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Firefly III: A free and open-source finance manager

firefly-iii.org

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Re: Firefly III: A free and open-source finance manager

#81

Post by jonhohle »

tjbiddle wrote: post #76
emiller88 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I've found https://lunchmoney.app/ really nice.

I'm a hugeeee LunchMoney fan. It's a solo dev and she does great! Hooked a few friends on it as well. This has been a lifesaver for insight into my financials and it's super flexible.

Bummer that it’s subscription only.

I switched from a decade old spreadsheet to YNAB. Then it went subscription and online only. It relied on the Adobe Air runtime which stopped working in macOS several years ago (32-bit only).

I haven’t looked at firefly yet, but I really want something that allows me to forecast expenses, and realize them as they occur and automatically adjust forecasts accordingly.

Re: Firefly III: A free and open-source finance manager

#82

Post by jlokier »

Semaphor wrote: post #77
toyg wrote: post #11

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 always fail to see how that actually works (edit: I mean the auto importing of transactions). My 3 biggest non-recurring expenses are Amazon, REWE (German supermarket chain) and PayPal. While REWE is mostly groceries, it certainly isn’t all, Amazon could be almost anything and PayPal could be absolutely anything. Do people just give up on granularity, or how does it work?

When I last did some bookkeeping of Amazon expenses, I fetched the detailed purchase history from Amazon (when available) as well as extracting data from the emails received by the person who purchased items. Similarly with some other suppliers. This undoubtedly saved on some manual data entry.

Re: Firefly III: A free and open-source finance manager

#83

Post by Larrikin »

Semaphor wrote: post #77
toyg wrote: post #11

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 always fail to see how that actually works (edit: I mean the auto importing of transactions). My 3 biggest non-recurring expenses are Amazon, REWE (German supermarket chain) and PayPal. While REWE is mostly groceries, it certainly isn’t all, Amazon could be almost anything and PayPal could be absolutely anything. Do people just give up on granularity, or how does it work?

Budgeting tools work best when you're checking them regularly, so you should have a basic idea of what you bought even if you lost the physical receipt.

YNAB offers the ability to split transactions over different categories so categorizing an Amazon purchase is trivial.

In the case of physical receipts you can enter them before they are synced from your credit card and YNAB does a great job matching uncleared transactions back with the cleared ones.

Paypal purchases always have the merchant attached to them, so you should be able to differentiate them regardless of the budgeting app you use.

Re: Firefly III: A free and open-source finance manager

#84

Post by JC5 »

Karawebnetwork wrote: post #24

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}…

Apologies. Firefly III tracks the IP's you login with and warns you when a new one appears. For a demo site that gets slashdotted, that is less than convenient. The issue is fixed and the site is back up.

Re: Firefly III: A free and open-source finance manager

#85

Post by JC5 »

__michaelg wrote: post #27

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.

I built a new website, should be up in a few minutes (CDN etc)

Re: Firefly III: A free and open-source finance manager

#86

Post by JC5 »

XorNot wrote: post #69

When I tried this after importing data and setting things up for a bit through the web UI, I somehow managed to get the database into an invalid state and it broke. For finance, you need simple and obvious recovery and this just doesn't have it.

Is there a thread on GitHub somewhere? Can I help?

Re: Firefly III: A free and open-source finance manager

#88

Post by Semaphor »

Larrikin wrote: post #83
Semaphor wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always fail to see how that actually works (edit: I mean the auto importing of transactions). My 3 biggest non-recurring expenses are Amazon, REWE (German supermarket chain) and PayPal. While REWE is mostly groceries, it certainly isn’t all, Amazon could be almost anything and PayPal could be absolutely anything. Do people just give up on granularity, or how does it work?

Budgeting tools work best when you're checking them regularly, so you should have a basic idea of what you bought even if you lost the physical receipt. YNAB offers the ability to split transactions over different categories so categorizing an Amazon purchase is trivial. In the case of physical receipts you can enter them before they are synced from your credit card and YNAB does a great job matching uncleared transa…

Oh, yeah, it is easy, that’s what I do. Sorry, I was unclear, I meant the automatic importing of transactions. If you have to go through them anyway, there does not seem to be much saved.

Re: Firefly III: A free and open-source finance manager

#89

Post by neilv »

toyg wrote: post #11

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.

Open source GnuCash can also fetch data.

(Personally, rather than fetch, I save OFX or QFX files from each US financial institution periodically. So that I can import them now into GnuCash, and also potentially import them into some other tool maybe decades into the future.)

Re: Firefly III: A free and open-source finance manager

#90

Post by JC5 »

toyg wrote: post #11

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.

There is the Firefly III Data Importer though?

https://github.com/firefly-iii/data-importer/

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