create_bookWritesStart a new set of books, seeded with real accounts on day one
You want to start tracking a business or a household budget properly, but setting up a chart of accounts from scratch — deciding what to call things, what codes to use — is the part that makes people give up before they start.
A blank ledger is worse than no ledger — it is a form nobody fills out. BalanceMCP skips that problem: tell your assistant whether this is a business or a household, and it creates the book with a full chart of accounts already in place. Pick "business" and you get a Schedule-C-friendly setup — sales, materials, subcontractors, owner's draw, the categories a small contractor or freelancer actually uses. Pick "personal" and you get groceries, housing, transportation, and the other buckets a household budget needs.
This is the one decision in BalanceMCP you should slow down for: the chart of accounts you pick at creation is the one this book uses going forward. You can add individual accounts later through manage_accounts, but you cannot swap a business chart for a personal one after the fact, or vice versa. If you are not sure, ask which chart fits your situation before you commit — the assistant should walk you through the difference, not just create something.
Once the book exists, the natural next step is importing a bank statement so there is something in it. The response tells you exactly how many accounts were created, so you can sanity-check that the seeding actually happened before moving on.
Unlike the tools that write to the ledger itself, this one does not preview first — there is nothing to post that could be wrong in the way a journal entry could, so the first call creates the book and seeds the full chart immediately. Confirm the business-vs-personal choice out loud before asking for it, since that is the one decision here you cannot easily undo.
What this does not do
- The chart of accounts (business vs. personal) cannot be changed after creation — only individual accounts can be added.
- This only creates the book and its chart; no bank connection, no transactions. Import a statement to actually populate it.
- This tool has no preview step — it creates and seeds the book on the first call, unlike the tools that write to the ledger.
Arguments
| Name | Type | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
name | string | Required | What to call this set of books, e.g. "Iron Crest Remodeling" |
type | "business" | "personal" | Required | Which chart of accounts to seed |
Generated from the tool definition, so it cannot describe arguments the tool does not accept. Unrecognised arguments are rejected rather than ignored.
Common questions
- What is the difference between the business and personal chart?
- Business seeds accounts like Sales, Cost of Goods Sold, Subcontractors, and Owner's Draw — built for a small company's tax reporting. Personal seeds household categories like Groceries, Housing, and Transportation. Pick based on what the book is actually tracking.
- Can I rename accounts after the book is created?
- The chart of accounts can be extended through manage_accounts, which lets you add, archive, or unarchive individual accounts. Renaming an existing account isn't part of that tool today — archiving the old one and creating a replacement is the current workaround.
- Can I run one business and one personal book at the same time?
- Yes. Most users do exactly that. list_books shows both, and every other tool takes a bookId so your assistant always knows which one it is working in.