Firefly III
A personal finance manager with double-entry bookkeeping and rules
Firefly III records your accounts, transactions, budgets and bills using double-entry bookkeeping, and automates categorisation with rules. It is AGPL-3.0 licensed, built with PHP and Laravel, and pairs with a separate data importer.
Best for when
- you want a detailed history of every account and transaction
- you like rules that categorise transactions for you
- you track savings goals, bills and loans in one place
Watch out for
- double-entry concepts and the many options make the learning curve steep
- importing bank data needs the separate Data Importer and some setup
- it is largely maintained by one developer, so priorities follow that person
Detailed tracking of where money goes
Firefly III treats every transaction as money moving between accounts, which keeps balances honest across bank accounts, cash, credit cards and loans. Budgets, categories, tags, piggy banks for savings goals and recurring bills sit on top, with a rule engine that sorts new transactions automatically.
It suits people who want a full picture of their finances over years and do not mind some accounting vocabulary. A separate Data Importer tool reads CSV files and connects to some bank data providers.
What running it costs
It is a PHP application with MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL or SQLite. A few hundred megabytes of RAM covers it, plus a cron job for recurring tasks. The importer is a second container. Back up the database regularly, since years of financial history live there.
Keep it private: it holds your full financial life. Upkeep is mostly updates, though major versions sometimes change requirements such as the PHP version.
