QuickBooks MCP server — local, read-only

Ask Claude Desktop questions about a QuickBooks Online company in plain English and get answers from the live books.

RESPONSES WILL BE DIFFERENT THAN THOSE WRITTEN HERE: EXAMPLE FIGURES ARE DERIVED FROM YOUR OWN SANDBOX

You: Who owes us money and how overdue is it?

Claude: Sandbox Company US 4768 has $5,281.52 outstanding across 20 open invoices. Most of it isn't late yet — $3,756.02 is still current. Of the $1,525.50 that is overdue, the worst is Red Rock Diner at $156.00, 65 days past due (invoice 1024, due 3 June). Kookies by Kathy ($75.00) and Bill's Windsurf Shop ($85.00) are both around 45 days out.

Everything runs on your own machine. Nothing is hosted or deployed, and no company data leaves your computer except to Claude, in the answer.

What you can ask

The aging tools compute days overdue and bucket everything (current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90, 90+) rather than making Claude do date arithmetic on raw invoices.

Related MCP server: qbo-mcp

What "read-only" means here

The server cannot write to QuickBooks. Not "writes are switched off" — there is no code that could write:

• client.py is the only module that can reach the QuickBooks API. It exposes a single request method, the HTTP verb is a hardcoded literal "GET", and every path is checked against an allowlist of exactly two prefixes (/query and /reports/). QuickBooks writes are POSTs to /v3/company/{realm}/{entity}, which is neither.

• tests/test_readonly.py parses the source and fails the build if a non-GET verb appears in that module, if any other module grows its own HTTP client, or if the path allowlist changes.

The honest caveat: Intuit publishes no read-only scope for accounting data. The OAuth token this server holds is capable of writing — the restriction lives in this code, not in the token. If you don't trust the code, don't trust the claim; read client.py (about 200 lines) and the test that guards it.

One POST does exist, in auth.py: the OAuth token exchange. It is pinned to Intuit's token endpoint, which is a different host from the accounting API, and the test asserts that too.

Want to see for yourself? Every request is logged. Open the MCP log (%APPDATA%\Claude\logs\mcp-server-quickbooks.log) and you'll see only GET lines.

Install

Takes about 10 minutes, most of it on Intuit's website.

1. Install uv

uv runs the server and handles Python and dependencies for you.

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"

Close and reopen your terminal afterwards. Check it worked:

uv --version

(macOS or Linux: curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh)

2. Get this code

git clone https://github.com/CharlesPiccioneBTP/Local-MCP-server-for-QuickBooks-Sandbox.git

Remember where you put it — you'll need the full path in step 5.

3. Create an Intuit app

Free, no card required.

1. Sign up at developer.intuit.com. A sandbox company with realistic sample data is created for you automatically.

2. My Hub → Workspaces → + → Get Started → fill in the basic details.

3. + to add an app → choose QuickBooks Online (Accounting) → name it anything (e.g. "Claude read-only").

4. Go to Settings → Redirect URIs → Development tab → Add URI and paste this exactly:

   http://localhost:8000/callback

   This is the step people get wrong. It must be http (not https), with no trailing slash. If it doesn't match character-for-character, Intuit refuses the sign-in and setup fails.

5. Open Keys & credentials and keep the tab open. You need the Client ID and Client Secret from the Development section. (Sandbox and production have different keys — use Development.)

4. Connect your company

In a terminal, from the folder you cloned into:

uv run qbo-mcp-setup

It asks for the environment (press Enter for sandbox), then your Client ID and Client Secret. Your browser opens; sign in and choose the sandbox company. The secret isn't shown as you type and isn't saved to your shell history.

You should see:

Saved credentials to C:\Users\you\AppData\Local\qbo-mcp\credentials.json
Verifying the connection...
Success - connected to "Sandbox Company US 4768".

5. Tell Claude Desktop about it

Open Claude Desktop → Settings → Developer → Edit Config. That opens claude_desktop_config.json. Add the quickbooks block inside mcpServers:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "quickbooks": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": [
        "--directory",
        "C:\\Users\\you\\path\\to\\Local-MCP-server-for-QuickBooks-Sandbox",
        "run",
        "qbo-mcp"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Two things to get right:

• Replace the path with your folder from step 2. On Windows use double backslashes (\\) as shown.

• If Claude Desktop reports it can't find uv, replace "uv" with its full path. Find it by running where uv (Windows) or which uv (Mac/Linux) — it's usually C:\Users\you\.local\bin\uv.exe.

No credentials go in this file — that's deliberate. This file gets shared and screenshotted when people ask for help. Your secrets live in the separate credentials file from step 4.

6. Restart Claude Desktop

Fully quit and reopen it — closing the window isn't enough. Then ask:

Who owes us money and how overdue is it?

Checking it works

uv run qbo-mcp-doctor

This runs without Claude and checks the whole chain:

[ ok ] Credentials loaded from C:\Users\you\AppData\Local\qbo-mcp\credentials.json
       environment=sandbox  realm=93414576XXXXXXXX
[ ok ] Token refresh succeeded
[ ok ] Refresh token unchanged this time (rotation is periodic); file is current
[ ok ] Refresh token expires in 101 days
[ ok ] Connected to "Sandbox Company US 4768"
[ ok ] Receivables aging: 20 open invoice(s), total outstanding 5281.52
         current      3,756.02
         1-30         1,128.50
         31-60          241.00
         61-90          156.00
         90+              0.00

Run this first whenever something seems wrong — it separates "the server is broken" from "Claude Desktop isn't talking to it".

Troubleshooting

"No credentials found" — Setup hasn't been run, or it ran as a different Windows user. Run uv run qbo-mcp-setup.

The QuickBooks tools don't appear in Claude Desktop — Almost always the config file. Check the path uses double backslashes, then confirm the file is valid JSON (a stray comma breaks it silently). Then fully quit and reopen the app. If it still fails, check %APPDATA%\Claude\logs\mcp-server-quickbooks.log.

"Port 8000 is already in use" during setup — Something else is using that port. Stop it and retry. The port must match the redirect URI registered with Intuit, so changing it means changing both.

Setup opens the browser but fails after sign-in — The redirect URI doesn't match. It must be exactly http://localhost:8000/callback in Settings → Redirect URIs → Development.

"Intuit rejected the client credentials (401)" — Wrong keys, or production keys used for a sandbox company. Copy them again from the Development section and re-run setup.

It worked for weeks, now it says "invalid_grant" — The connection needs re-authorising. This happens if the token expires (see below), if it was revoked in QuickBooks, or if two copies of the server fought over a refresh. Fix: uv run qbo-mcp-setup.

Keeping it working

Access tokens last 1 hour and the server refreshes them automatically. The refresh token rotates roughly daily, and Intuit invalidates the old one immediately, so the new value is written to disk atomically, under a cross-process lock, before it's used. If two copies of the server start at once, the second adopts the first's tokens instead of refreshing again — which would otherwise disconnect both.

The refresh token itself is currently good for ~101 days from setup, and that window resets every time it's used. So the server keeps working indefinitely as long as it's used occasionally. If it goes unused for that long, re-run uv run qbo-mcp-setup. The doctor warns you when fewer than 30 days remain.

Where things live

Credentials are stored outside this repository so they cannot be committed by accident. That's the actual protection — .gitignore is a backstop. Setup will refuse outright to write them anywhere inside a git repository. The file is locked to your user account (icacls on Windows, mode 600 elsewhere).

Using it with a real company

This is built and tested against a sandbox. It will work against a live QuickBooks company — answer production at the setup prompt and use your Production keys — but bear in mind:

• Production apps need to go through Intuit's app review before other people can connect to them. For your own company's books, that's not required.

• Everything the tools return is sent to Claude to answer your question. Consider whether that's appropriate for your real financial data.

• The read-only guarantee holds identically. It's the same code path.

For developers

uv run --group dev pytest       # 83 tests, no network or credentials needed

Notes on design decisions worth knowing before changing things:

• Tools raise plain exceptions, never MCPError. In this SDK a plain exception becomes a tool error whose message the model reads and can act on; MCPError becomes a protocol error the model never sees. Every failure here is one the user needs told about.

• AR aging is computed from Invoice rows, not Intuit's aging report. Invoice rows already embed CustomerRef.name, so no join is needed, and it keeps the bucket boundaries under our control. Their Reports API is used for the financial statements, where the aggregation genuinely has to come from QuickBooks.

• describe_schema is a tool, not an MCP resource, even though resources fit static reference data better. Claude Desktop requires resources to be attached by hand, so it would never be read — and run_query without it is guesswork.

• The QuickBooks query language is not SQL. No JOIN, GROUP BY, OR, HAVING, or !=. qbo_sql.py catches these and explains the workaround rather than passing them through to an opaque Intuit 400.

• minorversion is pinned (currently 75). Intuit changes response shapes between minor versions; an unattended server shouldn't have its output shift underneath it.