Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

It’s fairly detailed. One issue is that matching refunds to line items can be ambiguous.

I have a side project that does a best effort match, when I get around to completing it I’ll publish it. If you build it before me please share :)

However, I'd like to understand how you ended up where you are. How'd you somehow end up so burned by zero-based or envelope-based budgeting? FWIW, I've come from a traditional budgeting method and migrated to a zero-based and both can work.

> But also keep in mind: it's harder to spend less money with zero-based budgeting.

I'd argue the opposite is a problem with traditional budgeting methods: you're budgeting money you don't yet have. Yes, you might get it, but you don't until you have it. More importantly, how? How is it harder to spend less?

> It's harder to get a feeling for your financial situation with zero-based budgeting [..]

What? With envelope-based budgeting the colloquial jobs that your money has must be defined. You have to acknowledge exactly what you have and what you don't have, because you can't play with imaginary money. If you don't have enough money to put aside for rent next month, you know you don't have that money or you're not willing to spend it.

How?

> it's especially harder to change anything

In my own experience, when it's hard to change your budget with envelope-based budgets it's usually because you're constrained in your money. The exception to this has been financial investments: you can use tools like YNAB for it, but they're not created for forecasting or any of that stuff -- you're here for your here and now.

In a way, I think you're absolutely correct that it's harder to change anything, but not because the method is wrong; it's because it addresses the fundamental issue of traditional budgeting and it's difficult and tough to deal with the consequences: you can only budget the money you actually have. You can't make up numbers about what a month usually looks like.

If you want to feel safe about next month's rent, the only way is to have next month's rent budgeted. Thus, isn't harder better if harder is actual change as opposed to imaginary?

I am left with a sour taste that you not only decide to talk about things like paycheck to paycheck, but also combine it with a conclusion that says:

> Use Firefly III. Use GnuCash. Use anything from this list. But skip the zero-based nonsense.

I think you'd be better off acknowledging the different audiences more-so than categorising zero-based budgeting as nonsense.

I'm not even going to touch the question of recommending someone to use GnuCash as an alternative to zero-based budgeting.

And for what I use it just works. I don't have any complains, docs are good, plenty of tutorial available and it is easy enough to setup and update (I don't use docker for it). I can't ask more of a software tbh.

[1]: https://docs.firefly-iii.org/how-to/firefly-iii/features/rul...

Do you see any major drawback comparing to YNAB4?