Till: a voice CFO for small businesses

Ask about your money out loud. Till answers in one or two spoken sentences and shows a card.

"Morning. Anything I should worry about?" "Mostly fine: you have 16.7 thousand in the bank, and the tightest point, November 3, still sits at 11.2 thousand. Four charges need a look, led by a duplicate $913 flour payment. Want me to go through them?"

Till is a self-hosted MCP server (spec 2025-11-25, Streamable HTTP) built for the Alexa+ track. It gives a voice assistant ten tools for the money questions a small business owner asks every week. It also has a web demo client: a real MCP client with a microphone, speech output, and an MCP Apps card host.

Small businesses don't have a CFO. They have a bank app, a spreadsheet, and a 10 pm worry about payroll. The questions are simple: how much do I have, will I be short, did I get charged twice, can I afford to hire? But the answers take an hour of reconciling. Till answers them in seconds, by voice. It remembers what you already decided, so the next morning's brief only tells you what's new.

What it does

Every number comes from deterministic Python (till/engine.py, stdlib only), never from a language model. The model's job is to pick tools, chain them, and talk. Tool results lead with a sentence written for the ear ("16.7 thousand dollars", not "$16,717.31"), so any voice assistant can read them as-is.

Remembers across sessions. Cash alerts, reviewed charges, and the last brief live in SQLite. Dispute a charge today and tomorrow's brief says "3 charges need a look", not 4.

Cards via MCP Apps. Every tool is bound to ui://till/card.html (text/html;profile=mcp-app) through the io.modelcontextprotocol/ui extension. Hosts that support MCP Apps render a card with the big number, a forecast line with your alert threshold, and line items. Hosts that don't still get the full text.

Related MCP server: budget-mcp

Run it (2 minutes)

git clone <this repo> till && cd till
python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
.venv/bin/python -m till.server
# MCP endpoint  http://127.0.0.1:8765/mcp
# Demo page     http://127.0.0.1:8765/      (use Chrome for the microphone)

Optional: copy env.example to .env and add an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY. With a key, Claude chooses and chains the tools ("dispute the flour charge, and can I afford a $2,400 mixer next week?" becomes review_charge then can_i_afford). Without one, the page uses a built-in keyword router. No key is needed to judge the MCP server.

Connect it to an assistant

Any MCP client that speaks Streamable HTTP can use Till. For example, in Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http till http://127.0.0.1:8765/mcp

Tests

.venv/bin/python tests/test_engine.py                                  # analysis engine
.venv/bin/python tests/test_protocol.py http://127.0.0.1:8765/mcp      # raw JSON-RPC over Streamable HTTP

test_protocol.py speaks the wire protocol directly, the same way the demo page does. It checks that initialize negotiates 2025-11-25, lists the tools, reads the ui:// resource, and calls every tool, including memory across calls.

How it's built

voice (Web Speech API) ──> demo page = MCP client ──Streamable HTTP──> Till MCP server (mcp 2.3.0)
                           │  agent loop: Claude picks tools                ├─ engine.py   deterministic cash math
                           │  (via /agent/llm; key stays on server)         ├─ memory.py   SQLite: alerts, reviews, briefs
                           └─ MCP Apps host: sandboxed iframe <── ui://till/card.html

• till/server.py: the ten tools, MCP Apps binding, and demo routes.

• till/engine.py: snapshot, recurring-bill detection, 13-week forecast, anomaly rules, affordability, and month-over-month change.

• till/memory.py: what Till remembers per business.

• till/demo_data.py: generates the fictional Sunrise Bakery books (seeded). Four problems are planted on purpose: a duplicate supplier payment, a software price jump, a utility spike, and a large first-time vendor.

• web/index.html: the voice demo client and MCP Apps host. web/card.html is the MCP App view.

All data in this repo is synthetic. Till is a tool for owners, not a licensed advisor, and it does not give tax or investment advice.

License

MIT