall Pro. "Housecall Pro" is a trademark of its owner, used here only to describe compatibility.