Actual Budget MCP Server

MCP server for integrating Actual Budget with Claude and other LLM assistants.

Overview

The Actual Budget MCP Server allows you to interact with your personal financial data from Actual Budget using natural language through LLMs. It exposes your accounts, transactions, and financial metrics through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Features

Resources

• Account Listings - Browse all your accounts with their balances
• Account Details - View detailed information about specific accounts
• Transaction History - Access transaction data with complete details

Tools

Transaction & Account Management

• get-transactions - Retrieve and filter transactions by account, date, amount, category, or payee
• create-transaction - Create a new transaction in an account with optional category, payee, and notes
• update-transaction - Update an existing transaction with new category, payee, notes, or amount
• get-accounts - Retrieve a list of all accounts with their current balance and ID
• balance-history - View account balance changes over time

Reporting & Analytics

• spending-by-category - Generate spending breakdowns categorized by type
• monthly-summary - Get monthly income, expenses, and savings metrics
• budget-vs-actual - Compare budgeted amounts against actual spending per category
• net-worth - Track assets, liabilities, and net worth across all accounts over time
• category-trends - See how spending in each category moves month over month, with trend direction
• spending-by-payee - Rank payees by how much was spent with (or received from) each one
• cash-flow - Report income, expenses, and net cash flow per month or week

The five tools above return JSON rather than markdown, so amounts stay machine-readable. Every amount is an integer number of cents, and each response carries an amountsIn field describing the sign conventions it uses.

Custom Reports & Dashboards

• get-custom-reports - Retrieve every saved custom report from the Reports section
• create-custom-report - Create a saved custom report
• update-custom-report - Update fields on a saved custom report, leaving the rest unchanged
• delete-custom-report - Delete a saved custom report
• get-dashboards - Retrieve every dashboard page and the widgets laid out on it
• add-dashboard-widget - Add a widget to a dashboard page
• update-dashboard-widget - Update a widget's configuration, position, or size
• remove-dashboard-widget - Remove a widget from its page
• organize-dashboard - Reposition and resize several widgets at once
• create-dashboard-page / rename-dashboard-page / delete-dashboard-page - Manage dashboard pages

Categories

• get-grouped-categories - Retrieve a list of all category groups with their categories
• create-category - Create a new category within a category group
• update-category - Update an existing category's name or group
• delete-category - Delete a category
• create-category-group - Create a new category group
• update-category-group - Update a category group's name
• delete-category-group - Delete a category group

Payees

• get-payees - Retrieve a list of all payees with their details
• create-payee - Create a new payee
• update-payee - Update an existing payee's details
• delete-payee - Delete a payee

Rules

• get-rules - Retrieve a list of all transaction rules
• create-rule - Create a new transaction rule with conditions and actions
• update-rule - Update an existing transaction rule
• delete-rule - Delete a transaction rule

Prompts

• financial-insights - Generate insights and recommendations based on your financial data
• budget-review - Analyze your budget compliance and suggest adjustments

Installation

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v16 or higher)
• Actual Budget installed and configured
• Claude Desktop or another MCP-compatible client
• Docker Desktop (optional)

Remote access

Pull the latest docker image:

docker pull sstefanov/actual-mcp:latest

Local setup

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/s-stefanov/actual-mcp.git
cd actual-mcp

2. Install dependencies:

npm install

3. Build the server:

npm run build

4. Build the local docker image (optional):

docker build -t <local-image-name> .

5. Configure environment variables (optional):

# Path to your Actual Budget data directory (default: ~/.actual)
export ACTUAL_DATA_DIR="/path/to/your/actual/data"

# If using a remote Actual server
export ACTUAL_SERVER_URL="https://your-actual-server.com"
export ACTUAL_PASSWORD="your-password"

# Specific budget to use (optional)
export ACTUAL_BUDGET_SYNC_ID="your-budget-id"

# How long downloaded data stays fresh before the server re-syncs, in ms
# (default: 60000). Use 0 to sync before every call, or -1 to never sync.
export ACTUAL_SYNC_TTL_MS="60000"

Optional: separate encryption budget password

If your Actual setup requires a different password to unlock the local/encrypted budget data than the server authentication password, you can set ACTUAL_BUDGET_ENCRYPTION_PASSWORD in addition to ACTUAL_PASSWORD.

# If server auth and encryption/unlock use different passwords
export ACTUAL_BUDGET_ENCRYPTION_PASSWORD="your-encryption-password"

Connection lifecycle

The server keeps one shared Actual connection for its entire lifetime and serializes budget operations through it. Downloaded data is re-synced when it exceeds the ACTUAL_SYNC_TTL_MS freshness window. In both stdio and HTTP modes, SIGINT and SIGTERM drain in-flight work before the server shuts down. Actual is no longer initialized and shut down for each tool call.

Report semantics

• Balances and balance histories are capped as of today; future-dated transactions are excluded, and the current-month balance-history row is partial.
• Closed on-budget accounts remain included in historical reports; closed off-budget accounts stay excluded by default.
• Monthly income follows Actual's income-group metadata. Refunds net against expenses, zero-activity months count in averages, and uncategorized transfer pairs are skipped.
• The former Investments bucket is removed from monthly summaries.

Usage with Claude Desktop

To use this server with Claude Desktop, add it to your Claude configuration:

On MacOS:

code ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

On Windows:

code %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

Add the following to your configuration...

a. Using Node.js (npx version):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "actualBudget": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "actual-mcp", "--enable-write"],
      "env": {
        "ACTUAL_DATA_DIR": "path/to/your/data",
        "ACTUAL_PASSWORD": "your-password",
        "ACTUAL_SERVER_URL": "http://your-actual-server.com",
        "ACTUAL_BUDGET_SYNC_ID": "your-budget-id"
      }
    }
  }
}

### a. Using Node.js (local only):

```json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "actualBudget": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/path/to/your/clone/build/index.js", "--enable-write"],
      "env": {
        "ACTUAL_DATA_DIR": "path/to/your/data",
        "ACTUAL_PASSWORD": "your-password",
        "ACTUAL_SERVER_URL": "http://your-actual-server.com",
        "ACTUAL_BUDGET_SYNC_ID": "your-budget-id"
      }
    }
  }
}

b. Using Docker (local or remote images):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "actualBudget": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "-i",
        "--rm",
        "-v",
        "/path/to/your/data:/data",
        "-e",
        "ACTUAL_PASSWORD=your-password",
        "-e",
        "ACTUAL_SERVER_URL=https://your-actual-server.com",
        "-e",
        "ACTUAL_BUDGET_SYNC_ID=your-budget-id",
        "sstefanov/actual-mcp:latest",
        "--enable-write"
      ]
    }
  }
}

After saving the configuration, restart Claude Desktop.

💡 ACTUAL_DATA_DIR is optional if you're using ACTUAL_SERVER_URL.

💡 Use --enable-write to enable write-access tools.

Running an SSE Server

To expose the server over a port using Docker:

docker run -i --rm \
  -p 3000:3000 \
  -v "/path/to/your/data:/data" \
  -e ACTUAL_PASSWORD="your-password" \
  -e ACTUAL_SERVER_URL="http://your-actual-server.com" \
  -e ACTUAL_BUDGET_SYNC_ID="your-budget-id" \
  -e BEARER_TOKEN="your-bearer-token" \
  sstefanov/actual-mcp:latest \
  --sse --enable-write --enable-bearer

⚠️ Important: When using --enable-bearer, the BEARER_TOKEN environment variable must be set.
🔒 This is highly recommended if you're exposing your server via a public URL.

Example Queries

Once connected, you can ask Claude questions like:

• "What's my current account balance?"
• "Show me my spending by category last month"
• "How much did I spend on groceries in January?"
• "What's my savings rate over the past 3 months?"
• "Which categories am I overspending on this month?"
• "How has my net worth changed over the past year?"
• "Which payees do I spend the most with?"
• "Is my grocery spending trending up or down?"
• "Analyze my budget and suggest areas to improve"
• "What custom reports do I have?"
• "Add a net worth widget to my Spending Plan dashboard"
• "Rearrange my dashboard so the cash flow card is full width at the top"

Usage with Codex CLI

Example Codex configuration:

In ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.actual-budget]
url = "http://localhost:3000"

Point Codex at the same port you pass to npm start -- --sse --port <PORT>.

Development

For development with auto-rebuild:

npm run watch

Testing the connection to Actual

To verify the server can connect to your Actual Budget data:

node build/index.js --test-resources

Debugging

Since MCP servers communicate over stdio, debugging can be challenging. You can use the MCP Inspector:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector node build/index.js

E2E validation gate

The end-to-end test suite (vitest.e2e.config.ts) spins up a real Actual Budget server in a Docker container (via Testcontainers), seeds a budget, and drives it through a real MCP client over stdio to verify accounts, transactions, categories, payees, rules, and imports actually persist. It requires Docker to be running locally.

In CI, the e2e-test job in .github/workflows/pr-validation.yml only runs on release-please PRs (branch prefix release-please--) or when a PR is given the run-e2e label — it does not run on every PR by default, since it needs Docker and takes longer than the standard checks.

To run it locally:

npm run build && npm run test:e2e

Docker must be installed and running; the test suite pulls and starts the Actual server image automatically.

Project Structure

• index.ts - Main server implementation
• types.ts - Type definitions for API responses and parameters
• prompts.ts - Prompt templates for LLM interactions
• utils.ts - Helper functions for date formatting and more

Registry & Discovery

actual-mcp is published to the official MCP Registry as io.github.s-stefanov/actual-mcp. Registry metadata lives in server.json and is published automatically on each release (see .github/workflows/release-please.yml).

It advertises two transports on the npm package — stdio (default) and streamable-http (via the --sse flag). (A Docker image is also published, but is not yet listed as a registry package.)

Post-release directory listings are tracked in docs/mcp-registry-checklist.md.

License

MIT

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.