workbench-ynab

workbench-ynab

Tax-aware YNAB budget management for Claude Code — a claude-workbench plugin.

It turns a proven, hand-run weekly financial review into a first-class plugin: a formalized financial-assistant persona, a reusable tax-aware review methodology, a frozen HTML report template, and approval-gated write-back to YNAB. The YNAB MCP is vendored into the plugin, so setup is a one-time token paste — nothing to install or configure by hand.

Status: pre-release / under construction. This repo is being built sprint-by-sprint by the workbench dev team. See docs/ROADMAP.md for the full plan and issue backlog.

What it will do

• Review — pull your budget, accounts, and transactions and produce a polished, tax-aware HTML report (Schedule C / A / SE awareness, medical-threshold tracking, quarterly estimated taxes).
• Propose → approve → apply — surface categorizations, Ready-to-Assign allocations, duplicate fixes, and reconciliation as a proposed change-set you approve before anything is written.
• Never move money — write-back is strictly ledger-only (categorize/allocate/dedup/reconcile). The plugin never initiates transfers or payments.

Privacy & safety

• Your YNAB Personal Access Token is stored in the macOS Keychain — never in this repo, never in a config file, never logged.
• Not tax advice. This tool organizes financial data and surfaces tax-relevant signals to help you and your tax professional. It is not a substitute for professional tax advice.

Architecture

Mirrors the sibling workbench plugins (workbench-core, workbench-bujo, workbench-dev-team): a plugin.json-declared MCP launched via bin/launcher.sh, ritual skills, a read-only orchestrator agent, session hooks, and a one-time setup command. The bundled YNAB MCP is @dizzlkheinz/ynab-mcpb, vendored and version-frozen.

License

See issue tracker — license selection is tracked as an early backlog item.