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

Firefly III: A free and open source personal finance manager

firefly-iii.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 160 posts

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

#51

Post by junto »

leononame wrote: post #32
optimal-choices wrote: post #21

Looks good! However, if you need multi-currency support, I'd recommend checking out HomeBank. Multi-currency is one of those weird things, where if you actually need it your options are much more limited, but it also feels weird to keep asking financial software developers to keep implement a niche-ish feature. Anyway, it's good to have options. https://www.gethomebank.org/en/index.php

Multi currency is the one thing every app I try keeps getting wrong. It's not about calling an API for conversion rates, it's about tracking each thing at its currency and being able to convert at price/at cost. I'm hacking together my own scripts on top of beancount at the moment but I'd love an actual double entry accounting app that can handle multiple currencies (and auto import from my European bank account idea…

In Germany I’m required to convert the currency to EUR based on the transaction date against an official exchange rate: https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Web/DE/Themen/Steuern... for tax returns. I imagine that each country has their own rules.

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

#52

Post by mratsim »

brokenengineer wrote: post #44
JC5 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference isn't very big, but I honestly (I wrote that page) believe that the difference is worth pointing out.

I struggle to read that page without wanting to ask follow-up questions. I know it's your personal opinion about finance, and I'm not actually expecting you to change your mind from these questions. 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-base…

> 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.

You can predict what your month will look like based on your rent, utilities and how expensive are your groceries from the past months.

The unpredictable is accident and sickness but that's what insurances and emergency funds are for.

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

#53

Post by cmbothwell »

leononame wrote: post #33
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.

Does actual support tracking assets in different currencies and split transactions? I'm hacking together a tool for myself that fits my needs, but I'd really be in the market for something that could replace gnucash or beancount for me

I am also hacking my own tool together for exactly this reason - multi-currency is one of those things that is absolutely essential if you need it, but is often ignored by a lot of these solutions.

Check out this amazing article that helped me: https://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/tutorial.ht...

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

#54

Post by plondon514 »

hysan wrote: post #10

Any recommendations for a self-hosted finance tracker that supports multiple users who share bank accounts? I don’t think I need a budgeting tool? Ideally, what I want is a simple to use tool that will let me add my expenses, categorize them, and view breakdowns of where I’ve spent money each week/month/year. Does firefly work well for that?

I built https://porkybank.io for my wife and I for this very purpose

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

#55

Post by zrail »

h05sz487b wrote: post #20
neilv wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Amazon orders in GnuCash, I've been idly thinking about making a browser plugin that scrapes the Amazon order page, since that's less likely to be cut off than a standalone scraper is. How I'm currently manually doing Amazon orders in GnuCash is I go to the register for account "Liabilities > Credit Cards > Chase-CC-1234", and add a transation with description, say, "2024-02-16 Amazon order 113-1234567890-987654…

For Amazon I sometimes have items grouped differently in the order overview on Amazon itself then in the credit card charge. That makes it quite tedious to actually find out what charge goes where.

Amazon's transaction engine is bananas. I've seen it split an order for multiple items across two unequal card transactions. Try reconciling that without parsing every single invoice page.

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

#56

Post by BOOSTERHIDROGEN »

shric wrote: post #43
BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote: post #30

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?

I just start fresh from start.

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

#58

Post by lakomen »

Alifatisk wrote: post #57

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

Yes, but idk where you are, in the EU we have this PSD2 rule or law, which adds 2FA to every action, not just transaction, making it impossible to automate and forcing you to use a 3rd party service, which costs about 30€ / month of you'd like to automate.

Before PSD2, at least German banks had a free api one could automatically query.

The EU claims it's done because of "security".

Essentially corruption.

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

#59

Post by ta1243 »

lakomen wrote: post #58
Alifatisk wrote: post #57

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

Yes, but idk where you are, in the EU we have this PSD2 rule or law, which adds 2FA to every action, not just transaction, making it impossible to automate and forcing you to use a 3rd party service, which costs about 30€ / month of you'd like to automate. Before PSD2, at least German banks had a free api one could automatically query. The EU claims it's done because of "security". Essentially corruption.

Your bank and your implementation can use TOTP just fine while meeting a 2FA requirement.
Post reply on HN