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Self-Hosted Document & Budgeting Automation: Paperless-ngx, Firefly III, and n8n – Good Idea? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 4 days ago by MIXEDUNIVERS@discuss.tchncs.de to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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Hi everyone, I’ve recently taken an interest in self-hosted solutions for document management and budgeting, specifically Paperless-ngx, Firefly III, and n8n. A bit about me: I run a Proxmox server with a freshly set up Docker LXC container. I’m still quite new to all this, but i am infected with the homelab fever.

After spending hours on Google, I’ve come across a few services that caught my eye:

Paperless-ngx: A tool for scanning and organizing all my receipts, invoices, and documents in a searchable database.

Firefly III: A budgeting app with lots of cool features. My goal is to use it to get a better overview of my finances.

n8n: To automate the process, because I know I’m lazy and won’t keep up with manual data entry for long.

My idea: I want to scan receipts and invoices, store them in Paperless-ngx, use OCR to extract the text, total amount, and maybe even individual items, and then pass that data to Firefly III via n8n.

My questions:

Does anyone have experience with these tools? Is this a good approach, or should I consider other software?

I’ve seen that n8n is getting a lot of hype, but also has some critical, glaring issues. Is it still a good choice for this kind of automation?

Are there any tutorials or blog posts out there that cover a similar setup? I haven’t found much online. Are there any additional Docker containers I should consider, like a dedicated AI container or a special database? I have only a weak Intel I5 7th Gen PC.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, experiences, or any concerns you might have about this project. If you know someone who has done something similar, or if there’s a hidden tutorial I’ve missed, please let me know!

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[–] Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 4 days ago

First my context: I'm also running multiple Proxmox hosts (personal and professional), and havea paperless-ngx instance (personal/family). I tried Firefly, but the effort required to get it to a point where it would be if use to me was too high, so I dropped it. Haven't used n8n.

For the setup I'd just use the Proxmox community scripts, if you haven't heard of them. Makes updates trivial and lowers the bar to just trying something to basically zero.

Paperless-ngx I actually use, cause it means I can find something when i need it. It's all automatically ocr'd and all you have to do is categorize them. With time, it'll learn and do this for you. You can (manually) setup your scanner to just directly upload files to the "consume" folder and it just works. PC/server power is near irrelevant, it just means OCR takes slightly longer, otherwise it's a web server. You can run this just fine on a raspberry pi.

I don't have any real automation setup, so I can't really comment on that. My advice is to just install it, see what it does and how it feels. Try to anticipate if and how much automation you need. Many aspects of all this are of the "setup once" variety, where once it's working, you don't have to touch it again. Try to gauge if the one time effort is worth it for you, then go from there. As I said, it was fine for paperless for me, but not for Firefly (but I might need to revisit this).