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!
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.