Connect QuickBooks Online.

The AI Finance Stack reads your books locally, under your own OAuth grant. Your credentials never leave your machine. Setup takes about 10 minutes the first time.

How this works. You install a small Python MCP server on your own machine (Mac, Linux, or Windows). It uses Intuit's OAuth flow to read from QuickBooks Online. Claude Desktop (or any MCP-compatible client) talks to the local server, which talks to QBO. No third-party servers are in the data path.

Setup — 5 steps

1Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/sanjay-raghavan/the-ai-finance-stack.git
cd the-ai-finance-stack/mcps/qbo

2Create a virtual environment and install

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

3Configure your Intuit credentials
Copy .env.example to .env, then fill in QBO_CLIENT_ID and QBO_CLIENT_SECRET from your Intuit Developer dashboard. Set QBO_ENVIRONMENT=production.

4Run the one-time OAuth flow

python -m qbo_mcp.server --setup

Your browser opens to Intuit. Sign in, authorize the app, you'll be redirected here.

5Wire into Claude Desktop
Edit ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json (macOS) and add a quickbooks entry under mcpServers pointing at your local Python venv and the qbo_mcp.server module. Full config example in the QBO MCP README.

What you get

12 read-only tools exposed to Claude — chart of accounts, recent transactions, journal entries, vendor / customer search, AP and AR aging, P&L, and account-level drill-downs.
Local-only architecture — refresh tokens stored at ~/.config/finance-stack/credentials/qbo.json with mode 0600 permissions. Never transmitted off your machine.
Token auto-refresh — access tokens refresh every 60 minutes automatically; refresh tokens rotate forward on each use (101-day lifetime if unused).

About the broader project

The QBO MCP is part of The AI Finance Stack — a free, open-source collection of 12 Finance AI agents and shared skills, designed around the propose → human approve → post architecture. The MCP gives the agents (and you, directly in Claude Desktop) read access to your books. Write capability is queued for v0.2 once the approval pipeline is wired end to end.

Browse the source on GitHub · Read the architecture · The companion lesson series on Substack