A connected AI tool or app can read your company's Forge data. It can also make a listed set of changes, but only if an owner or admin lets it. This page says exactly how that works.
Two choices, and edits start off
When an owner or admin connects a tool on Forge's page, reading is what they approve. If Forge is offering edits, the page also shows a box, ticked off to start with: "Also let the app make changes in Forge". Leave it off and the tool can only read. Tick it and the button reads Allow read and edit access, and the page lists what the tool can and cannot change before you press it.
- An owner or admin can approve a connection, with or without edits.
- A project manager or estimator can approve a connection to the MCP server for themselves, read only: their connection never makes changes, even if the box is ticked. It reads only the tools that carry no money (jobs, scopes, photos, walks and transcripts), and only what Forge shows them in the app. Estimates, rates and every change tool need an owner or admin.
- An API key can never make changes: an API key only reads.
- A connection that was made before Forge offered edits does not gain them. A new connection, made with the box ticked, is how you allow them.
- If Forge has edits switched off, the page does not show the box and the change tools are not offered to any tool.
What a tool may change
An owner or admin may separately allow an app to create jobs and their clients, edit job details, link external job IDs, decide and sync daily sweep segments, merge duplicate jobs, record estimate outcomes, record the prices sent to clients and what work actually cost, and propose rate changes for an owner or admin to approve. These edits are recorded. Connected apps cannot change money, permissions or ownership, or delete records. API keys remain read only.
The tools marked as changes in the tool list are the ones that do this. Reading tools never change anything.
Look before it changes anything
Every change tool takes a dry run: ask it for one and it answers what would change and changes nothing. The merge tool only shows what would move unless it is told to make the change. Asking a change tool to do the same thing again changes nothing the second time.
Every change is recorded
Each change is written to your company's audit log with the person who approved the connection, the connection, and the values before and after. Every owner and admin can see the connection in Settings and end it, and ending it stops its next request.
Prices and rates: a person decides
A tool can record the outcome of an estimate, the prices you actually sent a client and what the work actually cost, as notes kept beside Forge's own numbers. Recording them does not change an estimate's lines, prices or totals, and a homeowner never sees them.
A tool can also propose a new amount for one of your rates, citing your own recorded prices and costs. A proposal only goes into a queue. Nothing in your rate book or on any estimate changes until an owner or admin approves it in Forge's web app.
What a tool can never change
- It cannot delete anything. Merging jobs archives the duplicates and moves their records to the job you keep; nothing is deleted.
- It cannot change an estimate's prices, costs or lines, a change order, or a rate in your rate book.
- It cannot change who owns a job, who is on your team or who can see a job.
- It cannot reach another company's data.
Text it reads is still data
A change tool can only do what is listed above, but the tool that calls it still reads your records word for word. See what is shared for why you should connect only tools you trust.