Using Claude AI with Intervals (MCP Integration)

Intervals now supports a direct integration with Claude Desktop, Anthropic’s AI assistant, through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Once connected, Claude can read and write to your Intervals account — letting you manage projects, log time, update tasks, pull reports, and much more using plain English conversation.

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What can Claude do with Intervals?

This is a full read/write integration. Claude can take action in your account, not just look things up.

Time tracking

• Log time entries to any project or task
• View time entries by person, project, date range, or billable status
• Start and stop timers
• Edit or delete existing time entries
• Pull summarized time reports grouped by project, person, or work type

Tasks

• List open or closed tasks, filtered by project, assignee, priority, or status
• Create new tasks with titles, descriptions, due dates, and estimates
• Update task details — reassign, reprioritize, change status, or close tasks
• Delete tasks

Projects & milestones

• Browse all projects by client or open/closed state
• Create new projects and assign them to clients
• Update project details including budget
• Create and manage milestones within projects

Clients & people

• Look up clients and their contact details
• Create or update client records
• List team members and find person IDs for filtering and assignment

Invoices & expenses

• View invoices by client or status (draft, sent, paid)
• Create new invoices
• Log and review expense entries by project or date range

Lookups & reference data

• Retrieve available work types, task statuses, and task priorities — useful context when creating or filtering records

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What does this look like in practice?

Rather than navigating menus, you simply describe what you want:

“Show me all open tasks assigned to me across all projects”

“Log 2 hours to the Acme Website project for today, billable, design work”

“How many hours did the team log last week, broken down by project?”

“Create a task called ‘Review staging deployment’ in the DevOps project and assign it to Sarah”

“What invoices do we have outstanding for Acme Corp?”

“Close all tasks in the Brochure milestone and mark the milestone complete”

Claude handles multi-step work too. If you say “Log time to the task I was just working on”, Claude can look up your recent tasks and timers to figure out what you mean.

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Setup instructions

Prerequisites

• Claude Desktop installed on your Mac or Windows PC
• Node.js version 18 or later
• An active Intervals account with API access

Check if Node.js is installed

Open Terminal (Mac) or Command Prompt (Windows) and run:

node --version

If you see a version number, you’re ready. If not, download the LTS version from nodejs.org.

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Step 1: Get your Intervals API token

1. Log into your Intervals account at myintervals.com
2. Hover over your profile picture
3. Click My Account
4. Click API Access
5. If you don’t have a token yet, generate one — then copy it

Important: Keep your API token private. Anyone with your token can access your Intervals account with your permissions. Do not share it or commit it to a repository.

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Step 2: Edit the Claude Desktop configuration file

Claude Desktop uses a JSON config file to know which MCP servers to connect to. The easiest way to open it is directly from within Claude:

1. Click your name in the lower-left corner of Claude Desktop
2. Click Settings
3. Click Developer in the left column
4. Click the Edit Config button

This opens the config file in your default text editor on both Mac and Windows.

Add the Intervals entry

Paste the following into the mcpServers section of the file, replacing your_token_here with the token you copied in Step 1:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "intervals": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "intervals-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "INTERVALS_API_TOKEN": "your_token_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

If you already have other MCP servers configured in this file, add the "intervals" block inside the existing mcpServers object — don’t replace the whole file.

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Step 3: Restart Claude Desktop

Quit Claude completely:

• Mac: Press Cmd+Q
• Windows: Right-click the Claude icon in the system tray and choose Quit

Then reopen Claude Desktop.

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Step 4: Verify the connection

Open a new chat in Claude and type:

“What Intervals tools do you have available?”

Claude should respond with a list of available tools covering timers, time entries, tasks, projects, clients, and more. If it does, you’re connected and ready to go.

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Troubleshooting

Claude doesn’t mention any Intervals tools

• Make sure you fully quit and relaunched Claude Desktop (closing the window is not enough on Mac — use Cmd+Q)
• Verify your JSON config file is valid. Paste it into jsonlint.com to check for syntax errors
• Confirm Node.js is installed by running node --version in Terminal

“Unauthorized” or authentication errors

• Double-check that your API token is correct and hasn’t been regenerated since you set it up
• Make sure there are no extra spaces or line breaks around the token in the config file

npx takes a long time on first use

• This is normal. The first time Claude connects, npx downloads the intervals-mcp package. Subsequent connections use a local cache and are much faster.

Something else isn’t working

• Contact Intervals support at support@myintervals.com and include any error messages you see

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Security & privacy

• Your API token is stored only in your local Claude Desktop config file on your own machine
• The MCP server runs locally — it is not a cloud service
• All communication between the MCP server and Intervals happens over HTTPS, directly to the Intervals API
• Claude never sees your Intervals password — only the API token you provide
• You can revoke your API token at any time from your Intervals account under API Token

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About the Model Context Protocol

MCP is an open standard developed by Anthropic that allows AI assistants like Claude to connect directly to external tools and services. It acts as a universal connector — rather than copying and pasting data into Claude, Claude can query and act on your live data directly. You can learn more at modelcontextprotocol.io.

Curious what’s happening behind the scenes? The Intervals API is fully documented at myintervals.com/api.