Connect Propel Your MSP

Propel Your MSP is a vCIO and quarterly-business-review platform for MSPs. It imports your clients, assets and agreements from your PSA (ConnectWise Manage, Autotask PSA or HaloPSA), then builds each client's Strategic IT Plan: a budget, a roadmap of projects, IT audits, and how closely the client's technology matches your standards. Propel calls a client it is actively planning for a "propelled company".

Connecting Propel Your MSP to StackJack gives your AI assistant a small family of propel_ MCP tools. MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools are the standardized commands an AI assistant can call through StackJack. With them, your AI can:

• List every client in your Propel account with the identifier your PSA uses for the same client, whether Propel is actively planning for them, a summary of their assets (how many are out of warranty or past end of life) and a summary of their money (recurring revenue, planned spend over the next twelve months, overdue replacements)
• Read a client's assets with warranty, end-of-life and operating-system end-of-life dates and the replacement budget Propel has worked out for them
• Read a client's IT audits newest first, with status, score and whether the audit failed, and open one audit to see its sections, its questions, the risk on each and the comments
• Read a client's budget as a fiscal-year and quarter tree of asset replacements, projects and agreements, over a window you choose
• Read the roadmap, one client's projects or every propelled client's projects at once, with status, priority, cost, business justification and the PSA identifier of each project
• Check clients against your standards: the tech stacks you have defined, how one client scores against each, or how every propelled client scores against one stack in a single call

Every Propel tool reads. Propel's External API has no way to create or change anything, so nothing here can alter your Propel data.

How StackJack authenticates to Propel Your MSP

Propel gives you a Client ID and a Client Secret. You create them once in Propel and paste them into StackJack. StackJack exchanges them for a short-lived access token behind the scenes and refreshes it before it expires, so there is nothing to renew on a schedule.

Three things about Propel's side decide whether the connection works, and they are easy to miss:

• The External API is a paid Propel add-on. It is not on every account, and Propel does not list its price publicly. Propel bills it every month once it is active, whether or not anything uses it, and only Propel support can switch it off. StackJack cannot see the add-on's price and does not charge for it.
• Only a Propel Admin can create a credential, and the credential must carry the Read scope. Propel's form also offers Write, but a credential created with Write alone cannot be used by this connector, and Propel's current API has no operation that needs it.
• A credential can be limited to a list of IP addresses. If you fill in Allowed IPs, StackJack is blocked until its addresses are on the list. Leave the list empty, or open a support ticket with StackJack and we will give you the addresses to add. StackJack does not publish them.

One credential belongs to your Propel account, not to a person, and it reads every company in the account. If you run two separate Propel accounts, add each as its own connection.

Steps

1. Check that your account has the External API. Sign in to Propel Your MSP and look for Settings, then API Access. If the page is not there, ask Propel support to enable the External API for your account.
2. Sign in as a Propel Admin and open Settings, then API Access.
3. Create a credential. Give it a name and tick Read.
4. Leave Allowed IPs empty, as above.
5. Copy the Client Secret straight away. Propel shows it once, when the credential is created, and never again. Treat it as a password. If you set an optional expiry date, the connection stops working on that date and you will need to create a new credential.
6. Open Propel Your MSP in StackJack, paste the Client ID and the Client Secret, and save. There is no address to enter: Propel has one address and StackJack already knows it. Enter both values again whenever you edit the connection, because Propel will not show the secret a second time.
7. Run a Test Connection. StackJack asks Propel for your tech stacks, which proves the credential, the Read scope, the add-on and the Allowed IPs list in one call. A brand-new account with no tech stacks still passes.

What you get

Starting from your client list

Every other tool needs a company id, and the companies tool is where it comes from. It is also the bridge to the rest of your stack: each company carries the identifier your PSA uses for the same client, so your AI can match a Propel client to the same client in ConnectWise, Autotask or HaloPSA that it already reaches through StackJack.

The companies list has no filter. There is no way to ask for one client by name, so finding one client means reading the list. Ask your AI to read it once and remember the ids.

Planning data exists only for propelled companies

A company that Propel is not actively planning for still appears in the list, but it has no plan data. Propel does not say what it answers when you ask for the audits, budget or projects of such a company, so the answer can be an empty list or an error. The "propelled" flag on each company tells you which ones have plan data, so check it before you build a report.

The budget

The budget tool returns Propel's own fiscal-year and quarter tree. You can say how many fiscal years to project and the date the window starts from, and it defaults to Propel's standard window and today. The numbers are exactly as Propel computed them: StackJack does not add anything up or reshape them.

Audits

The audits tool lists a client's audits newest first. Open one audit to read its sections, its questions with the risk on each, and the comments, and to see the remediation project Propel linked to a failing question when you ask for it.

Technology standards

A tech stack is one of your technology standards. The stack list is the catalog of those standards, and its ids feed the cross-company answers: for one stack, one row per propelled company with its score and each item's answer. That is the quickest way to find the clients that are off standard.

Things to know before you rely on it

Money fields carry no currency

Propel's amounts (recurring revenue, budgets, project costs) arrive without a currency, and Propel does not say which currency an amount is in. Check the currency in Propel before you quote a figure to a client.

Numbers can arrive as text

Propel sometimes sends a number as a quoted string. StackJack passes Propel's answers through exactly as they arrive, so your AI sees the same thing you would in Propel's own API. If you chart the results, convert the values first.

Reading long lists

Lists are read a page at a time. StackJack always asks for a page size, caps it at one hundred rows (Propel does not publish a maximum) and tells your AI how to read the next page from the link Propel returns. Propel's published API description does not spell out exactly how a list is paged or how several relationships are requested at once, so StackJack follows the description's own wording. If the second page of a list ever repeats the first, tell StackJack support and it will be corrected.

Propel is strict, and it does not say how strict

Propel limits requests per IP address, per credential and per account, and publishes no numbers. StackJack paces itself and waits when Propel asks it to, so a wide read takes longer rather than failing. The per-address limit is shared with other applications calling Propel from the same address, so a throttle can appear on a quiet account. Wait a minute and try again, and ask for fewer rows per page on large reads.

After you revoke a credential

Tokens Propel has already issued can keep working for up to thirty minutes after you revoke the credential, so a connection does not always fail the instant you delete the credential in Propel.

Plans and limits

Every Propel tool is a read, so every one of them is available on the Free tier. Pro and Business reach the same tools and differ by monthly call quota.

See the generated Propel Your MSP tool reference for the current inventory, plan assignment and input schemas.

Troubleshooting

"Propel Your MSP rejected the Client ID and Client Secret saved here" - the credential was revoked or has passed the expiry date you set, or the values were not copied exactly. Propel shows the secret once, so a truncated copy cannot be recovered. In Propel, create a new credential with Read ticked, paste the new Client ID and Client Secret into StackJack and run a Test Connection.

"Propel Your MSP accepted the sign-in but refused this call" - Propel does not say which of three account-side settings caused it, so check all three. The External API add-on must be active on your account. The credential must have been created with Read ticked. And its Allowed IPs list must be empty: if it is filled in, StackJack is blocked until its addresses are on it, so leave it empty or open a support ticket with StackJack for the addresses.

"Propel Your MSP would not issue a token with the Read scope" - the credential was created without Read, most often with Write alone. Create a new credential with Read ticked.

"Propel Your MSP could not find what this tool asked for" - if the tool took an id, check the id. Company ids, audit ids and tech stack ids are long identifiers that come from a list, and the safe way to get one is to read the list rather than type it. A company in a different Propel account is not visible to this credential. If the tool took no id (the companies list, the account projects list, the tech stack list or Test Connection), the usual cause is that the External API add-on is not active on your Propel account, so check Settings, API Access for the activation prompt. Propel does not publish what it answers in this case, so treat that as the likeliest cause rather than a certainty.

"Propel Your MSP is rate limiting this connection" - you reached one of Propel's undocumented limits. This is temporary and StackJack recovers on its own. If it keeps happening, ask for fewer rows per page or narrow the read.

"Something between StackJack and Propel Your MSP answered instead of Propel itself" - a proxy, a firewall or a sign-in page returned a web page where the API should have returned data. Nothing is wrong with the credential. If it persists, check whether outbound access to Propel is being intercepted on your network.

Test Connection fails right after you created the credential - the usual causes are a secret that was truncated on copy, a credential created without Read, an add-on that is not active yet, or an Allowed IPs list that does not include StackJack.

A company shows no audits, budget or projects, or its audits, budget or projects return an error - check its propelled flag in the companies list. A company Propel is not actively planning for has no plan data, and Propel may answer with an error instead of an empty list.

Propel Your MSP tools

propel_ · 10 tools · Free 10

Companies

Company Assets

Company Audits

Company Budget

Company Projects

Projects

Company Tech Stacks

Tech Stacks