61–70 of 135 posts
I guess I'm really old school but I just have a spreadsheet for my budgeting, with formulas and charts I've written and maintained over the last 25 years. It's gone from old Microsoft formats (xls/xlsx) to ODS, to Gnumeric, back to ODS, and now I use Apple's Numbers since I have a Mac and an iPhone, and iCloud web works on pretty much any device with a browser I might have in front of me. If I do ever feel like ditch…
Looks good but the real problem, as for 90% of similar programs, is the volume of necessary data-entry. Paid-for options like YNAB, nowadays, can fetch transactions from many mainstream US/EU banks and credit providers. Without that sort of feature, it's a real drudge to keep up entering every single expense.
I've been using firefly over two years now. Data entry has not been been a problem: * Run the data-importer as a separate container. Takes maybe 20 minutes to configure correctly if you already know docker and docker-compose. * Download the transactions as CSVs from each of my 5 or so credit card and bank accounts that get regular use. * Upload them through the data-importer. It lets you configure and save settings f…
Looks good but the real problem, as for 90% of similar programs, is the volume of necessary data-entry. Paid-for options like YNAB, nowadays, can fetch transactions from many mainstream US/EU banks and credit providers. Without that sort of feature, it's a real drudge to keep up entering every single expense.
Once the transaction data is available, it is trivial to auto categorize it and create dashboards. I’ve blogged about my own process/tools for that here [2]
I recently discovered PocketSmith[0] which is not free nor open-source, but I have found it to be the easiest to keep up to date. It automatically pulls transactions from most banks and credit providers, which I've been unable to replicate with other solutions. [0]: https://www.pocketsmith.com/
It’s also one of the few that does a good job of forecasting balances.
Looks good but the real problem, as for 90% of similar programs, is the volume of necessary data-entry. Paid-for options like YNAB, nowadays, can fetch transactions from many mainstream US/EU banks and credit providers. Without that sort of feature, it's a real drudge to keep up entering every single expense.
I've been using firefly over two years now. Data entry has not been been a problem: * Run the data-importer as a separate container. Takes maybe 20 minutes to configure correctly if you already know docker and docker-compose. * Download the transactions as CSVs from each of my 5 or so credit card and bank accounts that get regular use. * Upload them through the data-importer. It lets you configure and save settings f…
It seems like someone or something has crashed the demo. It outputs an error log. Whoops! An error occurred. Unfortunately, this error was not recoverable :(. Firefly III broke. The error is: Could not save preference: SQLSTATE[22001]: String data, right truncated: 1406 Data too long for column 'data' at row 1 (SQL: update `preferences` set `data` = [{"ip":"00.000.00.00","time":"2022-05-30 20:02:06","notified":false}…
Definitely don't upload your real financial data to the shared hosted demo. I definitely wouldn't trust the demo with real data.
... but for the actual app, you run it locally on a server you control. You can add whatever form of auth in front of it, whether that's nginx basic auth, or requiring a client certificate, or so on. The app's designed with that in mind, with the user being a trusted person, so of course it's fine for it to dump sqlstate for you to debug.
Since this is AGPL free software, and self hosted, it's about as trustworthy as can be for putting data into it, and if you don't trust it yet, you can read the code and gain such trust.
Side note: If you need to say this: > (click on the icons for more information) then you almost certainly have an unintuitive design and know it, but instead of fixing it you just doubled down on it.
At my previous job, Symphony[0] chat was set up to launch at startup for all employees. I remember when the icons I call "Pyramid of Infinite Fun" and "Drone Strike" showed up in Symphony. There was no mouseover alt-text for the icons, and the Pyramid of Infinite Fun was right next to the icons for bold, italic, etc. text. So, people naturally clicked on the new icon a few times to see what it did, but it seemed to do nothing. The thing was, it caused a musical ding (like striking a musical triangle) for everyone else in the current Symphony room (channel), without any visual or auditory feedback for the person clicking the icon. So, being in Asia at the time, we heard waves of ringing noises from all over the trading floor when the London office got in. (Deployment of new versions was usually midnight NYC, so mid-day in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore, so the deployment for us was more gradual as people responded to notifications to restart Symphony to pick up the new version.) The sound was closer to a triangle than a bell, but I suspect the driver for using a triangle instead of the traditional bell icon was just to be perceived as making progress.
"Drone strike" was just the screen shot icon. However, it looked like a targeting reticle and showed up the same day as the Pyramid of Infinite Fun, so I was somewhat hesitant to try it out.
I recently discovered PocketSmith[0] which is not free nor open-source, but I have found it to be the easiest to keep up to date. It automatically pulls transactions from most banks and credit providers, which I've been unable to replicate with other solutions. [0]: https://www.pocketsmith.com/
For finance, you need simple and obvious recovery and this just doesn't have it.
Edit: not a shill, just happy. :) The killer feature for me is the event-driven budgeting: you load in your expenses and note when they occur, and MoneyWell figures out how much to allocate to the corresponding envelope automatically. So nice. Anyone else know of another PF system that does that?