Your data is already there. Now you can just ask.

Brand marketers spend more time waiting for data than acting on it. A question goes to the data team, a ticket gets filed, a few days pass, a spreadsheet arrives, and half the time it's not quite right. The Subtotal MCP changes that. You can now ask questions about your brand's Subtotal data in plain English and get answers in seconds, without writing analytical queries or waiting on anyone.

What's MCP?

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard for connecting AI assistants to external systems. It defines a typed interface of schemas, tools, and resources that an assistant can discover and call against at runtime. Instead of an AI guessing at your data, it sees the shape of it and queries it directly.

The Subtotal MCP is a server we built on top of that standard. Point your AI assistant at it, and your brand's data becomes queryable in conversation. The assistant inspects the schema, composes a query, and returns the result.

The kinds of questions you can ask

Here are a few examples of what brand marketers are actually running:

• Which retailers drove the most repeat purchases last quarter?
• What's the average basket size by retailer for our top SKU?
• Where are cross-sell patterns strongest across our product lines?
• How have purchase trends shifted month-over-month this year?

These are questions that used to require a ticket, an analytical query, or a BI dashboard someone else built. Now they just require a sentence.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

You: Which retailers drove the most repeat purchases of our products last quarter?
Assistant: Here are the top 5 retailers by repeat purchase rate for last quarter:

1. Walmart: 38% repeat rate, 12,400 orders
2. Target: 29% repeat rate, 9,800 orders
3. Amazon: 27% repeat rate, 7,200 orders
4. Kroger: 24% repeat rate, 6,100 orders
5. Costco: 21% repeat rate, 5,400 orders

Walmart's repeat rate is well above the cohort average. Want a breakdown by product category or region?

Built around the question

The MCP isn't a natural-language wrapper around a query builder. It works against a typed schema it's been given context for: how entities relate, which keys join, what aggregations make sense at which grain. A question about "repeat purchase rate by retailer" gets the right denominator. A question about "top SKUs last quarter" gets counted at the basket level, not double-counted across line items. When something is ambiguous, the assistant makes a choice and tells you which choice it made. When there's a follow-up worth pulling on, it suggests one.

It reads less like a search box and more like an analyst working alongside you: not just rows, but the answer, how it got there, and what's worth looking at next.

Why this matters for brands

To get to the same answer the old way, you'd typically need a warehouse copy of your purchase data, a modeled set of tables on top of it, an analyst or contractor to write the queries, a BI tool to publish dashboards, and a ticket queue for the questions the dashboards don't cover. Every change in what you want to know costs another cycle of someone's time.

The MCP collapses that stack. No warehouse to provision, no semantic layer to maintain, no dashboards to keep current, no queue to wait in. Your purchase data already lives in Subtotal, in a schema designed for the kinds of questions you're asking. The MCP is the layer that lets you ask them.

For brand teams tracking campaign performance, monitoring retail partnerships, or trying to understand buyer behavior, the win isn't just the stack you skip. It's the timing. Getting the answer while you're still in the conversation it came up in is a different kind of decision than getting it next Tuesday.

Getting set up

The Subtotal MCP works with the AI your team already uses: Claude, ChatGPT, and other MCP-compatible agents. Setup takes about a minute. Add the Subtotal MCP to your AI assistant of choice, sign in to Subtotal when prompted, and the session is authenticated to your account automatically, with no keys to manage or rotate.

If you're already a Subtotal client, reach out to your account contact. They'll have you connected in a few minutes. If you're not yet working with us and want to see what your brand's data can do, get in touch.