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The agent picks these itself. Read this when you want to know what’s available, or to name a specific tool in a request. Every tool answers with either a result or a reason it didn’t work. The reason carries QuickBooks’ own status message where there is one. There are 134 of them, in the groups below.

Setup

See setting up company files and several company files. When something isn’t working, qb_doctor is the one to reach for. It replaces the whole is-it-plugged-in conversation, opens at most one QuickBooks session, and changes nothing.

Batch

The main workflow. Anything arriving in volume belongs here.

Audit and reversal

Rules

Knowledge

Notes about a client’s books that a rule can’t express. Entries land as drafts and surface on their own once confirmed — see what it remembers.

Playbooks

Work log

Asking questions

qb_report runs against the open company file. The rest run against a local copy, never against QuickBooks.

Reading

Direct from QuickBooks, in fixed shapes, returned as CSV.

Single postings

For one-off work. Volume belongs in a batch, which adds preflight, the approval step, and automatic duplicate protection that these don’t have.

Money going out

Money coming in

A statement charge suits anyone billing the same thing repeatedly — rent, a retainer, a storage bay. The charges accumulate and one statement covers the period. If the customer expects a document to pay against, that’s an invoice. To bank receipts already taken in, call qb_undeposited_payments first: it returns the line ids qb_record_deposit needs, and no other tool returns them.

Documents that post nothing

None of these three move money or change a balance. They exist to be turned into an invoice, a receipt, or a bill later.

Inventory and receiving

An item receipt raises quantity on hand without creating anything payable — it won’t appear in qb_pay_bills. When the vendor’s invoice arrives, someone ticks Bill Received in QuickBooks and the same record becomes a bill.
These four, and billing a purchase order through qb_record_bill’s purchaseOrderTxnIds, are included with the Enterprise licence — and with the free evaluation. Every other tier still reads everything about an inventory file: valuation, quantity on hand, open purchase orders, and corrections to inventory transactions already in it.

Everything else

Creating list entries

A name can’t be deleted from a QuickBooks file afterwards, only made inactive. To create the names a whole batch is waiting on in one approved step, use qb_create_names instead. Customers, vendors, employees, and other names share one namespace, so a name taken by any of them is taken for all four, and nothing moves a name between those lists later. qb_create_list_name is the one to check twice. QuickBooks has no way to rename, hide, or remove those six lists’ entries from outside its own window, so a misspelling there is permanent as far as this connection is concerned. qb_create_calculated_item covers the five item types that change what a form adds up to rather than describing something sold: a discount, a subtotal, a payment, a sales tax item, and a sales tax group. They’re separate from qb_create_item because they carry no price and no cost, and the fields they do take — a discount rate, a tax rate and its agency, where a payment deposits to — mean nothing on the other item types. A percentage discount needs a subtotal item above it on the form to apply to the whole order rather than to the line immediately above. Use a sales tax group wherever two bodies tax the same sale — a state rate plus a county rate — because each member keeps its own agency and the liability report still splits the money per return, which one item at the combined rate would not. Correcting one is qb_modify_calculated_item, separate from qb_modify_item for the same reason — and note that a group’s member list is replaced wholesale, so adding a jurisdiction means passing the existing ones again alongside it.

Correcting list entries

Each of these shows what would change and waits for confirmation before it changes it. The preview works even on a read-only install. Renaming a name rewrites it on every transaction, report, and statement the file will ever print, and QuickBooks keeps no record of the spelling it replaced. The previous version is saved in the run journal, and nowhere else. qb_merge_duplicates is the one thing here with no way back — the “Home Depot” / “HOME DEPOT” / “Home Depot #4” problem. QuickBooks provides no unmerge.

Correcting transactions

qb_modify_transaction covers bills, checks, invoices, sales receipts, journal entries, card charges and credits, deposits, customer payments, bill payments, transfers, credit memos, vendor credits, sales tax payments, inventory adjustments, purchase orders, estimates, statement charges, sales orders, item receipts, and assembly builds. Like the list corrections above, it previews first and posts only on confirmation. Voiding preserves the audit trail and deleting doesn’t. Prefer voiding unless you have a reason. Neither works on funds transfers — see what it can’t do. Closing an order posts nothing. It’s how you tell QuickBooks to stop offering a cancelled balance when raising the next invoice or bill, and it can be undone by closing it again the other way.

Updating

See updating.

Resources

Alongside the tools, the server publishes reference data your client can hold onto instead of fetching per request. Clients that support MCP resources pick these up automatically; clients that don’t lose nothing, because everything here is also reachable through a tool. The five list resources come from the local copy, so they’re as fresh as the last sync, and reading them never waits on QuickBooks. zeno-qbd://knowledge carries confirmed entries only. A draft is a proposal, and a resource a client may load the moment it connects is not the place for one.

Read-only mode

Every tool under Single postings, Creating list entries, Correcting list entries, and Correcting transactions, plus qb_apply_batch, qb_create_names, and qb_reverse_run, refuses when the install is read-only. Reading and planning work normally. The corrections are the one partial case: their preview still runs, so a bookkeeper on a read-only install can see exactly what a fix would involve. Only the confirmation is refused. Even with writing enabled, those tools require the target company to be visibly open in QuickBooks. Closed-file permission is used only for reads, reports, and mirror refreshes.