Using the tools

Once you’re connected, you don’t call the tools directly — you ask your assistant a question, and it picks the right tool (and chains several when needed). Pinion ships a growing set of tools. Most read (they answer questions); several are actions that change state — submitting for approval, deciding one, creating a renewal or amendment, generating a PDF, logging a follow-up. Every tool runs as you, and every action asks you to confirm first, so a tool can only ever do what you could already do in Pinion yourself.

At a glance

The tools group into five areas. Each row’s Salesforce action label is the name an admin adds to the MCP server in setup; rows marked (action) change state.

Find & explore (read)

Pricing & rules (read + action)

Approvals (read + action)

Accounts, contracts & renewals (read + action)

Activities & documents (read + action)

Ask in plain language

The tools are built to be driven by natural questions — ask the way you’d ask a colleague:

“Why is the Enterprise License priced this way on the MCP Demo – Acme Corp opportunity?”

Behind that one question the assistant chains two tools: it finds the deal’s lines by name, matches “Enterprise License” to a specific line, then explains that line’s price.

The tools

Find & explore

Find deals — the conversation entry point: it finds the deals (Opportunities) a rep is working on without needing a record Id. Every filter is optional and composes — owner scope (mine / all / a rep), account, stage, close-date window, name, open-only, max results. With no filters it returns your open deals, soonest close first — each row with the deal name, account, stage, amount, close date, probability, owner, and a click-ready link. Then drill in (Get deal line items, Get approval status, the quote-PDF tool, or Brief me on an account).

Pipeline summary — the rollup behind Find deals: totals, not rows. Takes the same filters and returns total open amount, weighted pipeline (amount × probability), deal count, a by-stage breakdown, and the next close date. Answers “what’s my open pipeline?” / “how much is in Negotiation?”. Pair it with Find deals to go from the number to the deals behind it.

Get products — finds products and bundles in the catalog. List mode (blank reference) browses; Detail mode (a product name/Id) returns that product’s bundle features/options and configuration attributes. Ambiguous names return candidates.

Get deal line items — resolves a deal reference (Opportunity/Quote name or Id, or a saved configuration’s name) to that deal’s persisted line items — product/bundle name, role (bundle parent / child / segment / standalone), quantity, unit price, line total — with bundle children and MDQ segments nested. Totals reconcile to the Products tab to the cent. Ambiguous names return candidates.

Pricing & rules

Estimate a price — a what-if estimate: “what would this cost?” for one or more products without saving anything. Give it products (with a quantity and an optional per-line discount % or unit-price override) and it returns the full priced waterfall — list → uplifted → net unit price, per-line totals, bundle parent/child subtotals, and a grand total — computed by the same pricing engine a real save uses, so the estimate matches what a Save & Sync would persist to the cent. Use it to compare quantities or discounts before building a real quote. A bundle auto-includes its required and default options. For a metered product, the estimate also attaches a usage projection — give it an estimated usage and it returns the projected overage above the entitlement (computed by the same rate-card kernel a Save & Sync uses), flagged display-only and non-contractual; omit the usage and it projects at the entitlement (a $0-overage baseline) so the agent knows to ask for a real number. (v1 note: MDQ / segmented / block-priced / percent-of-total products aren’t supported yet — the tool returns an honest note rather than a wrong number.) The companion to Explain a price: Estimate prices an unsaved what-if, Explain breaks down an already-saved line.

Explain a price — explains how one saved line was priced: the ordered waterfall from list price through each adjustment (contracted price, volume/term discount, additional/manual discount, promotion) to the net, reconciled to the cent. MDQ-aware (per segment, with compounding uplift), and honest by construction — an unattributable step surfaces as an honest residual rather than a wrong split. Works for Opportunity and Quote lines.

Simulate product & pricing rules — a dry run: simulates the active product & pricing rules against a deal and returns which rules fired and which didn’t, and why — the per-rule condition trace with both sides resolved. Actions are never executed. The partner to Explain a price: that explains the price, this explains the rules behind it.

Look up a contracted price — the negotiated price for one or more products at an account: per product, the contracted unit price (fixed, percent-off, or amount-off), the source record, and its effective dates — or a clear “no contracted price.”

Configure & price a deal (action) — the tool that actually commits a quote: it builds or edits a deal’s product configuration and Save & Syncs it onto the deal’s line items. It’s the natural finish to Estimate a price — hand it the exact config you just quoted (an “applied config” handle from Estimate) and the config you quoted is the config that saves, or give it a fresh list of lines. Use modify mode to edit an existing saved configuration (add/edit/remove lines; anything you don’t mention is preserved). It’s built to be safe on Pinion’s most important path:

• It reuses the exact Save & Sync the configurator UI uses — the same pricing engine, the same rules, the same limits. It doesn’t re-implement any pricing; the server recomputes the authoritative prices on save, so tampered inputs can’t persist a wrong number.
• It returns the final saved line items read back from the records (never your inputs), plus the authoritative grand total — reconciled to the cent, exactly what the Products tab shows.
• It respects approvals. If the configuration needs approval it’s saved as a Draft but not synced — the tool tells you to submit it (Submit for approval) and apply again once approved. It never auto-submits, and it never sneaks a deal past the approval gate.
• Confirms first, like every action, and runs as you — so it can only save a deal you could save yourself in the configurator.

Approvals

Get my approvals — your own pending queue as a numbered list (deal, amount, requester, the rule that fired, submitted/due dates).

Get approval detail — the full context for one pending request: what’s being approved, why it tripped (firing rule + condition trace), who submitted it, the status, SLA, and prior comments. Use it after Get my approvals — “details for #3.”

Get approval status — a deal’s approval state: overall status, who still needs to approve, and which rule triggered each pending approval, per configuration.

Submit for approval (action) — submits a deal’s submittable Draft configuration for approval. If a rule matches, it creates the request(s), marks the configuration Pending, and notifies the approver(s); if no rule matches, it returns an honest “no approval required — you can sync” (not an error); if already synced or pending, a clear guardrail message with no duplicate. Confirms with you first.

Decide approval (action) — approves or rejects a request assigned to you, with a comment. Records your decision, advances or terminates the chain, and notifies the deal owner. Tightly bounded: only your own requests (the server refuses someone else’s), you confirm first, and a comment is required to reject.

Accounts, contracts & renewals

Brief me on an account — a structured brief: TCV and ARR/MRR, active contracts, upcoming/in-flight renewals with forecast amounts, open amendments, and notable negotiated prices. A natural starting point for an account — then drill in.

Get contract lines — one contract’s line detail: its recurring subscription lines (product, quantity, unit price, total, term, bundle role + parent, MDQ segment label/index) and its account’s one-time assets (scoped to the account, which the tool flags). Accepts a Contract Id or Number.

Contract revenue metrics — MRR, ARR, and TCV for one contract or rolled up for an account across its active subscriptions and contracts.

Renewal forecast — one row per renewing contract (contract, renewal date, current recurring amount, forecast ARR, uplift) plus totals over a window. Leave dates blank for “next quarter.” It never creates renewal opportunities — it forecasts.

Create renewal (action) — creates a renewal Opportunity from a contract’s active subscriptions, with renewal line items priced by the renewal engine (the same engine the Pinion UI uses). Pass a Contract Id or Number. Idempotent — if the contract already has a renewal, the existing one is returned (no duplicate). Confirms with you first.

Create amendment (action) — creates an amendment (mid-term change) Opportunity from a contract’s subscriptions and one-time products, with line items priced by the amendment engine. A contract can have several amendments over its life — each call creates a fresh one. Confirms with you first.

Activities & documents

Get activity timeline — the activity story of a deal, account, quote, or contract — the standard Tasks and Events logged against it — so you can answer “when did we last talk to them?”, “what’s the next step?”, “any overdue follow-ups?”. Returns a chronological timeline plus summary fields (last activity date, next activity/subject, open + overdue counts).

Log a follow-up (action) — creates a standard Task on a deal/quote/account/contact — “remind me to follow up on Acme Friday.” Give it a record, a subject, and optionally a due date and type. Assigned to you by default; created as you (so only on records you can see, and only if you can create tasks). Confirms first. A follow-up logged here shows up in the activity timeline.

Generate quote / proposal PDF (action) — renders and saves a quote/proposal PDF for a deal (a GeneratedQuote__c record plus a PDF file under Files on the deal). If the configuration isn’t synced, the PDF is a watermarked draft (this tool never removes the watermark). Optionally takes a template name; otherwise the routed/default template is used. Confirms first.

How they chain

The tools hand off to each other, so a broad question drills to a precise answer or a completed action:

• Discover → drill → explain. “What’s closing this month?” (Find deals) → open one deal’s lines (Get deal line items) → “why is this line priced this way?” (Explain a price).
• Quote → commit. “What would this cost?” (Estimate a price) → “save it to the deal” (Configure & price) — the quoted config is the saved config.
• Account → contract → renew. “Brief me on Acme” (Brief me on an account) → its contract lines (Get contract lines) → “create the renewal” (Create renewal).
• Approvals, end to end. Get my approvals → Get approval detail → Decide approval. And a rep’s own side: Submit for approval → track with Get approval status.
• Price and rules. Explain a price says what; Simulate rules says which rules shaped it.
• Follow through. Get activity timeline shows the next step; Log a follow-up creates one; Generate quote PDF produces the document.

You don’t orchestrate this — the assistant chains the tools from your question. When a step is an action, it pauses for your confirmation before it runs.

What they can and can’t do

More tools coming

The set is growing quickly — from a couple of read tools to a full span of read and action tools across the deal, approval, contract, and activity lifecycle. New tools follow the same pattern: run as you, do only what you could do in Pinion, and confirm before acting. As more ship, they’ll appear here.

Related

• Overview — what MCP is and the security model.
• Setting up the MCP server — publish these tools and connect a client.
• Pricing Methods ▸ MDQ — the per-segment uplift the Explain-a-price tool narrates.
• Approvals ▸ My Approvals — the queue the approval tools read and act on.