Firefly III: An open-source personal finance manager | Hacker News Reader

Firefly III: An open-source personal finance manager

github.com

102 pointsVentureHawk13 comments

The documentation seems really light on what I would consider the most important feature: automatic transaction importing.

Having previously used F3, there is a separate importer app that will load data from a few different formats and import it in. The kind of things you can export from your bank web site. I went so far as to script selenium to download the data from my bank, but it would constantly break because my bank did some silly things with cookies. There's not much support for any sort of automatic importing directly from your bank, which was the reason I stopped using it and went to Actual Budget, which supports SimpleFIN linking to tons and tons of different accounts. I remember there were a few different threads to get similar support in Firefly but they didn't seem to get much traction.

F3 is very cool and powerful, though it's also strongly opinionated. I used it for about a year and ultimately it didn't click for, but it really hits the spot for a lot of people.

Afaik the maintainer has a semi-firm position on the tool being intended for the manual import of transactions.

There is, however, the third party firefly-fints-importer[1] which I'm running without any issues.

[1] https://github.com/bnw/firefly-iii-fints-importer

It looks like FinTS is a Euro thing? I didn’t find any of my US banks on the list of FinTs banks. Anyone know of a tool that does auto import for US banks?

All the banks on the list linked in the repo are German so this does not seem to be an international standard.

SimpleFIN is not free but it's very cheap ($1.50/mo, cheaper annually) and has an easy to integrate API. I use it with Actual Budget after giving up on Firefly III because of data import issues and it supports every financial account I have. Annoyingly several of my upstream financial institutions force me to manually reauthenticate the connection every time I want to import data, but that's my banks being stupid and otherwise it works flawlessly.

Firefly III at one point was planning to support SimpleFIN as well but it seems to have dropped off the radar. https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii/issues/5396

Did anyone use Firefly III and was able to import/export from and to ledger/hledger format?

Seems only about budgeting, anyone know of something similar for investing? Mostly simple portfolio stats MoM/YoY?

I have been using a spreadsheet but it is really annoying

I use GNU cash [0]and it has support for securities. I’m on my phone now and couldn’t get a direct link to the corresponding man page to work, but you should be able to find it easily if you search for “Security Editor”.

[0]https://www.gnucash.org/docs.phtml

Checkout projectionlabs.com. Very powerful

I am not really interested in the product, so can't comment on that, but I want to give my 2c about logo, it gave me an uncomfortable feeling, which is not good for business. Piggy on fire is fine, I guess, but it's tail looks more like a hole with a disturbing shape.

wish it used sqlite instead.

it supports sqlite: https://docs.firefly-iii.org/references/faq/install/#i-want-...

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