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Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

firefly-iii.org

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

#5

Post by tdotdev »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #2

This looks like exactly the kind of thing I've been searching for! Curious about testimonials if anyone's used it

I self host it since Mint shutdown. It obviously doesnt have automatic integrations with financial institutions so you need to export/import manually or frankenstein your own automation.

There are a lot of things it does that I dont use. I am mostly there for spending visualization. It does that well, but it takes a lot of clicks to setup categorization rules, but once its done things happen automatically.

Its just a few minutes work to get it setup on docker. And i think it has a demo site that you can look around on to see what tools it has.

Its not perfect. But its good enough for me, for now.

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

#6

Post by sanjeetsuhag »

My biggest gripe with my Firefly workflow is how difficult it is to automatically handle Amazon orders. I’ve setup rules to automatically organize/label the various types of transactions that I export from banks to CSVs, but having to break down Amazon orders is a tedious nightmare. If anyone has any ideas for how to automate this, please share. One idea is to have Puppeteer just open the order page and get the invoice, but that doesn’t seem to secure to me, even if it’s on machine.

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

#7

Post by zargon »

The author has a weird take on zero based budgeting [0]. To me it seems like a distinction without a difference. I never did try Firefly because at first it wasn't very mature and then later I found Actual Budget, which is (or at least was) perfect. (I haven't transitioned to the open source version yet, so I'm not sure if they broke it.)

[0] https://docs.firefly-iii.org/explanation/firefly-iii/backgro...

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

#8

Post by Roadeo »

I've been using Firefly iii for about 3 years now. I use it with Waterfly iii [1] so anytime I get an SMS or notification from my bank about any kind of transaction, Waterfly automatically parses text from the notification and auto-fills transaction details like the amount, transaction title and date.

Makes it super easy to maintain proper history since you can instantly create transactions from your phone.

[1] https://github.com/dreautall/waterfly-iii

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

#9

Post by mdhowle »

zargon wrote: post #7

The author has a weird take on zero based budgeting [0]. To me it seems like a distinction without a difference. I never did try Firefly because at first it wasn't very mature and then later I found Actual Budget, which is (or at least was) perfect. (I haven't transitioned to the open source version yet, so I'm not sure if they broke it.) [0] https://docs.firefly-iii.org/explanation/firefly-iii/backgro...

I have been using the self-hosted ActualBudget for ~6 months and found it mostly perfect. The mobile version of the site is not complete but it's at least usable for managing transactions. The only drawback is no user accounts, but you can have multiple budgets.

I was originally on YNAB4, and then financier.io for ~2 years.

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

#10

Post by hysan »

Any recommendations for a self-hosted finance tracker that supports multiple users who share bank accounts? I don’t think I need a budgeting tool? Ideally, what I want is a simple to use tool that will let me add my expenses, categorize them, and view breakdowns of where I’ve spent money each week/month/year. Does firefly work well for that?
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