freshbooks-mcp

MCP server for FreshBooks — invoices, clients, estimates and payments, exposed to Claude as typed tools.

This project was developed and is maintained by AI (Claude Code). Use at your own discretion.

Install

npm install -g @chrischall/freshbooks-mcp

Setup

FreshBooks is OAuth2 only — there is no API key and no personal access token, so a one-time browser authorization is required.

1. Register an app at https://my.freshbooks.com/#/developer. The redirect URI must be HTTPS with no query string; https://localhost works and never needs to resolve.
2. Note the Client ID and Client Secret.
3. Run the one-time bootstrap to obtain a refresh token — see skills/freshbooks-curl, which ships the bootstrap script.
4. Configure:

FRESHBOOKS_CLIENT_ID=...
FRESHBOOKS_CLIENT_SECRET=...
FRESHBOOKS_REFRESH_TOKEN=...       # from the bootstrap
FRESHBOOKS_REDIRECT_URI=https://localhost   # optional; must match what you registered
FRESHBOOKS_TOKEN_STORE=~/.freshbooks-mcp/session.json   # optional

⚠️ Refresh tokens rotate

FreshBooks issues a new refresh token on every refresh and immediately invalidates the old one. This server persists each rotation to FRESHBOOKS_TOKEN_STORE (mode 0600) before the refresh is considered complete, and prefers the stored token over the environment value — the stored one has rotated past it.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• Do not point two tools at the same store. The MCP server and the freshbooks-curl skill keep separate state files on purpose; sharing one makes them spend each other's tokens and locks both out.
• If the store is lost, re-run the bootstrap. A spent refresh token cannot be recovered.

Changing FRESHBOOKS_REFRESH_TOKEN to a freshly bootstrapped value is detected and adopted, so re-bootstrapping is the supported recovery path.

Tools

Tool	Purpose
freshbooks_get_identity	Resolve accountId / businessId / businessUuid
freshbooks_list_invoices / freshbooks_get_invoice	Browse and fetch invoices
freshbooks_list_clients / freshbooks_get_client	Browse and fetch clients
freshbooks_list_estimates / freshbooks_get_estimate	Browse and fetch estimates
freshbooks_list_payments / freshbooks_get_payment	Browse and fetch payments
freshbooks_list_items / freshbooks_get_item	Browse and fetch catalogue items
freshbooks_create_client	Create a client — confirm-gated
freshbooks_create_invoice	Create an invoice — confirm-gated
freshbooks_update_invoice	Update an invoice — confirm-gated
freshbooks_record_payment	Record a payment against an invoice — confirm-gated
freshbooks_accept_estimate	Accept an estimate (action_accept) — confirm-gated, idempotent
freshbooks_update_estimate	Update an estimate's lines, notes, terms, presentation — confirm-gated
freshbooks_send_estimate	Email an estimate to the client (action_email) — confirm-gated
freshbooks_decline_estimate	Always fails: FreshBooks has no decline. Answers with the alternatives
freshbooks_list_expenses / freshbooks_get_expense	Browse and fetch expenses
freshbooks_list_expense_categories	Categories supplying categoryid for new expenses
freshbooks_create_expense	Record an expense — confirm-gated
freshbooks_list_projects / freshbooks_get_project	Projects (businessId-keyed)
freshbooks_create_project	Create a project — confirm-gated
freshbooks_list_time_entries	Tracked time, with total_logged / total_unbilled
freshbooks_create_time_entry	Log time in seconds — confirm-gated
freshbooks_list_services	Billable work types for projects and time entries
freshbooks_list_records / freshbooks_get_record	Generic accessor for the accounting long tail (taxes, credit notes, invoice profiles, tasks, staff, gateways, bills, bill vendors, bill payments, other income)

Confirm-gated means the tool makes no network call unless confirm: true is passed; without it you get a dry-run preview of exactly what would be sent.

Estimate writes

Acceptance is an action on the estimate, not a status field: status (int), display_status and ui_status are computed and read-only, and they disagree with each other by design (a viewed estimate reads status: 3, display_status: "viewed", ui_status: "open"). Accepting is PUT estimates/estimates/{id} with {"estimate": {"action_accept": true}} — see docs/FRESHBOOKS-API.md for where that shape comes from.

• Accept is idempotent. An estimate already accepted (or invoiced) comes back with changed: false and no write is sent — acceptance cannot be undone through the API, so a repeat call must not re-fire it.
• There is no decline. FreshBooks' estimate statuses are draft / sent / viewed / replied / accepted / invoiced; no declined state, no action_deny, no estimate.decline webhook. freshbooks_decline_estimate exists only to say so and point at the alternatives, rather than leave an agent to invent a write that changes nothing.
• Every write returns the re-fetched estimate, plus before / after state and changed / changedFields, so success is verified against the record rather than inferred from a 200. changed covers the status fields and the fields that write actually set, so a successful notes edit reports changed: true even though no status moves. On freshbooks_send_estimate it describes the record only — emailing an already-sent estimate moves nothing, and retrying on changed: false would send the client a second copy.

Writes require an owner/admin accounting account

FreshBooks separates the role you hold on a business from the role you hold on an accounting account. You can own a business that has no accounting account (account_id: null) while being only a client on the account you can actually see — in which case reads succeed and every write returns 403 Permission Denied, even though your OAuth token carries all the :write scopes.

freshbooks_get_identity reports accountRole and businessRole so this is visible up front. If accountRole is client, the invoicing write tools will not work against that account — that is an account permission, not a configuration problem.

Two things the API reports misleadingly

• total counts records you may not be able to read. Expenses reported total: 16 while returning zero rows. List results attach a note when that happens, so it reads as a permission boundary rather than an empty account.
• Projects and time tracking are keyed by businessId, not accountId, and paginate under a meta block instead of flat page/pages/total. They also work on a business with no accounting account at all.

The three identifiers

FreshBooks hands out three non-interchangeable ids, and using the wrong one returns a bare 404 that reads like a missing record:

Identifier	Used by
accountId (alphanumeric)	/accounting/account/…, /payments/account/…
businessId (integer)	/projects/business/…, /timetracking/business/…
businessUuid (UUID)	/accounting/businesses/…

Call freshbooks_get_identity first. Full API notes, including the four different error envelopes, are in docs/FRESHBOOKS-API.md.

Shell access without the server

skills/freshbooks-curl covers the same API from a shell with curl + jq, including the OAuth bootstrap and rotation-safe token handling.

Development

npm install
npm run build
npm test

License

MIT