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

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 (v24 or higher)
• Actual Budget installed and configured
• Claude Desktop or another MCP-compatible client
• Docker Desktop (optional)

Remote access

Pull the latest docker image from GitHub Container Registry:

docker pull ghcr.io/baruchiro/actual-mcp:latest

For PR preview images (replace 123 with PR number):

docker pull ghcr.io/baruchiro/actual-mcp:pr-123

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"

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"

Optional: currency symbol

Actual Budget is currency-agnostic. By default, formatted amounts are shown without a currency symbol (e.g., 1,234.56). If you want to display amounts with currency formatting, you can set ACTUAL_MCP_CURRENCY_SYMBOL to a valid ISO 4217 currency code:

# Choose one of the following currency codes:
export ACTUAL_MCP_CURRENCY_SYMBOL="USD"  # For US Dollars: $1,234.56
# export ACTUAL_MCP_CURRENCY_SYMBOL="EUR"  # For Euros: €1,234.56
# export ACTUAL_MCP_CURRENCY_SYMBOL="GBP"  # For British Pounds: £1,234.56

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",
        "ghcr.io/baruchiro/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" \
  ghcr.io/baruchiro/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.

Docker Images

Available Images

Docker images are published to GitHub Container Registry (ghcr.io) with the following tags:

• latest - Latest release from the main branch
• v1.2.3 - Specific version tags (e.g., v1.8.0)
• 1.2.3, 1.2, 1 - Semantic version aliases
• pr-123 - Preview images for pull requests (e.g., pr-42 for PR #42)

Using PR Preview Images

To test a pull request before it's merged, you can use the PR-specific Docker image:

# Replace 123 with the actual PR number
docker pull ghcr.io/baruchiro/actual-mcp:pr-123

# Run the PR preview
docker run -i --rm \
  -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" \
  ghcr.io/baruchiro/actual-mcp:pr-123 \
  --enable-write

This allows you to test new features or bug fixes before they are officially released.

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?"
• "Analyze my budget and suggest areas to improve"

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

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

License

MIT

Contributing

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