hledger VS Firefly III

A simple TUI to view various financial reports of your personal finances. Uses hledger[1] under the hood for the accounting stuff.

[1]: https://hledger.org

For historical interest (though to compare you really need to work with them over a period of time), here's a thousand line [Makefile](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/2d35b1051/Makef...) that was converted to a [Justfile](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/43c93eb37/Justf...). And here's the kind of template I used for multicommand shell scripts when trying those ([ft](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/43c93eb37/bin/f...), [tt](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/43c93eb37/bin/t...)).

I'm surprised that there is no mentions of a great hacker-friendly plain-text accounting software called `ledger` https://ledger-cli.org/ in this thread. It has amazing documentation when it comes to understanding basic principles of double-entry bookkeeping and goes through many typical situations and usecases. There are also several forks, most popular and advanced is `hledger` https://hledger.org/ (h is for Haskell), which provides some neat features out of the box, such as a simple web interface. All of them are very primitive compared to "professional" accounting software, but in return it offers great opportunities for hacking around while ensuring validity of your books.

I've been using hledger[1] - similar tool but has more features like balance sheet, income statement generation with a plain text file for the last 3 years and it's been working out great. Before that I used iBank (rebranded as Banktivity) and don't miss it at all.

[1] - https://hledger.org

I can offer this (warning, crufty real-world scripts ahead!): these [make](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Makefil...) [files](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Makefil...) and this [bash script](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/a3c300b/bake) have been replaced by this roughly equivalent [Justfile](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Justfil...) (some old things were commented out, some new things were added).

I'm only a few weeks in, and just has its own learning curve, but I'm very pleased overall. Cognitive load is down, usability is up, robustness is up.

I use Firefly III (https://firefly-iii.org). It's a self-hosted web app which is nice for me because I tend to use it from my phone most of the time. It does have a pretty extensive API, perhaps not as easy to do bulk edits as a text file, but should be fairly straightforward. It also has a rule system that could be used to do bulk edits too.

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 it does work.

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

"Add cron to the docker image for recurring transactions #2170" firefly-iii GitHub Repository Issue

Not SQL, but check out the contents of the database folder. For example:

https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii/blob/main/databas...

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

Has anyone tried https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii? It seems to be under active development but it always makes me nervous when the vast majority of updates come from one person. (What happens to the project when that person isn’t working on it anymore?)

Any HN users out there with experience with Firefly III (https://github.com/firefly-iii/firefly-iii)? Sounds interesting.