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by JC5 1481 days ago
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 twice. Once when you spend the money, and twice when you have to enter it.

Making you finances tangible is a very good way of spending less money. Importing all your shit just gives GIGO but with nicer graphics.
2 comments
sverhagen 1481 days ago
To ask something that now seems obvious... in your experience, doesn't that friction just drive people away from the program? That seems to me the natural response.
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JC5 1481 days ago
Firefly III is missing plenty of features (see below). I started Firefly III with a single user (me) and everything else is a bonus.

https://docs.firefly-iii.org/firefly-iii/about-firefly-iii/w...

I will admit that I caved under pressure and built the Firefly III Data Importer:

https://github.com/firefly-iii/data-importer

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Helmut10001 1481 days ago
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 owes whom how much. Also, I scan all my receipts and they are automatically renamed and moved based on patterns (paperless-ng).

I agree to your argument, seeing all your expenses in this way helps keeping a connection to how much is spend. I yet need to combine my two systems with firefly.

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jeffwass 1481 days ago
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?

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