Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefly III: A free and open-source finance manager

firefly-iii.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 135 posts

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

#111

Post by equinoxmist »

scotttopic wrote: post #36
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 look at this from the opposite perspective. Seven years of YNAB4 trained me to include manual entry of every transaction, assigning categories, splitting it as necessary, etc right there at the moment I make the purchase. It's baked into my process, as that was one of the core components that the old YNAB taught. At this point I could never trust an automated system for everyday purchases, where it couldn't accurat…

I thought this would be a problem for me and resisted using imports in YNAB... I changed to using it and I found I was more likely to actually keep on top of my budget knowing I didn't have to login to 2/3 different systems to start entering every transaction.

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

#113

Post by JC5 »

henrydark wrote: post #112

Is double-entry still needed? I feel that it muddles storage logic with business logic. If it's an error-detecting raid1 storage system, can't we just use raid1 storage configurations separately from the application?

Technically speaking, it's not really necessary. It does help to validate database consistency, because the sum of all transactions is zero.

It also prevents you (from an architectural perspective) to pull money out of thin air. If you create an account with 1000 on it from the start, there has to be a source for that money. That account is hidden and invisible, but will have a balance of -1000. It may look like nothing, but it helps to keep things in check.

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

#114

Post by RedShift1 »

henrydark wrote: post #112

Is double-entry still needed? I feel that it muddles storage logic with business logic. If it's an error-detecting raid1 storage system, can't we just use raid1 storage configurations separately from the application?

I learned both single and double entry bookkeeping and double entry just makes much more sense.

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

#115

Post by sirsinsalot »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #58
sirsinsalot wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, a windows installer (or RPM) that doesn't require a background process so that more people can access the value of the software. Even Flatpak or something if we are talking Linux specific. Having Docker and other "enthusiast" methods of running software makes it less accessible. Having a web-stack as the goto method of writing software doesn't make sense if it limits the audience that would gain value from it…

But that approach doesn't work if you intend for people to be able to access it from their mobile app, multiple PCs, etc. Slapping a web server into a local desktop install and calling it good basically removes the vast majority of benefits of it being a web app.

You can have your cake and eat it here. If you're packaging a "web app" for local installation, you typically have a webserver sufficient for SoHo in your app. In our case, you have "]$ myapp" which runs a web view UI, local process and sqlite db.

But you can also launch it with "--serve" options to access it through a web browser and expose it on a network, with sqlite local disk database.

You can also launch with "--db=postgresql://postgres@dbhost:5432/postgres?sslmode=disable" to run it against a postgresdb.

A bit of work on the "how it runs" aspects can give great flexibility and usability for single-user cases.

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

#116

Post by rco8786 »

scotttopic wrote: post #36
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 look at this from the opposite perspective. Seven years of YNAB4 trained me to include manual entry of every transaction, assigning categories, splitting it as necessary, etc right there at the moment I make the purchase. It's baked into my process, as that was one of the core components that the old YNAB taught. At this point I could never trust an automated system for everyday purchases, where it couldn't accurat…

> For example, take a trip to Walmart where you purchased things that cross like 3 or 4 categories.

I'm still waiting for the next step in these apps, where I connect my account to Walmart/Amazon/Target/etc and it can do item/category breakdowns automatically based on the actual line items in the order.

Otherwise, I am with you. I use a much simpler system without categories but I manually enter every dollar I spend right when I spend it.

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

#117

Post by xur17 »

tjbiddle wrote: post #105
jonhohle wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Meh - $100/year. I'm happy to support a small developer for a great product.

That was my thought as well. I normally resist subscriptions, but given how much effort I went through each month to get my spreadsheet setup to work, it seems well worth it.

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

#118

Post by Karawebnetwork »

TheDong wrote: post #66
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}…

> Let's just say it is hard to trust a piece of software with my financial data after this. 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.…

Very much fair.

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

#119

Post by jeffwass »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #101
JC5 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This depends on how you look at financing and budgeting (duh). But Firefly III was originally designed (by me) to lower your running expenses. It doesn't feature a lot cool budget automation because that leads to more charts but less money. The original idea was to make it hard (or at least with some friction) to create transactions. This also excluded any way of importing data. That way you feel your transactions tw…

Nice, came here to says thanks for the explanation! I was following Firefly III since a couple of years, already installed a test version on a local VM. I set up auto-pull for 2 of my 6 bank accounts, this did not work well (some transactions were missing, e.g. credit cards). I haven't found the time to proceed deeper. For my partner and me, I keep an OpenOffice spreadsheet were I enter all expenses, so we know who o…

Can you clarify what you mean by scanning receipts?

Do you scan (presumably photo with phone?) and then autodetermine the cost and maybe even some sub-category breakouts?

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

#120

Post by BbzzbB »

bern4444 wrote: post #52
BbzzbB wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I listened to a talk by YNAB's creator last year (about development not the program itself). Didn't realize until this thread how popular it is.

Can you share a link to the talk? Would enjoy listening to it

Of course! As I recall the morale of the story is "just get started". The site started with an Excel spreadsheet he was selling to his neighbors haha.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jw8N7YrBM4o

Post reply on HN