list_booksRead-onlySee every set of books your AI assistant can reach
You run more than one set of books — a business and a household, or two companies — and you want your AI assistant to know which one it is looking at before it touches anything.
Every session with an AI bookkeeper starts the same way: which books are we talking about? BalanceMCP answers that with a single call. It returns the name of every book you own, plus how many accounts are already set up in each one, so your assistant can ask "which one?" instead of guessing.
This matters more than it sounds like it should. Every other tool in BalanceMCP — posting a transaction, running a report, reconciling an account — needs a bookId, and this is the only place that id comes from. If you keep your business and your personal spending separate (you should), this is what keeps your assistant from ever mixing the two up.
There is nothing to configure and nothing to get wrong here. It is a read-only lookup: no mutation, no confirm step, no risk. Think of it as the assistant checking its bearings before it does anything else in a session.
What this does not do
- Returns only books you own — there is no sharing or multi-user access on a single book yet.
- Account counts include archived accounts, so a book that looks larger than expected may just have old accounts hanging around.
Common questions
- Do I need to run this every time I talk to my assistant?
- Not manually — a well-behaved assistant calls it automatically at the start of a session so it has a bookId ready before it needs one. You only notice it when you ask directly, like "what books do I have?"
- What if I only have one book?
- It still returns an array with one entry. Nothing changes about how your assistant uses it; there is just one bookId to pick from instead of several.
- Can this show me someone else's books?
- No. It only lists books tied to your account. Row-level security enforces that at the database level, not just in this tool.