Connect an MCP client

How to connect a client

1. In your MCP client, add a remote server using the connection address your TallyFolio operator gives you. It ends in /api/mcp.
2. Start the client's sign-in. Your browser opens TallyFolio's approval screen. If you are signed out, TallyFolio asks you to sign in first and then brings you straight back to the approval screen.
3. Check the approval screen: the client's name, the address it returns to, and the access you are giving it. If the return address is not one you expect, choose Deny.
4. Choose the access. Read only lets it read your data and nothing else. Read and propose drafts, the suggested choice, also lets it propose transactions that wait for you in TallyFolio. Two further choices let it change, or change and delete, transactions you already recorded — give those only to a client you would trust to edit your ledger while you are not watching. You can change this later in the Security section of Settings.
5. Choose Approve. The browser returns to the client, which can now read your data.

What a connected client can do

• Propose transactions as drafts, when you gave it that access. Each one waits above your ledger with where it came from, and you confirm, change, or dismiss it.
• Change, or change and delete, transactions you already recorded — but only at the two higher access choices, only one transaction at a time, and never a transfer, an investment contribution, or a planned item a real transaction has already replaced.
• Read your accounts, categories, labels, and subscriptions.
• Search your transactions with the same filters as the Transactions page, and get the same totals that page's summary shows.
• Read the dashboard's year grid and budget status, the cash forecast, your investments, and registered-plan room. Forecast months are estimates, and room is a personal estimate — not connected to the CRA.
• Look up the category your own merchant rules give a merchant, and check whether a transaction on an account already looks recorded.

Every figure it receives comes from TallyFolio's own calculations. Converted totals leave out amounts with no exchange rate, exactly as they do in the app.

What it cannot do

• Record a transaction directly, at any access. New transactions only ever arrive as drafts you confirm, and you can change every detail first.
• Change or delete anything you recorded, unless you chose one of the two higher access levels for it. At Read only and Read and propose drafts, your ledger is untouchable.
• Change several transactions at once, move one to another account, or change whether one is posted.
• Propose more than 200 drafts a day, or file the same receipt twice: a draft it has already proposed is not proposed again, even after you dismissed it.
• See anyone else's data, or anything your own sign-in could not see.
• Reach your data once you disconnect it, or once the operator removes the client from the allowed list or turns the feature off.

Before you approve

• The client receives what it reads — account names, merchants, descriptions, notes, and amounts — and that becomes part of the client's conversations under its provider's terms.
• Approve only clients you would trust with your financial records.

Disconnecting

• Signing out inside the client removes its sign-in from that device only.
• Open the Security section of Settings and choose Disconnect next to the client. That removes your approval and signs the client out; it has to ask for your approval again to reconnect.
• Signing out of TallyFolio in your browser ends that browser's session only. Connected clients stay connected until you disconnect them.
• Sign out everywhere, in the same section, signs connected clients out too but keeps your approval, so a client can sign back in without asking for it again. Disconnect is what removes a client.

Common mistakes

• Approving without reading the return address. A client's name is whatever it was registered with; the address it returns to is the part to check.
• Expecting a connected client to record transactions for you. It can only propose them; nothing reaches your figures until you confirm it.
• Giving a client more access than its job needs. Read and propose drafts covers filing receipts; the levels that change or delete are for a client whose work you check.
• Signing out inside the client and assuming the connection is gone everywhere. That clears only the device it ran on.
• Connecting a client that is not on your operator's allowed list. The approval screen says so and offers only Deny.

FAQ

Where this lives in the app

• Security settings
• Settings

Related articles

• Security and data

  Where your financial data lives, who can see it, and the boundaries TallyFolio deliberately keeps.

• Passkeys

  Add a passkey so you can sign in with your device's fingerprint, face, or PIN instead of typing a password.

• Export your data

  Download your record as CSV files, restore core data from a TallyFolio export ZIP, or export just the filtered view you're looking at.