Connect Your AI Assistant

Ask your own AI assistant about your money

You can connect an AI assistant — Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or another — to your Forbidden Finance account so it answers from your real data: "Where did my money go last month?", "Am I on track with my budget?", "What's the fastest way to pay off my cards?" You ask in plain language and the assistant looks the answer up in your finances.

It is your assistant, not ours. Forbidden Finance does not send your data to an AI on its own — it answers the questions your connected assistant asks, within the limits you set.

Forbidden Finance sits in the middle as a privacy gateway. You decide what each assistant may see, and what it may change. Those choices are enforced on our servers, so the assistant only ever receives the view you allowed.

This works over an open standard called MCP (the Model Context Protocol). You do not need to know anything about it to use this.

Before You Start

• You are on Premium. AI connections do not appear on Free, Starter, or Pro.
• You have an AI assistant that supports MCP connections.

There are two ways to connect. Both reach the same data and honor the same privacy choices.

Connect Over a Link

If your assistant supports adding a remote connector, this is the simplest path. There is no key to copy: you sign in through your browser and approve access on a Forbidden Finance screen.

Run the Connector on Your Computer

Some assistants run their tools locally instead of connecting to a remote address. For those, Forbidden Finance publishes a small connector that starts with a single command — there is nothing to install ahead of time.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "forbidden-finance": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@403fin/mcp"],
      "env": {
        "FF_API_KEY": "ff_ak_your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

What It Can Look Up

By default a connection is read-only — your assistant can look things up but change nothing. It can help with:

• Spending & transactions — "Where did my money go last month?", "Find every subscription over $20", "How much did I spend on dining?"
• Budgets — "Am I on track this month?", "How much is left for groceries?"
• Goals & savings — "How close am I to my emergency fund?"
• Net worth & investments — "How has my net worth changed this year?", "What's my asset mix?"
• Debt — "What's the fastest way to pay off my cards?", "When will this loan be paid off?"

What "Allow Changes" Means

Allow changes is a single switch, off by default, that decides whether this connection may change anything at all. Leave it off and your assistant can only read — no matter what else is selected.

Turn it on and you then pick which kinds of change are allowed, from five permissions:

You choose these individually. Granting one does not grant the others.

Two things it can never do

No connection can move money or reach your bank login. Those actions do not exist in this system at all, so there is no permission that turns them on and no assistant that can be talked into them.

Undoing a Change

Most changes an assistant makes can be undone, and one class of them is protected automatically.

• Bank-synced transactions keep the bank's original. The first time anything edits a bank-synced transaction, Forbidden Finance saves what the bank recorded for each field. You can put any of those fields back later, and the bank resumes updating it. Nothing the bank told us is lost by an edit.
• Bank-synced transactions cannot be deleted at all — by an assistant or by anyone. The bank is the source of truth for them, so the next sync would just bring the row back.
• Switching your budgeting method archives your old budget, it does not delete it. And if your budget is shared with a partner, the switch needs their approval in the app first, so an assistant cannot complete it on its own.
• Categorizing through an assistant does not change your rules. If your assistant files a coffee shop under Dining, that is that one transaction. It does not create a merchant rule, and it does not change how your other transactions are categorized — now or in future. Rules stay yours to set in the app.

What Your Assistant Can and Cannot See

You are in control of every connection:

• You choose the areas of data (called scopes) — turn one off and the assistant cannot see that area at all.
• You can hide specific fields — merchant names, amounts, balances, memos, purchase locations, and more. A hidden field is left out entirely, not blanked or masked, so there is nothing to reverse-engineer.
• You can keep whole accounts or categories private — they are invisible to the connection: absent from lists and from search, and indistinguishable from data that does not exist.
• Hiding applies to changes too — an assistant cannot edit a field it is not allowed to see.
• We enforce it, not the assistant — your choices are applied on Forbidden Finance's servers, at the one point every request passes through. A connected assistant cannot opt out, ask for a hidden field, or widen its own access.
• Your own view never changes — hiding and exclusion apply only to connections. What you see in the app is always complete.

Read the full explanation in Data Privacy & Redaction.

Managing and Revoking

Every connection appears under Settings > AI & API Connections, where you can adjust what it may see and do, review an audit log of what it accessed, and revoke it.

Revoking is instant: the assistant loses access immediately, and there is nothing to wait for and no other connection affected. Turning Allow changes back off is the lighter version of the same idea — the connection keeps working, read-only, from the moment you save.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to know how to code?

No. With the link method you paste one web address and sign in. There is no coding either way.

Which should I use — the link or the connector?

Use the link method if your assistant supports remote connectors — there is no key to copy or keep safe. Use the connector if your assistant only runs tools on your machine, or if you self-host Forbidden Finance.

Can my assistant move money or delete my account?

No. There is no way for a connection to move money, close an account, or reach your bank login. The changes it can make are limited to transactions, categories, budgets, and goals — and only the ones you allowed.

What if I only want it to tidy up my categories?

Turn on Allow changes and grant Categorize & annotate transactions alone. That is the whole categorizing job with none of the reach — it cannot add, delete, or re-price a transaction.

Can my assistant undo something it did?

For bank-synced transactions, yes — the bank's original values are kept and can be restored. Transactions you added yourself and categories you delete are gone for good, which is why those permissions are separate ones you have to grant deliberately.

Why can't my assistant see one of my accounts?

You most likely hid that account or category for this connection, or turned off a scope. All of those are enforced on our servers. Adjust the connection under Settings > AI & API Connections.

Is my financial data used to train an AI?

Forbidden Finance does not send your data to any AI model. When you connect your own assistant, that assistant and its provider handle whatever you ask under their own terms. Use scopes, field hiding, and account exclusion to limit what any assistant can read.

Related Articles

Need more help? Contact us at [email protected].