Connect Claude to Gusto

Read a company's employees, contractors, payrolls, pay schedules, departments and time off. Toolspoke puts 13 of its actions behind one MCP endpoint that Claude, Cursor, and Codex all speak.

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Connection: Provider REST API
Authentication: Sign in with Gusto
Actions exposed: 13
What a call bills: Nothing
Adapter: Maintained by Toolspoke

Connected in three steps

1
Install Gusto
Open the marketplace in your workspace, add Gusto to the project your agents work in, and it appears on the gateway immediately.
2
Connect the credential
Sign in to Gusto. Toolspoke holds the token encrypted and refreshes it when it expires.
3
Point your agent at the gateway
Give your client one address, https://toolspoke.com/mcp. Claude Code takes it as a command, Claude and Claude Desktop add it as a custom connector, and Cursor, Codex and VS Code each read it from a config file of their own.

.mcp.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "toolspoke": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://toolspoke.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

One block covers every tool you have installed. Gusto shows up in the client as soon as your policy allows it, and so does everything else you install later.

Where the address goes, per client

Claude Code: Run it in your project, then /mcp to sign in
claude mcp add --transport http toolspoke https://toolspoke.com/mcp
Claude and Claude Desktop: Settings, then Connectors, then Add custom connector
https://toolspoke.com/mcp
Cursor: ~/.cursor/mcp.json, or .cursor/mcp.json for one project
{ "mcpServers": { "toolspoke": { "url": "https://toolspoke.com/mcp" } } }
Codex: ~/.codex/config.toml
[mcp_servers.toolspoke] url = "https://toolspoke.com/mcp"
VS Code: .vscode/mcp.json, or the MCP: Add Server command
{ "servers": { "toolspoke": { "type": "http", "url": "https://toolspoke.com/mcp" } } }

What Gusto asks for

Press connect and sign in to Gusto. Toolspoke keeps the token encrypted and refreshes it when it expires, so there is nothing to copy and nothing to rotate by hand.

What Claude can do in Gusto

13 actions, each one declared and named by the connector rather than discovered at runtime. A workspace policy grants a person all of them, a hand-picked selection, everything on the read side, everything on the write side, or none.

Reads: 13Reads
Writes: 0Writes
Destructive: 0Destructive

Reads

Fetches data and changes nothing.

get_token_info
Return the company this sign-in was granted for, and the scopes it carries. Call this first: the company UUID in resource.uuid is what every other operation takes as company_id. It is also the connection test, because a Gusto token is issued for one company and this is the call that names it.
get_company
Retrieve the company - legal name, EIN, entity type, primary address and locations.
list_employees
List the company's employees - onboarding, active and terminated - with their jobs and departments. Filter with terminated or onboarded_active; search_term matches names.
get_employee
Retrieve one employee by UUID, with jobs, compensations and onboarding status.
list_contractors
List the company's contractors, onboarded and dismissed.
list_contractor_payments
List payments made to contractors between two dates, optionally for one contractor.
list_payrolls
List the company's payrolls whose pay period falls in a date window. Processed regular payrolls only unless processing_statuses or payroll_types say otherwise; pass include totals to get gross and net pay without fetching each payroll.
get_payroll
Retrieve one payroll with each employee's compensation, and optionally taxes, benefits, deductions and totals.
list_pay_schedules
List the company's pay schedules - frequency, anchor dates and which employees follow each.
list_departments
List the company's departments and who is in each.
list_locations
List the company's addresses - mailing, filing and work locations.
list_time_off_policies
List the company's time off policies - vacation, sick and others - with accrual rules and enrolled employees.
list_time_off_requests
List time off requests, past and present, optionally inside a date window.

What it will not do

Enforced by the gateway rather than left to convention, which is why each of these can be stated flatly.

It cannot call anything else: The 13 actions above are the whole of it. A call to any other name is refused before it reaches Gusto rather than forwarded on, and connecting your account does not add to the list: it is fixed by the connector, not discovered at run time.
It only reads: Every action here reads. Nothing this connector can do changes anything in Gusto.
It reaches no further than your credential: Toolspoke holds no access to Gusto of its own. Every call carries the credential you stored and nothing besides, so whatever that credential cannot reach, this connector cannot reach either.
It never hears from Gusto: Nothing is pushed to it. There is no webhook, no subscription and no polling, so this connector cannot notice by itself that something changed in Gusto. An agent has to ask.
It does not smooth over provider limits: Toolspoke does not retry, queue or back off around Gusto's own rate limits. A call that Gusto refuses comes back to the agent as a failed call.

Before you connect it

What can Claude do in Gusto?

13 named actions: 13 that only read. They include get_token_info, get_company and list_employees. Nothing outside that list is reachable: the connector declares each operation by name rather than proxying whatever an agent asks for.

What credentials does the Gusto connector need?

Nothing to paste. You sign in to Gusto over OAuth 2.0 and Toolspoke keeps the resulting token encrypted, refreshing it when it expires.

Does the Gusto connector work with Cursor and Codex, or only Claude?

Any client that speaks MCP, and every one of them gets the same 13 actions. There is a single address, https://toolspoke.com/mcp. Claude Code adds it with claude mcp add --transport http, Claude and Claude Desktop take it as a custom connector in settings, Cursor reads it from .cursor/mcp.json, Codex from ~/.codex/config.toml, and VS Code from .vscode/mcp.json. Each of them signs in to the gateway itself, so there is no key to paste.

What does the Gusto connector not do?

The 13 actions above are the whole of it. A call to any other name is refused before it reaches Gusto rather than forwarded on, and connecting your account does not add to the list: it is fixed by the connector, not discovered at run time. Every action here reads. Nothing this connector can do changes anything in Gusto. Toolspoke holds no access to Gusto of its own. Every call carries the credential you stored and nothing besides, so whatever that credential cannot reach, this connector cannot reach either. Nothing is pushed to it. There is no webhook, no subscription and no polling, so this connector cannot notice by itself that something changed in Gusto. An agent has to ask. Toolspoke does not retry, queue or back off around Gusto's own rate limits. A call that Gusto refuses comes back to the agent as a failed call.

Can I limit which actions an agent can call?

Yes, in two places. The project switches Gusto's actions on and off one at a time, for everyone in the project at once, and the screen groups them by read, write and destructive so turning off everything that deletes is one click. An individual agent key can then be narrowed further, to particular toolkits in a project and to particular actions in a toolkit. Whatever it was granted, a key never reaches a project its owner cannot.

What gets recorded when an agent calls Gusto?

Every attempt, with the agent that made it and the person that agent belongs to, the full request payload, the response payload, the status, the duration, and what the call cost in sandbox time and model tokens. Values whose key names a secret are masked out before the record is shown to anyone. An operation the connector marks as not retained never has its response body written at all, so the gateway keeps no second copy of what was read.

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