mercury-cli — Mercury Banking from the Terminal
Why This Matters
Mercury is the bank a meaningful slice of US-incorporated startups actually use — the dashboard is fine, the API has been around for years, but until now there was no first-party CLI. If your accounting, runway, or burn calculations live in scripts (and ours largely do, under
tidyverse/), you were either calling the REST API by hand or copy-pasting CSVs out of the web UI.mercury-cli is Mercury's official Go-based CLI — version 0.8.2 landed in Homebrew core this cycle. Apache-2.0, which is the right license for first-party banking tooling (no AGPL surprises in your finance scripts).This is the first-party version. Treat anything else you find with a similar name with suspicion — banking creds are a credential-stuffing target.
What It Actually Does
The CLI mirrors the Mercury REST API surface — account list, balance queries, transaction history, transfer initiation (within the limits Mercury's API permits), and recipient management. Auth is via API token, which Mercury issues per-workspace from the dashboard.
The interesting bits, from a scripting perspective:
- Programmatic balance + transaction reads — pipe into
jq, dump to Parquet, feed into your finance notebook without re-auth ceremony. - Recipient-managed transfers — useful for recurring vendor payments where you don't want a human re-typing a routing number.
- Workspace switching — if you operate multiple Mercury workspaces (parent entity + portfolio companies, fiscal sponsor + sub-orgs), the CLI handles the auth boundary.
Where It Fits in Our Workflow
Two angles:
- Runway / burn dashboards. The
tidyverse/child pseudomonorepo hosts our R + Quarto financial reporting. A scheduledmercury-clipull → DuckDB → Quarto render is a cleaner pipeline than the current CSV-export-and-tidy ritual. Plays nicely with panache (also in this cycle's Homebrew update) for the Quarto authoring side. - Credibility-card data. Our crawl fetch ingest flow already pulls public portfolio data for VC firms. For our own fundraise material under
deck-iteration-workflow, an authenticated read of our actual cash position is one of the things you want auto-current rather than copy-pasted into a slide three weeks before the meeting.
Caveats: it's a CLI to a bank. Keep the API token in
~/.secrets per the CLAUDE.md secrets discipline, never check it in, and audit transfers carefully if you wire any to automation.Install
bash
brew install mercury-cli
mercury-cli auth login # one-time
mercury-cli accounts list