Artnet Pro: from a shipping workbook to one platform that runs the business, with Claude and Gemini plugged in

Every shipment started as a copy of a form tab inside one shared workbook. A technician or someone in the office filled in the customer, the machine, the fault, the repair and what went in the box, then printed two documents from the same sheet.

• Nothing was enforced: a package could be marked shipped without a tracking number.
• Freight worked out by hand, against a printed table, every time.
• One customer, three spreadsheets: changing a customer's details meant changing them in three places.
• Paper in the field and in the office: service visits were written up on paper forms with thin notes, and quotes, orders and invoices went through paper and email.
• Unpaid invoices by copy and paste: every week the QuickBooks aging report was pasted into a new workbook tab, with everyone's comments in columns.
• No whole picture: the service call, the visit, the quote, the order and the invoice each lived somewhere different, so nobody could see a customer's whole history in one place.

The owner wanted one source of truth for the business.

Reflekt Lab treated the workbook as the specification. Every column is read by its header text and every block has to look like itself before it is trusted. One shipping request prints both the service report and the packing slip, freight and small packages are separate flows, and a stage cannot be completed without what it needs, such as a tracking number to ship.

Service came next. A service issue is ranked on a dashboard, assigned to an engineer who is told by email or WhatsApp, and carries its whole history. A field visit follows a checklist for its type, takes photos from the phone, and ends with the customer signing on the device and a Field Service Report emailed to them.

Then sales and money. A quote becomes a sales order, carried out by work orders; when the last work order is complete, the invoice is created in QuickBooks Online and linked back to the order. Receivables come back from QuickBooks as an aging view the office works through, with an owner and a comment on each account. Customers are read from Zoho CRM every hour, so the CRM stays the customer record and nobody types a customer twice. Zoho is the next tool to go: it ended up holding little more than lists, so accounts, contacts and equipment are moving into the platform.

In practice, someone in the office can ask Claude or Gemini "what have we done for this customer?", "which service calls are still open?" or "draft a quote for this machine", and get the answer from Artnet Pro's own data. That runs through an MCP server, the standard way to plug an assistant into a business app. It has 23 tools: 16 read-only, marked as such, and 7 that write, from posting an update on a service issue to completing a work order. Each call checks the person behind it against the app's own users, every write is recorded in the history as made from the assistant, a draft quote stays a draft until someone sends it from the app, and the server tells the assistant to confirm before completing a work order, because that one can create an invoice.

Sign-in to the assistant runs on an OAuth server built into the app: Claude registers itself, while Gemini, which cannot, gets a client set up from the app's settings. The server is stateless, so it keeps working through deploys and across servers, and a readme tool explains the app to the assistant before its first write, because many assistants never read MCP resources.