A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Paperless-ngx, Firefly III, and n8n are all awesome tools. However, I think connecting Paperless to Firefly via n8n will be very difficult to grab the correct date and amount. What if there is no receipt or the receipt is sent via email? Also, Paperless sometimes gets the wrong date for me, such as when there are multiple dates or the print isn't clear.
If you're using a card to pay, I recommend downloading .qfx files from your bank and uploading those to Firefly instead.
or the receipt is sent via email Paperless can automatically ingest e-Mails. I agree on the rest though.
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.
Paperless-ngx does include OCR, as well as supporting document types (which can have fields, etc) - but there is no built-in way to intelligently extract field values. You can use the python API to access & update the data and fields. So field extraction via your own code is feasible.
Given the large variety in receipt layout & potential for habdwritten totals after tips - I'd encourage part of your workflow to include manual ispection/correction of every processed receipt - or at the bare minimum that you include check-in points where you verify your end balances 100% match after all transactions have been entered, so you can detect & root-cause errors ASAP.
Well that is something i also have read online. Thats the reason why i think of using n8n
Thats the workflow which should be feasible. i think i have brainstormed with ki (say what you want) and i think thats the plan i try to implement first.
You can try ofc, but OCR isn't perfect. Sometimes mistakes an 8 for a 6 or the like. Just keep that in mind, depending on what's your goal.
or should I consider other software?
Unfortunately I had similar thoughts and plans that you outline here(receipt scanning into budgeting), but the amount of work involved was...too much for my liking.
I instead opted for a paid solution, which is Monarch: https://www.monarch.com/
It's $100 a year, but they have a promotion(they always run promotions), where you can do your first year for 50% off with code: NEWYEAR2026
So far my wife and I have been loving Monarch. We linked our bank accounts and other financial institutions(401k, brokerages, IRAs, etc.) and everything mostly "just works". There is an odd time or two where a bank account needs to be re-signed into to re-auth because token/api expired/changed, but again, the app works and does things well.
I'd suggest looking into it. I'm usually a huge proponent of self-hosting everything, but this is one of the few things I caved on...
Anything like monarch but for European banks?
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).
I've been hosting my own firefly iii instance for a couple years now. It has its quirks but overall it's a great home finance option. Better than some others I've tried.
As an example, the creator is adamantly against future transactions and projecting future transactions. There's the ability to create "recurring" transactions and the app has a daily cron that will create the recurring transactions on the day they're supposed to hit. I for one want to see these future transactions and want those to show up about a month early. To do this I have to spoof a cron job to make the app think it's creating recurring transactions for 30 days from today. This works well enough to show my balances for the future.
I like it has a pretty nice API that you can hook I to from your own apps.
I wrote an importer app that uses Plaid to connect to my bank accounts and credit cards and it gives me the option to categorize transactions and import them into firefly. It's made managing my finances incredibly simple. I used to spend hours on the weekend manually importing transactions from the previous week. Now I have something that I can tab through in a matter of minutes and see everything.
Huh. Well that fucks with my current GNUCash workflow of having transactions months in advance. Does Firefly do budgets well?
yeah if you want that same functionality of months in advance transactions - you'll have to create a similar solution with the cron job i mentioned.
Budgets work well enough. They allow you to create any number of budget "buckets" - and each can be configured in various ways:
You can even have different periods - daily, weekly, monthly, yearly - though I've only ever used monthly.
When you create transactions you assign them to a budget and it shows you how much you have left in that budget
Nice. Does it do projections with budgets? Like how is my savings account going to be in 6 months after putting in X$ every month?
potentially relevant: paperless recently merged some opt-in LLM features, like chatting with documents and automated title generation based on the OCR context extracted.