mcp-ynab

MCP YNAB Server 💰

Welcome to the MCP server for YNAB (TypeScript version)! 🎉 This project allows you to connect Cursor (or another MCP client) to your You Need A Budget (YNAB) account to interact with your financial data directly from your editor.

1. What is this? 🤔 (Purpose)

This is an implementation of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in TypeScript that acts as a bridge to the official YNAB API. The goal is to provide standardized tools for reading and writing YNAB data from MCP-compatible environments, allowing AI assistants like Cursor's to help you with your finances.

2. Available Tools 🛠️

This server provides the following tools, each with its own detailed documentation:

• : Lists your available budgets.
• : Lists accounts within a specified budget.
• : Fetches the current balance for a specific account.
• : Lists categories within a specified budget.
• : Gets detailed information about a specific category for a given month.
• : Provides a budget summary (income, budgeted, activity) for a specific month.
• : Lists transactions for a budget, with filtering options (by account, category, date, etc.).
• : Creates a new transaction or split transaction within a budget.

See each tool's README.md for detailed information on arguments, output, and usage context.

3. Setup 🚀

1. Clone the Repository:

   # git clone https://github.com/Bulletninja/mcp-ynab # If you haven't already
   cd mcp-ynab 
   

2. Install Dependencies:

   npm install
   

3. Configure Your YNAB API Token: You need a Personal Access Token from YNAB. The recommended and tested way for Cursor integration is:

   • Edit your global Cursor configuration file ~/.cursor/mcp.json.
   • Add or modify the entry for mcp-ynab, ensuring the command, args, cwd, and env are correct:

     {
       "mcpServers": {
         // ... other servers ...
         "mcp-ynab": {
           "command": "node",
           // 👇 Path to the compiled script
           "args": ["<path-to-your-project>/mcp-ynab/dist/server.js"], 
           "cwd": "<path-to-your-project>/mcp-ynab", // Path to this project
           "enabled": true,
           "env": {
             // 👇 Your YNAB token here, with the correct name!
             "YNAB_API_TOKEN": "YOUR_YNAB_TOKEN_HERE" 
           }
         }
         // ... other servers ...
       }
     }
     

   • Alternative (requires code modification): You could use a .env file in the project root, but you would need to uncomment the dotenv logic in src/server.ts and ensure it doesn't interfere with server mode.

4. Compile the Code:

   npm run build
   

4. Usage with Cursor 💡

1. Ensure the configuration in ~/.cursor/mcp.json is correct and "enabled": true.
2. Restart Cursor to load the updated configuration and launch the server.
3. Done! In Cursor's MCP settings, you should see mcp-ynab with a green dot and the list of available tools.
4. You can now ask the AI assistant to use the tools:
   • "List my YNAB budgets"
   • "Use mcp_ynab_list_accounts with budget_id 'last-used'"
   • "What's the balance of my account X (ID: YYY) in budget Z?" (Might use mcp_ynab_get_account_balance)

5. Development 🧑‍💻

• Run server in development mode (with hot-reload): npm run dev
• Run tests: npm test
• Compile for production/MCP: npm run build
• CLI Mode (Commented Out): The logic to run commands like node dist/server.js list-budgets is commented out in src/server.ts because it interfered with Cursor's MCP server mode. You can uncomment it for local testing if needed, but remember to comment it back out and recompile for Cursor integration.

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