Best practices

Depending on what financial application you're used to organizing your data with, you will find that Firefly III can be a little bit different.

This page tries to explain the most common use cases in transaction and financial management in Firefly III, and how to use the financial concepts Firefly III has.

See also the page organizing transactions which tells you what each field in a transaction can be used for.

Transaction management

A transaction is a single withdrawal or income or transfer between two accounts. Contrary to systems like GNUcash the opposing account is as simple as the name of a store or one or your asset accounts.

The description, source account, amount and destination account should tell you what the transaction is about, i.e. "14,95 EUR from Main Asset Account to Albert Heijn."

Extra information can be stored in the budget, category and tag fields of the transaction. You can also add notes, but they are only visible when you view the transaction itself.

Try to be descriptive, give transactions at least a budget so you have the grand scheme of things recorded.

How do I know how much I saved?

Firefly III does not have "buckets" like zero-based budgeting does. As a rule, the money in your asset or savings accounts is not "divided" like that. However, you can create piggy banks which is actually the "buckets" you might be looking for.

Create a piggy bank for a specific target or goal, with or without an upper limit and connect it to your savings account. Any new money then sent to your savings account is then ready to be divided over these piggy banks.

Money in piggy banks is not subtracted from your total balance, or blocked from spending or anything like that. If you divide your money over piggy banks you won't see a balance of zero, for example.

How do I know how much I can spend?

Use budgets. Make sure the amount of money on your bank account is the same as you have budgeted. If you budget for a total of € 2000,-, start the month with that amount in your account. Or if not, budgets are the way to track your expenses.