quickbooks-mcp-server

A single-file MCP server that gives Claude full read/write access to QuickBooks Online, plus reconciliation tools that find the things a human scrolling a register won't.

$ qbo_health_check

  transport ...... stdio (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, claude.ai)
  api ............ QuickBooks Online v3
  tools .......... 22
  version ........ 2.0.0
  deploy ......... local, or HTTP on a Raspberry Pi behind Tailscale

Why this exists

Bookkeeping questions are almost never one query. "Did we double-pay that vendor?" means listing purchases, grouping by amount and date proximity, checking against the bank feed, and then looking at whether the duplicate was later voided. That's a loop, and loops are what an agent is for.

The design bet: give the model a small set of composable tools and let it do the reasoning, rather than shipping one giant reconcile() that encodes my judgment about what a discrepancy means.

That bet is why v2.0.0 has 22 tools, down from 45 in v1.0.0. The first version had a tool for every question I'd ever asked. It turned out most of those were the model composing two primitives — so the primitives stayed and the compounds were deleted. See CHANGELOG.md for the migration map.

Related MCP server: penni-mcp

Tools

$ qbo --list-tools

  read
    qbo_company_info            qbo_get_preferences         qbo_health_check
    qbo_list_accounts           qbo_list_customers          qbo_get_customer
    qbo_list_bills              qbo_list_deposits           qbo_get_entity
    qbo_get_invoice             qbo_get_transaction         qbo_get_transfer
    qbo_get_journal_entry       qbo_get_report              qbo_account_register

  write
    qbo_create_invoice          qbo_create_payment          qbo_create_purchase
    qbo_delete_journal_entry    qbo_delete_purchase         qbo_delete_transfer
    qbo_batch_delete

  reconciliation
    qbo_detect_bank_feed_gaps       find dates where the feed silently stopped
    qbo_find_duplicate_transactions near-match scan across amount + date window
    qbo_duplicate_scan_by_account   the same, scoped to one account
    qbo_analyze_reconciliation      month-end variance with the arithmetic shown

The reconciliation tools are the ones worth stealing. Bank feed gaps are the failure mode nobody catches — the feed stops for four days, transactions never arrive, and the books balance perfectly against an incomplete picture. Nothing errors. You find it in March when the year-end doesn't tie.

Install

$ git clone https://github.com/rjpaganini/quickbooks-mcp-server
$ cd quickbooks-mcp-server
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ cp .env.example .env        # then fill in your QBO app credentials

Register an app at developer.intuit.com to get a client ID and secret. You will need:

  QB_REALM_ID          your company id
  QB_CLIENT_ID         from the Intuit developer app
  QB_CLIENT_SECRET     from the Intuit developer app
  QB_REFRESH_TOKEN     from the OAuth playground
  QB_ACCESS_TOKEN      refreshed automatically once seeded
  QB_SANDBOX           true while testing — set false deliberately

Then point your MCP client at it:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "quickbooks": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["/absolute/path/to/server.py"]
    }
  }
}

Safety

This server can delete things in live accounting data. That is not a hypothetical — qbo_batch_delete exists because cleaning up a bad import by hand is miserable.

Read SECURITY.md before pointing it at a real company file. The short version: start in sandbox, keep QB_SANDBOX=true until you've watched it work, and treat the write and delete tools as you'd treat rm with a wildcard.

$ pytest                       # unit tests, no network
$ pytest -m live               # smoke tests against a live sandbox company

Notes

• Single file on purpose. server.py is large, but the whole thing is greppable and there's no import graph to hold in your head.

• Also runs as an HTTP service on a Raspberry Pi via deploy-to-pi.sh, which is how I reach it from claude.ai on a phone over Tailscale.

• No credentials, company data, or financial records are in this repository.

License

MIT.