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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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[–] redxef@feddit.org 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I use fireflyiii and paperlees-ngx. I did exactly what you plan to do with concourse-ci instead of n8n. I'm not extracting as much data from the receipts yet - was too lazy to implement it.

I basically have a receipts document type on paperless and a "imported" tag. Querying for all receipts which don't have the imported tag and then creating transactions in firefly with a reference to the paperless document. The imported transaction gets two tags one to denote that it was automatically imported and one that gets removed once i manually verified the import.

Since I only scan my receipts with my phone the ocr job of paperless doesnt do too good of a job so I cant really automate more than that yet, maybe I'll get a scanner for that.

If you like I can share my concourse pipeline.