MoneyWorks

MoneyWorks Gold 9.2.5 and later includes a Model Context Protocol server that allows a local AI client to query and interact with MoneyWorks on your computer.

Requirements

• MoneyWorks Gold 9.2.5 or later

and any desktop AI client app that supports local STDIO MCP servers

• Anthropic Claude — Claude Desktop download page
• OpenAI Codex — Codex download page

In MoneyWorks Gold:

1. MoneyWorks Preferences → AI → Configuration...
2. Click the checkbox to enable the MCP server (you do not need logging)
3. Click Install into Claude and/or Install into Codex
4. Claude should offer to install MoneyWorks MCP. It will show a scary warning, however the MoneyWorks MCP will not in any way give Claude access to everything on your computer. The Codex install has no AI; you will just get a confirmation of the installation. You should restart Codex for it to load the server.

That's it. Now you can ask your AI to run reports and data analysis, open recent MoneyWorks files, and even find records and display them in MoneyWorks.

Examples to try:

• Please open the MoneyWorks sample file
• How is the balance sheet looking?
• Analyse the last 3 months sales breaking down by customer
• Open the MyCompanyLimited file from my recents in a new instance of MoneyWorks
• Set the colour of all of the sales invoices in Acme Widgets with a value over $1000 to red
• Find and display in MoneyWorks all of the invoices for customer SPRING

Any actions will be subject to whatever privileges you have in the file you are logged into.

Important note

After updating MoneyWorks, AI clients will lose their connection to the MCP server (since it has been replaced with a new one). You should quit and restart any AI client you are using to encourage it to reconnect.

Other AI clients

These clients do not currently support local MCP servers:

• ChatGPT — has a desktop app, but does not support local MCP; use OpenAI Codex
• Manus — has a desktop app, purports to support local MCP servers, but does not work
• Deepseek — does not have a desktop app

These clients do currently support local MCP servers, but require some technical expertise to use:

• gemini-cli
• Ollama with mcphost

If you want to manually install into one of these, you can manually configure in the tool's config json file (ask the AI how to do that). The config to add looks like this:

Mac

  "mcpServers": {
    "moneyworks": {
      "command": "/Applications/MoneyWorks Gold.app/Contents/Helpers/moneyworks", 
      "args": [
  	"-Z",
  	"Preload_MCP.mwpkg",
  	"-qj",
  	"MCP:StdioProcessCmd"
      ]
    }
  }

Windows

  "mcpServers": {
    "moneyworks": {
      "command": "C:\\Program Files\\MoneyWorks Gold\\moneyworks.exe", 
      "args": [
  	"-Z",
  	"Preload_MCP.mwpkg",
  	"-qj",
  	"MCP:StdioProcessCmd"
      ]
    }
  }

Open Source

The MCP server is a MWScript package that is open source. The script package is preloaded from the Std Plugins Scripts when you start MoneyWorks. Each MoneyWorks Gold instance starts a local HTTP server to process JSON-RPC commands. Your AI client software runs a copy of the same MWScript to process JSON-RPC commands via a STDIO interface. The requests are passed to a MoneyWorks Gold instance over HTTP for processing.

If you want to run a completely customised version of the MoneyWorks MCP server (to change the main system context prompt or implement your own MCP tools), you can copy the Preload_MCP.mwpkg from the std plugins Scripts folder. You will need to manually install your custom MCP into your AI client (e.g. ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json) using a configuration that will load your modified script instead of the standard one. Keep the name of the package the same — when MoneyWorks Gold opens a package it will unload the existing package of the same name, which will prevent them from colliding. Important: You will need to open and activate the package in MoneyWorks Gold to run the app side of your modified MCP server (either open it in a script window, or you can load it using LoadScriptFile(yourpackagepath, NULL, "app")

e.g. assuming your custom MCP server is in the Scripts folder in your home folder:

  "mcpServers": {
    "moneyworks": {
      "command": "/Applications/MoneyWorks Gold.app/Contents/Helpers/moneyworks", 
      "args": [
  	"-qj",
  	"MCP:StdioProcessCmd",
        "/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Scripts/Preload_MCP.mwpkg"
      ]
    }
  }

-q means quiet (don't report events on stdout); -j MCP:StdioProcessCmd means use the StdioProcessCmd handler as the interactive shell handler instead of the usual MoneyWorks CLI interactive shell. The mwpkg parameter instructs the CLI to load that package.

Running local/private AI models

If you have sufficient RAM, GPU, and distrust of cloud AI, you can also use local AI, via an app such as Ollama.

E.g. If you are running Ollama with Gemma4, you can connect it to MoneyWorks using mcphost:

mcphost -m ollama:gemma4 --config ~/.mcphost.json

Where .mcphost.json is as above.