App usage

Firefly III is very flexible and that can leave people unsure about how they should organise things. By no means is this the only way to do, but here's my opinionated guide:

Daily usage

• Create asset accounts for everything: one for every family member, one for your savings, stocks broker etc.
• Don't create any revenue or expense accounts; that way they will be treated as "cash" and you'll have one less field to fill inside transactions
• Create your big, general categories: ex. Bills, Food, Fun, Transportation etc.
• Create your root tags with names identical to the categories above. This enables auto-selection of a tag when you pick a category and vice-versa.
• Create your child tags for granularity (ex. Electricity, Heating, Internet all under the parent tag Bills). It's a good idea to remember these names and use them with the assistant for super fast expense tracking
• Create a tag, name it "todo", and set the Mark as to-do field to Yes. Attach this tag to any transaction that needs later editing. Ex. You paid dinner for multiple people and some will give you the money back later. Or you buy multiple shoes and return some of them. All these transactions will show up on your Dashboard.
• Set the usual account from which you make payments in Settings -> Transactions -> Default form values -> Default source account
• Inside Firefly III create recurring transactionsfor all your subscriptions and transactions that repeat at fixed intervals [These are not yet implemented inside Firefly-Pico]
• Identify any transactions that you perform regularly but cannot be turned into Repeating transactions because of irregularities. Create templates for them. The assistant can easily handle them as well.
• For budgets you can setup "Rules" inside Firefly III. When a transaction is created, if it has a list of tags, asign it to your desiered budget.

On vacation:

• Create a new tag "vacation germany 2026" under a root tag "vacation".
• Create a new profile called "vacation"
• Configure Settings -> Transactions -> Default form values to use the foreign currency "Euro" and default tag "vacation germany 2026"
• Configure Settings -> Assistant -> Currency to "Euro" This way you can still use the assitant to create new transactions, write the amount in the actual local currency and have the "vacation germany 2026" tag added automatically so you can check your total spending when you get back

Mobile device.

Finally make the process of starting the app faster by installing the PWA:

• iOS open the app in Safari -> Share -> Add to Homescreen. The app will also show up in you iOS global search