Live data from Hacker News

Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

firefly-iii.org

121–130 of 160 posts

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

#121
I mostly note down my transactions from my phone and https://moneymanagerapp.com/ has been working great for me.

It does let you start a webserver from your phone and use it on your desktop if you really have to, but the workflow is not ideal. It also does would not work if you need to track expenses of multiple people or want to automatically import expenses from your bank. It does allow you to export your data though. Backup and restore can be done via Google Drive.

Not OSS, and also paid(one time), but was totally worth it for me.

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

#122

With Mint being deprecated, I’ve been looking for something to replace it. I know there are a number of paid alternatives, but it seems like they all are missing at least one or two things that I liked about Mint. Is there an OSS option that comes close? Seems like the biggest hurdle is finding one that is close to reliable when authenticating with other sites (and able to adapt to changes they make, 2FA, etc.). I gu…

Actual Budget was a startup that didn't work out, so the founder open-sourced it. It's self-hosted at the moment (I think there are some 3rd parties you can spin up an instance on). My big hangup with it had been that it didn't automatically sync, but that's been fixed in NA and Europe (SimpleFin, a Plaid sync extension is in the works)

This is more a budgeting tool than a Financial analytics tool, but it'll sort and filter the data, and report features are being built out (They exist in the 'experimental' section)

https://actualbudget.org/

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefly kinda worked around this. You can download all transactions of your bank as a CSV, then use the Firefly importer to automatically map the data and save it inside Firefly. I usually do this once a week and it works pretty quickly, maybe a minute of work.

>You can download all transactions of your bank as a CSV Unless you have an Apple Card. I went to download last year's transactions and found out that they only allow you to download a PDF statement for each month!

Apple isn't known for inter-operating well with anything.

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

#125
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider SimpleFin Bridge [0] - it's essentially a wrapper around MX (Plaid competitor) that lets you very simply pull your own credit card/bank data for $15/yr. [0] https://beta-bridge.simplefin.org/

I checked it for many common German banks and it doesn't work.

Checkout GoCardless[1]. This is used in the Actual Budget[2] Project for bank sync in Europe.

[1] https://bankaccountdata.gocardless.com/overview/

[2] https://actualbudget.org

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

#126
post #40
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a day of trying to get it to work at all (tried through both the docker thing and the non-docker thing) and finally getting it to work. Then, the nexy time I try to start it, shit being broken again, I rage quitted and switched to hledger. I'm sure it is easy if you are in the webdev/devops world though.

What happened, exactly? The docker compose file and the associated files should work out of the box.

I am not sure, it would just throw errors when starting it back up, was a while ago by now.

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

#127
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any good paid ones, even, for Canadian institutions specifically? We have 4 credit cards and two chequing accounts plus mortgage etc at different institutions. It would be worth some small amount of money for me, especially for a desktop not SaaS solution, to get a unified view I can categorize, filter, sort, graph, etc.

BudgetSheet supports most US and Canadian banks: https://www.budgetsheet.com You can try it for free to see if it work for you first, and if you want to upgrade you can pay either monthly or annually. Disclaimer: I am the creator of BudgetSheet :)

Does it support Canadian credit cards?

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

#128
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks like a great tool. Not sure what the crystal ball does.

Thanks for the feedback, it's like a forecasting feature. Say you want to spend over budget today, you can see how that changes your daily budget 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, etc. out from today. Or let's say you plan on being frugal for the next few days and will spend only $20.00 over the next 3 days, by the 4th day your daily budget will adjust accordingly: https://imgur.com/a/hD9R2zv

What a great feature! I also had no idea what it meant so for UI/UX reasons I'd add some alt-text explaining that.

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

#129
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using this as a replacement for YNAB and I don't miss anything. After evaluating Firefly for six months, I would say its setup isn't easy.

How easy is it to move data from YNAB to this? i.e. transactions, categories and accounts?

It seems straightforward: https://actualbudget.com/docs/overview/migrating-from-other-...

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

#130
I tried Firefly for a year but I could not find a nice workflow with it.

It was a maintainability nightmare. Needed to run 2 instances for my girlfriend and myself. A third instance I think for automatic imports from my bank.

Every 2/3 months whenever the integration with the Spectre API needed to be reauthorized another docker container had to be ran just to hit a reauthorize button. And then it was a battle with duplicate transactions which I could manage to fix but I could never make my girlfriend understand.

Then there was weird philosophy on incoming money in a category. Let's say you have a €200 diner with 3 friends. You pay the whole bill and get €150 back from your friends later. Firefly would tell you you spend €200 euros on restaurants instead of just €50.

Happily back to Ynab now.

Post reply on HN