TRMNL Monarch Money

A TRMNL private plugin that displays recent transactions from Monarch Money on an e-ink screen.

What It Does

Fetches your latest transactions from Monarch Money and renders them for TRMNL's e-ink display. Each transaction shows the merchant name, amount, category, account name, and relative date. Pending transactions are marked with a badge. Income and expenses are visually distinguished.

Display Layouts

The plugin supports all four TRMNL display sizes:

• Full -- Up to 10 transactions with merchant, amount, category, account, date, and pending badge.
• Half Horizontal -- Up to 5 transactions with the same detail as full.
• Half Vertical -- Up to 7 transactions in compact mode (category icon, merchant, amount).
• Quadrant -- Up to 4 transactions in compact mode.

All layouts support toggling the title bar on or off via plugin settings.

Setup

1. Deploy to Vercel

Fork or clone this repo, then deploy to Vercel:

npm i -g vercel
vercel --prod

Or connect the repo directly in the Vercel dashboard for automatic deploys.

2. Set Environment Variables

In your Vercel project settings, add one of the following authentication configurations (see the Authentication section below):

Token auth:

Variable	Description
MONARCH_TOKEN	Session token from your browser

Email/password auth:

Variable	Description
MONARCH_EMAIL	Your Monarch Money email
MONARCH_PASSWORD	Your Monarch Money password
MONARCH_MFA_SECRET	(Optional) TOTP secret for MFA

3. Configure TRMNL

1. In the TRMNL dashboard, create a new Private Plugin.
2. Set the polling strategy to Webhook/Polling.
3. Set the API URL to your Vercel deployment endpoint: https://your-app.vercel.app/api/monarch
4. Upload the Liquid templates from src/ for each display size (full, half_horizontal, half_vertical, quadrant), along with shared.liquid.

4. Plugin Settings

These options are configurable in the TRMNL plugin settings panel:

Setting	Default	Description
Show Account Name	true	Display which account each transaction is from
Show Category	true	Display category name/icon
Show Date	true	Display relative date (e.g. "Today", "3d ago")
Show Pending Badge	true	Show a badge on pending transactions
Show Title Bar	true	Display the plugin title bar

Authentication

Method 1 -- Session Token (recommended for Google OAuth users)

If you log in to Monarch Money with Google, you cannot use email/password auth. Instead:

1. Log in to monarchmoney.com in your browser.
2. Open DevTools and find a request to api.monarchmoney.com.
3. Copy the Authorization header value (the token after Token ).
4. Set MONARCH_TOKEN in your Vercel environment variables.

Note: Session tokens expire periodically and will need to be refreshed.

Method 2 -- Email and Password

Set MONARCH_EMAIL and MONARCH_PASSWORD. If your account has MFA enabled, also set MONARCH_MFA_SECRET to your TOTP secret (the base32 string you get when setting up an authenticator app). The server generates TOTP codes automatically at request time.

API Query Parameters

The /api/monarch endpoint accepts optional query parameters:

Parameter	Default	Description
limit	10	Number of transactions to fetch (max 50)
start_date	--	Filter start date (YYYY-MM-DD)
end_date	--	Filter end date (YYYY-MM-DD)

Local Development

npm run trmnl    # Serve templates with trmnlp
npm run dev      # Run Vercel dev server locally

The .trmnlp.yml file configures local development defaults for the TRMNL plugin preview tool.

Tech Stack

• Node.js 18+ (Vercel Serverless Function, zero dependencies)
• Monarch Money GraphQL API
• Liquid templates (TRMNL rendering engine)
• Vercel for deployment