YNAB MCP Server

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for interacting with YNAB (You Need A Budget) via their API.

Features

• Get budgets, accounts, and categories

• Get, create and update transactions

• Create new categories

• Update budgeted amounts for categories

• Get budget summaries

Prerequisites

• Python 3.13 or higher

• A YNAB account with an API token (Get your token here)

• UV package manager (optional but recommended)

Installation

1. Clone this repository

   git clone https://github.com/ntdef/ynab-mcp.git cd ynab-mcp

2. Create a virtual environment

   uv venv

3. Activate the virtual environment

   • Windows:

     venv\Scripts\activate

   • Unix/MacOS:

     source venv/bin/activate

4. Install dependencies using UV

   # python -m pip install uv uv sync

5. Copy .env.example to .env and add your YNAB API token

   cp .env.example .env # Edit .env with your favorite editor

Usage

Running the server

The server will start in stdio mode, so you won't see any output.

Available tools

The YNAB MCP Server provides the following tools:

Budget management

• get_budgets: Retrieve all budgets for the authenticated user

• get_budget_summary: Get a summary of the budget, optionally for a specific month

Account management

• get_accounts: Retrieve all accounts for a specific budget

Category management

• get_categories: Retrieve all categories for a specific budget

• create_category: Create a new category in the specified budget group

• update_category_budgeted: Update the budgeted amount for a category in a specific month

Transaction management

• get_transactions: Retrieve transactions for a specific budget, optionally filtered by date, account, or category

• create_transaction: Create a new transaction in the specified budget

• update_transaction: Update one or more fields of a specific transaction

Development

Running tests

Code style

This project uses Black and isort for code formatting. To format your code:

License

MIT License

Acknowledgements

• Some of the code was written with the assistance of aider

• YNAB API Documentation

• fastmcp by Anthropic