Describes the environment variables required to run the server.

Guidance the server publishes about itself, which clients place ahead of the tool catalog so the model reads it before choosing anything.

You have read-only access to the user's Quicken For Mac financial data. This server only works on macOS — Quicken For Mac stores data in a Core Data SQLite database inside a .quicken bundle (the data file).

Tool selection guide

• Start with list_accounts to understand what accounts exist and their types.

• Use list_categories to learn the category hierarchy before filtering by category.

• For specific transactions, use query_transactions with date/amount/payee/category filters.

• For spending analysis, prefer spending_by_category or spending_over_time over raw queries — they handle the category joins and date bucketing correctly.

• Use search_payees to find the exact payee name before filtering transactions (payee names in Quicken are often different from what users expect).

• Use list_portfolio for investment holdings (uses stored Quicken quotes for prices).

• Use raw_query only when the other tools can't answer the question. The database uses Core Data schema — tables are prefixed with Z and columns with Z.

Important conventions

• All dates are ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD). The server handles Core Data epoch conversion.

• Amounts are signed: negative = expense/debit, positive = income/credit.

• Account types are case-insensitive. Common types: checking, creditcard, savings, mortgage, retirementira, asset, liability, loan.

• spending_by_category and spending_over_time default to checking + creditcard accounts only. Include other types explicitly if the user asks about all spending.

• Those spending tools include negative splits only, exclude transfers and report-excluded transactions, and preserve uncategorized spending as (Uncategorized). State that scope when reporting results.

• query_transactions returns one row per split entry — a single transaction may produce multiple rows if split across categories.

Prerequisites

• Quicken For Mac should be open. Depending on the install, Quicken may swap the database for an encrypted stub when the app is closed; other installs leave the file readable. The ZACCOUNT table check is the test.

• If a tool returns 'no such table' and Quicken is not running, offer to launch it for the user with: open -a 'Quicken'

• After launching Quicken, wait a few seconds for it to open the database, then retry the tool call.

Database auto-detection

• If QUICKEN_DB_PATH is not set, the server auto-detects only when exactly one .quicken bundle exists across ~/Documents, ~/Library/Application Support/Quicken*/Documents (the retail default) and the Mac App Store container.

• If the user has multiple Quicken files, the server refuses to guess and reports how many it found in each location. Instruct them to set QUICKEN_DB_PATH explicitly: claude mcp add quicken -e QUICKEN_DB_PATH=/path/to/YourFile.quicken/data -- npx -y quicken-mac-mcp

Features and capabilities supported by this server

Functions exposed to the LLM to take actions

Interactive templates invoked by user choice

Contextual data attached and managed by the client