Friday, 11:20. A new customer wants an offer before the weekend. You've never heard of them. Before you put a price in writing, you want the basics: is this a real company, where is it registered, is it in the VAT register, is it bankrupt or winding up, and did it make money last year?
All of that is public in Brønnøysundregistrene. So you open the site, search, click into the company, click again for the accounts, and copy four numbers into your notes. Next week you do it again for the next customer.
That's a good first tool. Not because it's impressive, but because nothing about it can break on a login.
Why start with a tool that needs no password
Most first automations stall at the credentials step: an API key in the wrong place, a sign-in screen that loops, a token that expires on day three. You end up debugging access instead of finding out whether the tool is any use.
Brønnøysundregistrene publishes the company register and filed accounts as open data. No key, no account, no login. The only thing you have to get right is the job itself: what goes in and what comes out.
Build it in the chat you already have open
You do this in Claude (or Cursor). Smia is where the tool lives once it's built, so it does the same thing every time instead of being rebuilt from a prompt.
- Add Smia once. In Claude, go to Customize → Connectors → Add custom connector and paste
https://app.smia.io/mcp. - Sign in or create a free account when Claude asks. Signup is open.
Then paste this prompt:
Use Smia to build a tool called company_check. It takes a Norwegian company name or org number and looks it up in Brønnøysundregistrene's open API at data.brreg.no (no key needed). Return: name, org number, business address, industry, whether it's in the VAT register, any bankruptcy or winding-up flag, number of employees, and revenue and profit (with currency) from the latest filed company accounts. If there are no filed accounts, say so instead of failing. If the name matches several companies, show the best match and its org number. Test it with org number 938280436, then turn it on.
- Check the test. Claude builds the tool and runs it. 938280436 is Smia Technologies AS, registered in Oslo in August 2026, so it's too new to have filed accounts. The tool should return the company details and say plainly that no accounts are filed yet. If it errors instead, tell Claude what came back and ask it to fix and test again.
- Use it. Next time, just ask: "Check [company name] before I send the offer."
How to know it worked
- Ask "List my Smia tools." company_check should be there and switched on.
- Look up a company you know well and compare the answer with its page on brreg.no.
- Open a new conversation and ask again. It should still work there, without you explaining where the data comes from.
Make it yours
The prompt above is a starting point. Change it to match how you actually check a customer or supplier:
- Only care about companies with more than ten employees? Say so.
- Want a warning when equity is negative? Add it.
- Want the answer in Norwegian? Ask for that.
Every change is one more sentence in the same chat, followed by another test. Keep the tool to one job.
What to build next
Once the check works, you've done the hard part: describing a job clearly enough that a tool does it the same way every time. The next tool can be one that needs a login, like pulling a customer's open invoices from your accounting system. By then you know the build-and-test loop, so you're only debugging the login, not everything at once.