BalanceMCP: What It Is, Cost and How It Works

What is BalanceMCP?

BalanceMCP describes itself as "a real double-entry ledger your AI can use." Its terms of service put it more formally: "a double-entry bookkeeping ledger designed to be operated through an AI assistant over MCP, alongside a web view of the same books."

The idea is a split of jobs. Your AI assistant does the reading and judging: it pulls rows out of a bank statement and decides that, say, a hardware-store charge on a contractor's books is job materials rather than office supplies. BalanceMCP does the recording: it turns each decision into a balanced journal entry, keeps a history that cannot be rewritten, and computes reports from those entries.

There is no separate app to learn for day-to-day work. You ask questions in plain English inside the assistant you already use ("How much did I spend on software last month?") and the assistant calls BalanceMCP's tools to get the answer from your actual books. The company says it serves both business and personal books, with no limit on how many sets you keep.

Its terms call it "bookkeeping infrastructure, not tax or accounting advice."

Who owns or runs BalanceMCP?

The site does not name an owner, founder, team or company address on any page we checked. The footer reads "© 2026 BalanceMCP." No phone number or support email is published on the pages we read. Account access is by signing in with a Google account.

Two dates give a sense of how new it is. The privacy policy, terms of service, security page, AI usage policy and editorial standards are all marked "Last updated 2026-07-26," and the public .com domain registry (RDAP) shows balancemcp.com was registered on 25 July 2026. Most product pages say their claims were "last checked against the product on 2026-08-09."

The terms describe it as "an early-stage product" whose features and tool set "may grow or be adjusted as the product matures."

Is BalanceMCP legit? What you can check

We don't rate our clients, but here is what can be checked from public information:

• It is a working, public website with detailed documentation: tool pages, guides, setup pages and a glossary.
• The pricing is stated plainly. The terms say "nothing on this product currently charges you money." The paid tier is labeled as planned, not available.
• The limits are published on its pricing, terms, privacy and security pages.
• The legal pages are drafts. The privacy policy and terms both say they are "a draft written to be honest and useful, not a reviewed legal document. No lawyer has read it." The editorial standards page adds that no accountant, lawyer or outside reviewer has signed off on the site's content.
• No certifications are claimed. The security page says: "We have not obtained SOC 2 or any other certification. We have not had a third-party penetration test performed."
• No invented social proof. The editorial standards page says the site does not publish user counts, testimonials, review scores or "trusted by" claims, and the chat example on the homepage is labeled "Illustration of a real session, not a recording of a customer."

The site also states: "BalanceMCP is not a bank and does not hold funds." It stores bookkeeping records; it does not move money.

How does BalanceMCP work?

BalanceMCP is a remote MCP server. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets an AI model call outside tools. Your assistant connects to one web address and authenticates with an API key you create in your BalanceMCP account. The homepage says "Nothing is installed and nothing runs on your machine."

The company's own outline of the flow:

1. You give your assistant a bank statement: a PDF, a CSV, or pasted text. It extracts the rows.
2. It calls the import tool with those rows plus the statement's opening and closing balance. BalanceMCP checks that the opening balance plus the rows equals the closing balance.
3. The assistant reads each transaction and proposes an account for it.
4. It calls the categorize tool. Each transaction becomes a balanced journal entry. Rows it cannot post come back as "skipped, with a reason" instead of failing the batch.
5. You reconcile against a real statement balance, lock the period, and ask for reports. The site says reports are "computed live from the ledger, not summarized from a guess."

Behind this, the company says the main rules are database constraints in Postgres rather than instructions to the model: an unbalanced entry is refused, posted entries cannot be edited or deleted, a locked period cannot be posted into, and every tool call is logged. Those are covered in more detail below.

Per the setup pages, authentication is by bearer-token API key only (not OAuth).

Which AI assistants work with it?

The homepage says: "If your assistant supports MCP connectors, it supports BalanceMCP." The site has setup pages for eight clients:

Two practical notes from the setup pages. First, the site says custom connectors in Claude "have generally required a paid plan," and connector access in ChatGPT "has generally required a paid ChatGPT plan," so the assistant itself may cost money even though BalanceMCP does not. Second, ChatGPT may ask you to confirm each write action, which the site calls "expected, not a bug."

The 19 tools, one by one

BalanceMCP exposes 19 tools. According to the tools page, 8 change your books and 11 only read. The company says every tool page is generated from the same code as the tool itself, and a test fails the build if a page and a tool disagree.

Two caveats from the tool pages: find_anomalies reports "an observation, not a verdict," and its price-increase check is strict enough that "an empty result is not a clean bill of health." export_book always exports the whole book; there is no date-range export through that tool.

How much does BalanceMCP cost?

As of 22 October 2026, the company says everything is free. The pricing on the homepage:

The free-software page explains why it is free: "Not because of a generous free tier. Everything is free because the paid tier has not been built yet." It adds that when Plus ships, "what is free now stays free," and then qualifies that as "a commitment about product direction, not a contract." The terms say nothing in the current plan charges money, and that the terms will be updated with real billing terms before any paid plan launches.

The site lists no limit on books, transactions or accounts. The 10-account figure applies only to connected bank accounts on the planned Plus tier.

One cost to plan for: the AI assistant you connect may need its own paid plan for custom connectors, as noted in the setup pages. BalanceMCP does not set that price.

What BalanceMCP does not do

The company publishes what it calls "the honest list." According to its pricing and AI bookkeeping pages, BalanceMCP currently has:

• No automatic bank feeds. Every statement is imported by hand. The homepage says "Automatic bank connections are still being built."
• No invoicing. You cannot bill a customer from it.
• No payroll, no inventory and no accounts-payable workflow.
• No tax filing and no tax advice.
• No multi-client or accounting-firm features.
• No import from another accounting product. Transactions come from bank statements, so moving over means starting from an opening balance on a chosen date rather than carrying history across.
• No point-and-click interface for the bookkeeping itself. Work happens through an AI assistant.
• No read-only API keys.
• No self-serve account deletion. Removal has to be requested and handled manually.
• No people doing the work. The site says "This is software your assistant drives, not a service."

It also lists a known limit on transfers: if you categorize both sides of a movement between two of your own accounts, the movement is recorded twice, and "every balance check still passes." The site says reconciling against a real statement balance is what catches it.

From bank statement to books, step by step

The site's main workflow page walks through one month of a checking account. Here is the sequence it describes.

Before you start, you need a book (ask the assistant to create a business or personal one), the statement itself as a PDF, CSV or text, and the statement's opening and closing balance. For your first month, the site says to "pick a date, take the bank balance on that date as your opening balance, and start there."

1. Import the whole statement in one call. Give the assistant the statement and both balances. The engine checks that the opening balance plus the rows equals the closing balance. The site stresses doing it in one call: splitting a statement "makes repeated identical charges look like duplicates, and they get skipped."
2. Look at what came in. Ask for the uncategorized transactions, oldest first, and check the dates and signs. Money out is negative and money in is positive. On a credit card, purchases are negative and payments to the card are positive, so the card balance reads as a negative number.
3. Categorize in batches, with a preview. The assistant proposes an account for each transaction. Because the confirm flag defaults to false, the first call shows the exact journal lines before anything is written.
4. Handle what it could not place. Cash withdrawals, payments to people and vaguely named merchants come back as skipped with a reason.
5. Save rules for repeat charges. The workflow suggests a rule for anything you will see again. (Note the AI usage policy's caveat above: it says saved rules are currently stored but not read back.)

If an import does not add up, the tool still imports it but flags it with the discrepancy amount. The site says re-importing the same statement is safe and "inserts nothing that is already there."

Reconciling, closing a month and running reports

The second workflow covers turning categorized transactions into a profit and loss statement. The order the site recommends:

1. Reconcile. Give the account, a date and the bank's ending balance (negative for a credit card). The tool returns the difference; zero is what you want.
2. Run a trial balance to confirm debits equal credits and spot any surprising balance.
3. Run the profit and loss statement for the date range.
4. Lock the period once it is right.

The P&L workflow warns that a report built only from bank statements misses anything that never touched an imported account, and that loan principal, owner draws and transfers are not expenses or income.

On locking, the lock_period page is firm: a lock "only moves in one direction: forward." There is no unlock. To fix something in a locked month, the site says to reverse the original entry and post a manual journal entry dated after the lock.

What stops an AI from breaking the books?

This is the core of how BalanceMCP presents itself. The homepage says: "The guardrails are in the database, not in the prompt." The company lists these rules as database-level constraints that apply to every caller, including the company itself:

• Balanced or rejected. An entry whose debits and credits disagree, or that has fewer than two lines, is refused at insert time by a Postgres trigger.
• Append-only history. Journal entries and journal lines reject updates, deletes and bulk truncation. Corrections happen by reversal.
• Closed periods stay closed. Nothing can post into a locked period, and the lock can only move forward.
• Reversals have limits. A reversal must be in the same book as the entry it reverses, and a reversal cannot itself be reversed.
• Everything is logged. Every tool call, successful or not, writes a row to an append-only audit log.
• Your books are only yours. Row-level security is enforced on every table holding user data, and the server refuses to run on a database connection that could bypass it.

Previews. Seven of the eight writing tools take a confirm flag that defaults to false, so the obvious first call returns a preview of the exact journal lines. Creating a book is the exception, since there is nothing to preview. The permissions page is specific that this is a default, not an approval step: "An assistant that calls a tool with confirm set to true writes immediately. The preview is a default, not a gate." The AI usage policy adds one more gap: a manual journal entry preview checks that the lines balance but not that every account exists and is active, so "a preview can look clean and the confirm can still fail."

What these rules do not cover. The company says constraints "check structure, not meaning." An entry can be valid and still describe the wrong thing, and "None of this makes an agent accurate. It makes an inaccurate agent survivable." The categorization itself is a judgment by whichever AI model you connect.

What happens when the AI gets something wrong?

You reverse the entry. The site says the reversal "releases the transaction so it can be categorized again, and both the original mistake and its correction stay on the record." Nothing is edited away.

The site's guide to reversing entries adds a few rules:

• A reversal cannot itself be reversed. If the first reversal was the wrong move, the fix is to categorize the freed transaction the way you meant it.
• If the original entry falls in a locked month, the reversal has to be dated in the period that is currently open, so the locked month stays as it was reported.
• BalanceMCP fills in a reversal memo automatically ("Reversal of:" plus the original memo), and you can write your own instead. The guide suggests doing that when the reason matters to a future reader, such as your accountant.
• For a manual entry with no bank transaction behind it, you reverse the original and then post a new, correct entry.

The company suggests skimming recent categorizations about once a week, reconciling every account monthly, and locking a month once you are satisfied.

The AI bookkeeping page also lists decisions it says still need a person: whether a laptop is an expense or an asset, whether a payment to yourself is an owner draw or wages, and whether a meal is deductible ("a tax question, and this is not a tax product").

Security, privacy and your data

The security and privacy pages are written as plain statements of current practice. Key points:

The terms put responsibility for API keys on the user: "Keep API keys as carefully as you'd keep a password." The site's advice for narrower access is to not give an assistant a key at all, or to revoke it when a session ends.

The terms also say the product is provided "as-is, without warranty," with no uptime guarantee or service-level commitment, and suggest keeping your own exports "if the data matters to you."

The charts of accounts

When you create a book, BalanceMCP seeds it with a chart of accounts: one version for a business and one for a household. The site's chart-of-accounts section has a page for each of 61 accounts across both charts, grouped as follows:

Each account page explains what belongs there, what people commonly file there by mistake, and which report it appears on. You can add or archive accounts with the manage_accounts tool.

Free guides, prompts and the knowledge API

Much of the site is reference material that the company says is "useful whether or not you ever use BalanceMCP":

• 16 bookkeeping guides, written "for someone competent who is not an accountant," on topics such as double-entry bookkeeping, debits and credits, reading a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet, reconciling a bank account, closing the books, and correcting an AI's mistake with a reversing entry.
• A glossary of accounting and MCP terms.
• 65 prompts in 6 collections (everyday bookkeeping, importing and categorizing a statement, month-end close, reading reports, finding problems, and a first session with a new book), each noting which tools it uses.
• A knowledge API at /api/knowledge that serves the same definitions, guides, tools and accounts as JSON. The site says it holds "198 entities and 1522 relationships," needs no key or signup, contains no user data, and is licensed under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to BalanceMCP.

How it compares with other options

A general comparison by category, based on what BalanceMCP says it does and does not include. We don't name other companies.

The company's own summary of the difference: most accounting MCP servers wrap a product you already subscribe to, while with BalanceMCP "the ledger itself is what the assistant connects to, with no subscription underneath it." It adds: "Both are legitimate; they solve different problems." On its pricing page it also says that if you want free software with a conventional interface, "other free options will suit you better."

Who it suits, and who should look elsewhere

Questions to ask before you start

• Does my AI assistant, on my current plan, support custom remote MCP connectors with a bearer token?
• What date will I start my books from, and do I have the bank balance for that date?
• Do I have statements for every account that business money moves through, including any personal card used for business?
• Do any of my accounts transfer money to each other? (Categorize only one side.)
• How will I store the API key, and will I revoke it between sessions, given that keys cannot be limited to read-only?
• Will my accountant or tax preparer accept a CSV export of transactions, journal and chart of accounts?
• If I need specific privacy or security assurances for my business, have I asked the company first, as its privacy page suggests?

How to get started

1. Go to balancemcp.com and choose "Start free." Sign-in is through a Google account; no card is asked for.
2. Create an API key in your account. It is shown once, so save it somewhere safe.
3. Open the setup page for your assistant (Claude, Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, Zed or any MCP client) and add BalanceMCP as a connector with the server URL and your key.
4. In a new chat, say "List my books" to confirm the connection.
5. Ask the assistant to create a business or personal book, which seeds a chart of accounts.
6. Pick a start date, then give the assistant your first statement with its opening and closing balance, and follow the import, preview and categorize steps above.
7. Reconcile, run your first reports, and lock the month when it is right.

Visit BalanceMCP

Terms you'll see on the site

• MCP (Model Context Protocol): an open standard that lets an AI model call outside tools. BalanceMCP is a remote MCP server.
• Double-entry bookkeeping: every transaction is recorded with two sides that must agree, debits and credits.
• Chart of accounts: the list of numbered accounts transactions are sorted into.
• Reversing entry: a new entry that undoes an earlier one, leaving both on the record.
• Reconciliation: checking that the ledger's balance for an account matches the bank statement.
• Period lock: a date on or before which nothing can be posted; in BalanceMCP it only moves forward.
• Confirm flag / dry run: the setting on writing tools that, left false, returns a preview instead of writing.
• Audit log: the append-only record of every tool call made against your books.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

All pages checked on 22 October 2026.

1. BalanceMCP homepage (product and pricing)
2. Free accounting software your AI can use
3. AI bookkeeping on a ledger that checks the work
4. Accounting infrastructure for AI agents
5. What an accounting MCP server actually is
6. Architecture
7. The security model
8. What an AI agent is allowed to do to your books
9. How an AI bookkeeping audit trail is produced
10. Workflows
11. Turn a bank statement into categorized books
12. Create a profit and loss statement from bank statements
13. All 19 tools
14. import_statement
15. reconcile_account
16. lock_period
17. export_book
18. find_anomalies
19. Connect your AI
20. Connect BalanceMCP to Claude (claude.ai)
21. Connect BalanceMCP to ChatGPT
22. Connect BalanceMCP to any MCP client
23. Chart of accounts
24. Bookkeeping guides
25. How to let an AI do your bookkeeping without letting it corrupt your books
26. Why an AI cannot edit your ledger
27. Correcting an AI's mistake with a reversing entry
28. Prompts for AI bookkeeping
29. The accounting knowledge API
30. Alternatives
31. Terms of Service
32. Privacy Policy
33. Security
34. AI Usage Policy
35. Editorial Standards
36. Public .com registry (RDAP) record for balancemcp.com