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How to use piggy banks

Firefly III features "piggy banks". Piggy banks are a way to divide a savings account in a number of parts, and divide the money among these parts. You can read more about them on the page that explains piggy banks.

Piggy banks can be managed from the /piggy-banks page on your installation.

Create a piggy bank

It's always a good idea to keep piggy banks on a dedicated savings account. Let's assume you have one, with €500 on it.

Click on "Create a new piggy bank" on the /piggy-banks page.

The screen to create a piggy bank is pretty straight forward.

Enter some details for this piggy bank. The amount is not mandatory, but useful. Here's an example:

  • Name: New camera
  • Target amount: €300

You can save some notes (like a link to the camera webshop) and add attachments if you want to. Use the "group" field to group piggy banks together. This is useful if you have a lot of piggy banks.

Manage the piggy banks

Here are three piggy banks I made:

The three piggy banks from the example are listed in Firefly III as you can see here.

I can use the [+] and [-] buttons to add or remove money from these piggy banks. That way I can divide the money on my savings account between the three goals I have.

On the bottom of the page, it shows you how much money you have left on your savings account. You can't add more money to your piggy banks than you have on your savings account.

You can see I have divided almost all my savings over these three piggy banks.

Adding money to or removing money from piggy banks

Apart from the [+] and [-] buttons, you can also link transfers to a piggy bank. The amount of the transaction will be automatically added to, or removed from the piggy bank.

When you create a transfer, you can select a piggy bank from the available list.

  • If the piggy bank is linked to the destination account of the transfer, the money from the transaction will be added to then piggy bank.
  • If the piggy bank is linked to the source account of the transfer, the money will be removed from the piggy bank.

The transfer will always be created. If the piggy bank is full, the piggy bank will not be changed. In other cases, the money will be added until the piggy bank is filled up. Any money left will still be transferred, but will not be added to a piggy bank.

That's it! Would you like to know more?