firefly-iii

Firefly Mark III is a new version of Firefly built upon best practices and lessons learned from building Firefly. It's Mark III since the original Firefly never made it outside of my laptop and Firefly II is live.

Changes

Firefly III will feature:

• Double-entry bookkeeping system;
• Better budgeting tools;
• Better financial reporting;
• More control over other resources outside of personal finance
  • Accounts shared with a partner (household accounts)
  • Debts
  • Credit cards
• More robust code base (mainly for my own peace of mind);
• More test-coverage (aka: actual test coverage);

More features

• Firefly will be able to split transactions; a single purchase can be split in multiple entries, for more fine-grained control.
• Firefly will be able to join transactions.
• Transfers and transactions will be combined into one internal datatype which is more consistent with what you're actually doing: moving money from A to B. The fact that A or B or both are yours should not matter. And it will not, in the future.
• The nesting of budgets, categories and beneficiaries will be removed.
• Firefly will be able to automatically login a specified account. Although this is pretty unsafe, it removes the need for you to login to your own tool.

Not changed

• Firefly will not encrypt the content of the (MySQL) tables. Old versions of Firefly had this capability but it sucks when searching, sorting and organizing entries.

Current state

I barely have the basics up and running and test coverage is doing very good. I have some good ideas about user configuration and preferences which was a huge pain in the butt with the previous Firefly.

Current problems include proper time-based navigation (how and when to switch to the next month, previous week, etc) and the best way to display your current financial state, which is something that still needs thinking.

The problem is that most peoples finances are very flexible and Firefly can be pretty static. For example, did you spend all your money? Or do you have money left? Good question: when your rent is due at the 1st of the month Firefly might think you've spent way too much. But marking it as some kind of "bill" will make Firefly ignore it, but it might make Firefly forget that you've got bills coming! So there's a lot to do, and a lot to fix.

If you have an idea, let me know!