Turn Telegram into your personal AI financial manager with Hermes Agent

Picture this. You just paid for groceries. Instead of opening an app, tapping through five screens, and picking a category, you just text your Telegram bot: "log 450 for groceries." A second later it replies: "Done. You've spent 62% of your food budget this month."

That's it. That's the whole interaction. No app to open, no dashboard to squint at. Just a chat, like texting a very financially responsible friend who never sleeps.

This is what happens when you wire together three things that were never built for each other, but fit together perfectly:

• 🤖 Hermes Agent, an open-source personal AI agent from Nous Research that lives on your own machine or VPS. You own it, nobody else.
• 📱 Telegram, the messaging app already sitting in your pocket. No new app to install.
• 💰 Wallet by BudgetBakers MCP, an official bridge that hands your agent secure access to your real accounts, transactions, categories, and budgets.

Grab a coffee. This takes about 30 to 45 minutes, and by the end you'll have a financial manager that lives inside a chat window.

🧰 What you need before you start

• A computer or VPS running Linux, macOS, Windows (native or WSL2), or Android (Termux). Git needs to be installed, and on Linux you'll also need curl and xz-utils. The installer handles Python, Node.js, ripgrep, and ffmpeg on its own.
• A Telegram account, which you probably already have.
• A Wallet by BudgetBakers account, the app where your financial data actually lives. No account yet? Sign up at budgetbakers.com first.
• An LLM to power the agent. Easiest option is a Nous Portal subscription, which unlocks 300+ models under one bill. You can also bring your own API key from a provider you already use.

Part 1 · Installing Hermes Agent

First, we get the agent itself running. On Linux, macOS, WSL2, or Android (Termux), paste this into your terminal and press Enter:

On Windows, use PowerShell instead:

You'll see a bunch of text scroll by, that's normal, it's just downloading and setting things up. It can take a few minutes. When it stops and gives you back a blinking cursor, it's done.

Now close the terminal window completely and open a brand new one (same steps as above). This makes sure it recognizes the new hermes command. In the new window, paste this and press Enter:

A list of AI providers will appear in the terminal. Use the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard to move the highlighted line, then press Enter to confirm your choice. (If instead you see a number next to each option, just type that number and press Enter.) If you're not sure what to pick, choose Nous Portal, a paid subscription that gives you access to hundreds of models under one bill without juggling separate API keys. There's a shortcut for that specifically:

Now for the fun part. In your terminal, type hermes and press Enter, then just say hello. If it talks back, Part 1 is done. 🎉

Part 2 · Connecting Hermes to Telegram

This is where your agent moves out of the terminal and into your pocket. Everything in this part happens in the Telegram app on your phone or computer, no terminal needed until Step 3.

• Step 1, create your bot. Open the Telegram app, tap the search bar at the top, and type BotFather. Tap the result with the blue checkmark (that's the official one, @BotFather), then tap "Start" or open the chat. Type /newbot as a message and send it. It will ask you to choose a display name, type anything you like, e.g. "My Finance Agent". Then it will ask for a username, which must be unique and end in bot, e.g. praveen_finance_bot. If that name is taken, just try another. BotFather then sends you back a long API token that looks like 123456789:ABCdefGHIjklMNOpqrSTUvwxYZ. Copy that whole line somewhere safe, like a notes app, you'll need to paste it in Step 3. Treat it like a password, anyone holding it can control your bot.
• Step 2, find your numeric user ID. Same idea: search for userinfobot in Telegram, open the chat with @userinfobot, and tap "Start". It replies instantly with a plain number, something like 123456789. That number is your ID, not your @username. Copy it too. Hermes uses this number as an allowlist so that only you, and nobody who happens to find your bot's username, can ever talk to it. Worth being extra careful here, since this bot will eventually see your money.
• Step 3, run the setup wizard. Back in your terminal, paste this and press Enter: hermes gateway setup It will ask you questions one at a time: which platform (choose Telegram), then your bot token (paste the long string from Step 1), then your allowed user ID (paste the number from Step 2). Just answer each question and press Enter to move to the next.
• Step 4, start the gateway. Paste this and press Enter: hermes gateway Your bot wakes up within seconds. Open its chat on Telegram and send it a message just to see it respond. Want it running permanently, even after you restart your computer? Paste this instead: hermes gateway install That turns it into a background service that starts on its own, so you don't have to remember to run hermes gateway every time.

Part 3 · Adding the Wallet by BudgetBakers MCP

Now for the piece that turns this from "a bot that chats" into "a bot that actually knows your finances." Wallet by BudgetBakers runs an official remote MCP server, a fancy way of saying "a secure door that lets Hermes read and update your Wallet data." Getting it connected means adding a few lines to a settings file. It looks more intimidating than it is, just follow along exactly.

• Step 1, open the settings file in a simple built-in editor. In your terminal, paste this and press Enter: nano ~/.hermes/config.yaml This opens the file inside nano, a plain text editor that lives right inside your terminal. Don't worry, you can't break anything permanently here.
• Step 2, go to the very end of the file. Use your down arrow key to scroll all the way to the last line. You're only adding new lines here, not deleting anything already there.
• Step 3, type or paste this exactly as shown. This part matters: YAML (the format of this file) cares about spacing. Use the spacing exactly as below (2 spaces per indent, never the Tab key), and don't add or remove any spaces: mcp_servers: wallet: url: "https://mcp.wallet.budgetbakers.com" auth: oauth
• Step 4, save and close. Press Ctrl + O (that's the letter O, not zero) to save, then press Enter to confirm the file name, then press Ctrl + X to exit back to your normal terminal.

Next, tell Hermes to actually connect using what you just added:

• Step 5, authorize it. Still in your terminal, paste this and press Enter: hermes chat Then, in the chat that opens, just type a message like "connect to my wallet" and press Enter. The first time it tries to reach Wallet, it opens a browser window asking you to log in. Wallet's login runs on email: type in the address linked to your Wallet account, check your inbox for a short verification code, and type that code into the page. Once approved, the page confirms you're connected, and you can close that browser tab and go back to your terminal.

Hermes remembers this login for next time, so you won't need to repeat Step 5 again unless you explicitly log out.

Running Hermes on a VPS with no screen or browser of its own? That login page still needs to open in an actual browser somewhere. Easiest fix: do this first-time authorization on your own laptop instead of the VPS, or forward the connection over SSH so the login page opens in your laptop's browser. If this doesn't mean anything to you, this is exactly the kind of step worth booking a call for, see below.

• Step 6, refresh Hermes' tool list. No restart needed. In the same chat, Telegram included, just send: /reload-mcp Hermes re-scans everything you've connected and picks up the Wallet tools: reading accounts, transactions, categories, labels, and budgets, plus creating and updating records, so your agent can log expenses for you, not just talk about them.

Part 4 · Taking it for a spin

Open your bot on Telegram and just talk to it, the way you'd talk to a person who happens to be very good with spreadsheets:

• 💬 "How much did I spend this month, broken down by category?"
• 💬 "Log a 450 rupee expense for groceries from my main account."
• 💬 "Am I on track with my food budget?"
• 💬 "What were my five biggest expenses last week?"
• 💬 "Compare my spending this month versus last month."

Since Hermes can transcribe voice memos automatically, you can even mumble an expense into your phone while walking out of the store. And because Hermes supports scheduled tasks, you can just ask it in chat to send you a spending summary every Sunday evening, and it will handle the rest. (Optional, for the more technical: this uses the TELEGRAM_HOME_CHANNEL setting in ~/.hermes/.env, editable with the same nano trick from Part 3 if you want to set it manually.)

🔧 If something doesn't cooperate

• Bot goes silent: double check TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN and glance at the gateway logs.
• "Unauthorized" message: your numeric ID is missing from TELEGRAM_ALLOWED_USERS. Confirm it again with @userinfobot.
• Wallet tools never show up: check the YAML indentation in config.yaml carefully, then send /reload-mcp once more.
• OAuth keeps failing: make sure the email you type matches your Wallet account exactly, and try finishing the flow on the same machine that has a browser.

Why this matters beyond money

Here's the thing worth sitting with. This setup isn't really about budgeting software. It's a template. A self-hosted agent, a messaging app you already live in, and MCP servers acting as secure bridges to your real data. The exact same pattern works for calendars, task managers, CRMs, anything that speaks MCP. Money just happens to be the highest-leverage place to start, because simply seeing your spending in plain language tends to change how you spend.

Got stuck somewhere along the way, or would rather have the whole thing configured for you in one sitting? Book a 1:1 call with me and we'll get it running together, live.