MoneyWorks Gold 9.2.5 and later includes a Model Context Protocol server that allows a local AI client to query and control MoneyWorks on your computer.
Requirements
- MoneyWorks Gold 9.2.5 or later
and a desktop AI client app that supports local stdio MCP servers; currently, the best choice for this is:
- Anthropic Claude — Claude Desktop download page
MoneyWorks does also include install support for the just-released Codex app
- OpenAI Codex — Codex download page
Setup
In MoneyWorks Gold:
- MoneyWorks Preferences → AI → Configuration…
- Click the checkbox to enable the MCP server (you do not need logging)
- Click Install into Claude and/or Install into Codex
- 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 doesn’t have any UI in the app; you will just get a confirmation of the installation. You should restart Codex for it to load the server.
Privileges
Any actions/enquiries the AI takes will be subject to the privileges you have in the file you are logged into.
In the User Privileges for users in documents that you want to access via the MCP server, enable the following privileges:
- Expression Evaluation
- Exporting
- Importing
- MCP Server Access
Conversely, for users that should not have AI access to the document, you should disable those privileges. Note that in MoneyWorks Gold 9.2.5, disabling the Expression Evaluation privilege does not prevent typing expressions into entry fields starting with an = sign, but it does restrict the functions available to only those that do not query the database.
Reports that might be accessed via the MCP server are subject to per-report privileges, or — for custom reports — report signing per-user (or else the Report Signing privilege itself)
The MCP Server Access privilege applies to the auto-loaded MCP server. Turn off this privilege to prevent casual/accidental exfiltration of business data to AI providers.
AI Queries
That’s it. With the server enabled, and appropriate privileges, you can now ask your AI to run reports and data analysis, open recent MoneyWorks files, and even find records and display them in MoneyWorks.
You should always begin an AI session by mentioning that you will be working with MoneyWorks, so that the AI knows to use the MoneyWorks MCP server. You might want to use a project for the purpose.
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
- Write me a MoneyWorks relational search expression to find all sales invoices for products whose colour is red
- Create an optimal delivery route for the delivery addresses in the highlighted sales orders and show me the resulting map
AI-generated responses can have mistakes (as can human-generated responses). The MCP server does not give the AI much scope for doing damage, and it should always confirm with you before doing something destructive like cancelling a transaction.
Company Context
If you want to provide additional context or prompts about your company to improve AI responses, the AI can read the text of a script named (exactly) Instructions.md in the document scripts. It can be plain text or you can use Markdown formatting. Open the Scripts window, click the [+] in the bottom left to add the script and use the name Instructions.md.
Installing updates
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. On Windows, you will need to right-click on the icon in the system tray to properly quit (Claude and Codex keep running even when you close the main window).
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
- Copilot — does not support local MCP
- Deepseek — does not have a desktop app
You can connect other AI clients such as gemini-cli / Antigravity or self-hosted models by configuring them manually. See Model Context Protocol