Safety Model

monarchmoney-cli treats financial data with the highest level of caution. It implements a multi-tiered safety model to prevent accidental or unauthorized modifications.

Operation Tiers

Operations are classified into tiers based on their impact:

Tier	Description	Examples	Security Requirement
Read	Fetching data from API	list, show, search	Always allowed
Remote Action	Triggering remote sync	accounts refresh	Blocked by Read-only
Mutation	Modifying remote data	update, set, create	Requires --confirm
Destructive	Deleting remote data	delete, reset	Requires --confirm

Safety Layers

1. Read-only Mode

Read-only mode blocks all operations that are not in the Read tier. This is ideal for CI/CD environments or AI Agent integrations where you want to ensure no changes are made.

Enable via flag:

monarch accounts refresh --read-only
# Error: [READ_ONLY_VIOLATION] remote writes are blocked in read-only mode

Enable via environment variable:

export MONARCH_READONLY=1
monarch transactions delete tx_123 --confirm
# Error: [READ_ONLY_VIOLATION] remote writes are blocked in read-only mode

2. Dry-run Previews

Before executing a mutation, you can use the --dry-run flag to see exactly what would happen. This generates a "Mutation Plan" but does not send the final request to the API.

monarch budgets set --category cat_123 --amount 500 --dry-run

3. Explicit Confirmation

By default, any mutation or destructive command will fail if the --confirm flag is missing. This prevents accidental execution of dangerous commands.

monarch transactions delete tx_123
# Error: [CONFIRMATION_REQUIRED] this destructive operation requires --confirm to execute

Audit Logging

Every mutation that is successfully executed (or attempted with --confirm) is logged locally for your review.

Log Path: ~/.monarchmoney-cli/audit/YYYY-MM-DD.jsonl

Log Format:

{
  "timestamp": "2026-05-08T22:12:00Z",
  "command": "transactions.update",
  "resource_id": "tx_123",
  "dry_run": false,
  "confirmed": true,
  "profile": "default",
  "result": "success",
  "error_code": ""
}

Audit records never contain sensitive credentials, session tokens, or private financial details (like account numbers).