monarch-mcp-jamiew

Monarch Money MCP Server

An MCP server for Monarch Money — gives AI assistants like Claude access to your financial accounts, transactions, budgets, and more.

Originally forked from @colvint/monarch-money-mcp but has diverged into a full rewrite on a modern FastMCP architecture. It's grown from a handful of tools to a broad toolset — adding server-side transaction search, parallel bulk transaction updates, multi-month spending-pattern analysis with forecasting, and a single-call financial overview that fans out to five Monarch APIs at once. Responses are tuned hard for token efficiency: the default compact transaction format cuts payload size by ~80%, categories return just id+name unless you ask for more, and every tool accepts a verbose flag when you want the full payload. It also ships MCP resources and guided prompts, natural-language date parsing ("last month", "30 days ago"), and proper read/write tool annotations so clients know what's safe to call.

Built on the monarchmoneycommunity library by @bradleyseanf — an actively-maintained community fork that tracks the latest Monarch Money API changes (the api.monarch.com domain move, gql 4.0, auth persistence) with full MFA support, pinned to a specific commit for reproducible builds. It descends from the original monarchmoney library by @hammem, which is no longer actively maintained.

Features

• Tools covering accounts, transactions, budgets, cashflow, investments, categories, recurring transactions, and spending analysis
• Structured output — every tool returns a typed schema (outputSchema + machine-readable structured content) with a text fallback for older clients
• MCP resources for quick access to categories, accounts, and institutions, plus parameterized templates for per-account holdings and history (accounts://{account_id}/holdings|history)
• MCP prompts for guided financial analysis workflows, with live argument autocompletion
• Smart output formatting — compact transaction format reduces token usage by ~80%
• Natural language dates — "last month", "30 days ago", "this year" all work
• Batch operations — parallel multi-account queries, bulk transaction updates, with progress reporting
• Spending analysis — multi-month trend analysis with category/account breakdowns
• Tool annotations & titles — read/write metadata and human-friendly titles for MCP clients

Setup

One-line install, no clone, no absolute-path wrangling. The server is published to PyPI, so uv runs it on demand with uvx monarch-mcp-jamiew. You'll need uv installed and your Monarch credentials (see Getting your MFA secret below).

Standard config

Every MCP client uses the same shape — command uvx, package monarch-mcp-jamiew, and your three credentials as env vars:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "monarch-money": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["monarch-mcp-jamiew"],
      "env": {
        "MONARCH_EMAIL": "[e-mail]",
        "MONARCH_PASSWORD": "your-password",
        "MONARCH_MFA_SECRET": "your-mfa-secret-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Pick your client below for the exact steps.

Claude Desktop

Edit your config file (create it if it doesn't exist) and add the standard config above under mcpServers:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

Then fully quit and reopen Claude Desktop.

Claude Code

claude mcp add monarch-money \
  -e MONARCH_EMAIL=[e-mail] \
  -e MONARCH_PASSWORD=your-password \
  -e MONARCH_MFA_SECRET=your-mfa-secret-key \
  -- uvx monarch-mcp-jamiew

Add -s user to make it available across all your projects. Verify with claude mcp list.

Codex CLI

codex mcp add monarch-money \
  --env MONARCH_EMAIL=[e-mail] \
  --env MONARCH_PASSWORD=your-password \
  --env MONARCH_MFA_SECRET=your-mfa-secret-key \
  -- uvx monarch-mcp-jamiew

Or add the equivalent block to ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.monarch-money]
command = "uvx"
args = ["monarch-mcp-jamiew"]
env = { MONARCH_EMAIL = "[e-mail]", MONARCH_PASSWORD = "your-password", MONARCH_MFA_SECRET = "your-mfa-secret-key" }

.mcp.json (project-scoped)

Drop the standard config into a .mcp.json file at your project root. Claude Code (project scope) and most clients auto-load it.

Hermes

Add to ~/.hermes/config.yaml under mcp_servers:, then /reload-mcp (or restart Hermes):

mcp_servers:
  monarch-money:
    command: uvx
    args: ["monarch-mcp-jamiew"]
    env:
      MONARCH_EMAIL: "[e-mail]"
      MONARCH_PASSWORD: "your-password"
      MONARCH_MFA_SECRET: "your-mfa-secret-key"

OpenClaw

Add the standard config to ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json under mcpServers, then restart the gateway.

Any other MCP client (Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, Cline, Zed, …)

Most accept the same standard config — drop it into the client's MCP config (e.g. Cursor's ~/.cursor/mcp.json, or VS Code via code --add-mcp). Anything that speaks MCP over stdio works.

Not sure how? Tell your agent:

Install the Monarch Money MCP server from https://github.com/jamiew/monarch-mcp — it's on PyPI as monarch-mcp-jamiew, runs via uvx monarch-mcp-jamiew, and needs env vars MONARCH_EMAIL, MONARCH_PASSWORD, and MONARCH_MFA_SECRET.

From source (development)

To run against a local checkout (and the git-pinned monarchmoneycommunity lib):

git clone https://github.com/jamiew/monarch-mcp
cd monarch-mcp
uv sync

Then point your client at the local copy with absolute paths (find them with which uv and pwd):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "monarch-money": {
      "command": "/abs/path/to/uv",
      "args": ["--directory", "/abs/path/to/monarch-mcp", "run", "python", "server.py"],
      "env": {
        "MONARCH_EMAIL": "[e-mail]",
        "MONARCH_PASSWORD": "your-password",
        "MONARCH_MFA_SECRET": "your-mfa-secret-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

[!NOTE] The claude mcp add / codex mcp add one-liners put your credentials in shell history. If that bothers you, edit the client's config file directly (as shown for Claude Desktop / Codex above) instead.

Getting your MFA secret

• Go to Monarch Money settings and enable 2FA
• When shown the QR code, look for "Can't scan?" or "Enter manually"
• Copy the secret key (a string like T5SPVJIBRNPNNINFSH5W7RFVF2XYADYX)
• Use this as your MONARCH_MFA_SECRET

Tools

Tool	Description
get_accounts	List accounts with balances
get_transactions	Transactions with date/account/category filtering
search_transactions	Search by merchant name or keyword
get_transaction_categories	Category list (compact by default)
create_transaction	Create a manual transaction
update_transaction	Update a single transaction
update_transactions_bulk	Update multiple transactions in parallel
get_budgets	Budget data and spending analysis
get_cashflow	Income and expense analysis
get_account_holdings	Investment holdings for an account (requires account_id)
get_account_history	Account balance history
get_institutions	Linked financial institutions
get_recurring_transactions	Recurring transaction detection
set_budget_amount	Set a budget category amount
create_manual_account	Create a manually-tracked account
refresh_accounts	Trigger account data refresh
get_spending_summary	Spending aggregated by category, account, or month
get_complete_financial_overview	Combined 5-API call in parallel
analyze_spending_patterns	Multi-month trend analysis

Transaction format

By default, transactions return a compact format with the fields that matter:

{
  "id": "123456789012345678",
  "date": "2025-03-15",
  "amount": -12.50,
  "merchant": "Corner Deli",
  "plaidName": "CORNER DELI NYC",
  "category": "Restaurants & Bars",
  "categoryId": "cat_001",
  "account": "Main Credit Card",
  "needsReview": true
}

pending and notes are included only when present. Set verbose=True on any tool for the full API response with all metadata.

Session management

Sessions are cached in ~/.monarch-mcp/ for faster subsequent logins (override the location with the MONARCH_SESSION_DIR env var). If you hit auth issues:

• Delete ~/.monarch-mcp/session.pickle to clear the cached session
• Set MONARCH_FORCE_LOGIN=true in your env config to force a fresh login
• Make sure your system clock is accurate (required for TOTP)

Development

Local setup

Create a .env file (git-ignored):

MONARCH_EMAIL="[e-mail]"
MONARCH_PASSWORD="your-password"
MONARCH_MFA_SECRET="YOUR_TOTP_SECRET_KEY"

Tests

uv run pytest tests/ -v                          # unit tests (no creds needed)
uv run pytest tests/test_integration.py -v        # integration tests (needs .env)
uv run scripts/health_check.py                    # quick API connectivity check

CI checks

Run all checks locally (same as GitHub Actions CI):

uv run python scripts/ci.py

Releasing

Cut a release with the /release flow (bump version in pyproject.toml → commit → tag vX.Y.Z → push → gh release create). Publishing the GitHub release triggers .github/workflows/publish.yml, which builds and pushes to PyPI and the MCP Registry via OIDC trusted publishing — no API tokens are stored anywhere. The workflow injects the tag version into server.json automatically, so pyproject.toml is the only version field you bump by hand.

Log analysis

Tools for measuring and optimizing token usage across MCP sessions:

uv run scripts/analyze_logs.py                    # full report
uv run scripts/analyze_logs.py --json             # JSON output
uv run scripts/eval_session.py snapshot           # mark log position
# ... use tools in Claude ...
uv run scripts/eval_session.py analyze            # analyze new entries

Security

Warning: Monarch Money does not provide an official API. This server uses unofficial API access that requires your actual account credentials. Use with appropriate caution.

• The server runs locally on your machine — your credentials live in your MCP client config and never pass through the LLM. Only the financial data you actually query is returned to the assistant.
• Your credentials have full account access — treat them like passwords
• The MFA secret (TOTP key) provides ongoing access
• Session files in ~/.monarch-mcp/ contain auth tokens — keep them secure
• Never commit .env or .mcp.json files to version control
• This is an unofficial API — Monarch Money could change or restrict access at any time

Credits

This project started as a fork of colvint/monarch-money-mcp by @colvint. Thanks for the original implementation!