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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

#131

Post by instagib »

jader201 wrote: post #65

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…

Bank of America has/had a setup to integrate all your accounts in one.

IIRC, it had some caveats like it could only be viewed or edited on desktop. Now it’s called “my financial picture” accessible on mobile. All of my account links are broken but it worked at one time and probably could again with some work. It was nice to be able to use one service to find a transaction or pending transaction I couldn’t remember how I paid for.

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

#132

Post by pimlottc »

Alifatisk wrote: post #57

I wish I could get data about my transactions through an api from my bank

I wish I could import my historical statements, is there any good tool for scraping transactions from PDF files? Maybe some kind of tweakable framework where you can customize for your institution's particular layout?

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

#134

Post by charcoalhobo »

plondon514 wrote: post #76
jader201 wrote: post #65

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…

After reading the comments in this thread I may consider open sourcing my side project porkybank.io. You can check out an example here: https://porkybank.io/example/overview It's a simple daily budgeting app I put together for my wife and I to help us be more cognizant of our daily spending. Upvotes count as interest.

This is pretty much exactly what I have been looking for, I do this with paper/pencil on our fridge.

If you don't open-source it, where is the data stored?

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

#135

Post by octobus2021 »

ebiester wrote: post #98
octobus2021 wrote: post #80

Help me understand, I must be dumb. If people seem to value privacy and security more so that they don't trust their data hosted at a third party, why are many of these are self-hosted Web apps as opposed to a simple desktop application? I'm not just talking about this particular one, just in general on the idea of replacing SaaS (like Mint) with self-hosted. What is self-hosting buying here? If it's installed on the…

The short of it is that nobody has cracked the free cross-OS problem in the same way as electron has. Lazarus requires pascal and is unattractive. JavaFX, afaik, still requires a jvm download to use, and the documentation is minimal. QT is expensive for anything that isn't OSS, and the tools are minimal if you are on the free plan. Most of the rest require C++ and most don't have a great default visual design. Electr…

I just find the idea of building a local application using Web tools very... counterintuitive. Just such a waste of resources. Isn't Electron one of the heavier frameworks? Think of all the resources used on your local machine just for one application and one user.

If you plan on sharing this data with other users, then sure, it makes perfect sense, you can't share stuff from desktop app (without standing up API or smth). But if it's some personal stuff, like finances, personal notes, etc etc why move it out to the open?

I tried Mint awhile ago and it offered seamless integration with most of the financial institutions I deal with. Like I can get all my CC transactions data, checking accounts, savings accounts, 401K and (almost) everything else. Wonderful. I just need to provide all credentials to Mint so that it can authenticate with these institutions.

My cell phone provider has been hacked 3 times in the last 5 years, with at least one time stuff like SSN numbers and physical addresses got taken. If anything remotely similar to that happens at the SaaS that has my credentials, that's not just my credit card and bad loans, that's my life savings that can disappear. That's just... a non-starter for me.

But I'm old and I guess younger folks don't care that much about life savings. To each their own :)

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

#136

Post by marcellus23 »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #97
Akashic101 wrote: post #70

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!

That’s not true. You can export transactions in a variety of formats, including CSV, the button is right below the button to export a PDF.

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

#137

Post by plondon514 »

charcoalhobo wrote: post #134
plondon514 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After reading the comments in this thread I may consider open sourcing my side project porkybank.io. You can check out an example here: https://porkybank.io/example/overview It's a simple daily budgeting app I put together for my wife and I to help us be more cognizant of our daily spending. Upvotes count as interest.

This is pretty much exactly what I have been looking for, I do this with paper/pencil on our fridge. If you don't open-source it, where is the data stored?

Right now just unmanaged postgres instance hosted on fly.io

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

#138

Post by octobus2021 »

brnt wrote: post #102
octobus2021 wrote: post #80

Help me understand, I must be dumb. If people seem to value privacy and security more so that they don't trust their data hosted at a third party, why are many of these are self-hosted Web apps as opposed to a simple desktop application? I'm not just talking about this particular one, just in general on the idea of replacing SaaS (like Mint) with self-hosted. What is self-hosting buying here? If it's installed on the…

Agreed completely. I've used Gnucash for a small business, but found it a bit to cumbersome for personal finance. I've had a look at Homebank, Eqonomize. Anyone use these?

In the same boat. I did use GnuCash for business as well, in my opinion that's its primary use case. I just found Eqnomize and will give it a spin, however it's not open source (?). Other than that... Seriously considering dusting off my old tools and starting something myself :)

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

#139

Post by brnt »

octobus2021 wrote: post #138
brnt wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed completely. I've used Gnucash for a small business, but found it a bit to cumbersome for personal finance. I've had a look at Homebank, Eqonomize. Anyone use these?

In the same boat. I did use GnuCash for business as well, in my opinion that's its primary use case. I just found Eqnomize and will give it a spin, however it's not open source (?). Other than that... Seriously considering dusting off my old tools and starting something myself :)

It's on Github, GPL licensed: https://eqonomize.github.io/

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

#140

Post by crashabr »

BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote: post #30
mr-karan wrote: post #29

While exploring some other self hosted/OSS personal finance tools, found https://github.com/actualbudget/actual to be a promising project too.

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.

Why did you stop using YNAB?
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