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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

#131

Post by yencabulator »

rco8786 wrote: post #116
scotttopic wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It seems the companies are actively trying to avoid that.

Amazon order confirmation emails used to list the products. Now they don't. Some other company might use that information, so the user can't have it.

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

#132

Post by sirsinsalot »

plater wrote: post #109
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…

"a web application that comes with a Windows installer, macOS traditional installation and a Linux RPM". I'm curious; how do you implement this (I assume you do not use Electron)? Wouldn't a PWA (installed PWA) make the web app integrate the way you say with desktop icons, separate window, drag & drop etc?

The system predates the popularity of installable PWAs. It is basically an exec spawning a Qt Web view and a server process then the Web view connects to local host. Server process shuts down when the Qt UI is closed. The server process is just Java with a webserver lib.

The binary is built for those OS and installed via installers idiomatic for those systems.

It defaults to use a local sqlite backend but could use any rdbms. Simple really.

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

#133

Post by toyg »

Semaphor wrote: post #88
Larrikin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Categorizing is much, much faster than having to enter the transaction manually. It's also less error-prone.

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

#134

Post by toyg »

totetsu wrote: post #108
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.

What about cash transactions? I'm still searching for something that can efficiently OCR my receipts and extract a total and a store name automatically. (and in Japanese)

Cash is still an unsolved problem. Because receipts are so different, nobody has a solution for the OCR task. The best I've seen are expense-tracking apps for businesses that offer such a service for a fee - because they farm out the job to low-paid offshore workers with stuff like Amazon Mechanical Turk.

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

#135

Post by rco8786 »

yencabulator wrote: post #131
rco8786 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It seems the companies are actively trying to avoid that. Amazon order confirmation emails used to list the products. Now they don't. Some other company might use that information, so the user can't have it.

Yea I think that's the big challenge. Plaid has somehow cracked this code for banking data, is it possible for someone to do it with retail data?

edit Amazon does provide an Orders API that at a glance seems like it would work for this case, but there's probably some underlying restrictions I am unaware of. https://docs.developer.amazonservices.com/en_US/orders-2013-...

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