I have been running homebank for the last two years. It’s in the Debian repositories. It’s OK but is somewhat labour intensive and these days seems old fashioned.
I have all my accounts with the NAB and can download year to date files in various formats but mostly CSV and QIF. Homebank can categorise new data if there is a previous assignment of a traction for that entity to a particular category.
I was thinking that AI could probably write me an app to automate the downloading, updating and categorisation of the transactions and then produce reports as required (e.g. alcohol purchases year to date).
Firefly III looks interesting and a lot better than homebank. It is actively maintained and has at least a few contributors.
What is your experience with Firefly?
I was a big user of YNAB when it first came out and even into last year. It’s a good system for budgeting but it is a paid subscription. It was good if you could get it to draw from your bank but didn’t support many Australian banks.
Firefly III was going to be my next call but don’t really have a need right now. If Firefly has an API you can build a skill with an LLM that processes the downloaded statements (maybe OFX as it’s a good standard) and then input into Firefly for you with the right categories.
So I had a bit of a look around and realised I had completely missed the Consumer Data Right (CDR) ecosystem that kicked off in 2020.
For those like me who missed it Mistral Medium 3.5 says, inter alia:-
“Australia’s Consumer Data Right (CDR) ecosystem is a government-backed framework that enables consumers and businesses to securely share their data with accredited third parties, fostering innovation, competition, and consumer choice.”
After “moseying around” (I think Claude has me brainwashed) I settled on Frollo. It is an Accredited Data Recipient (ADR) - (viz An “Entity accredited by the ACCC to receive and use CDR data from consumers (with their consent)).”
That is, you create a Frollo account, choose one or more banks with whom you have accounts and then authenticate via the Frollo app with the bank to allow them to download your data. Once Frollo has your data it runs it tools over it and gives a breakdown of the items. (I am scoring highly on “Alcohol - Lifestyle”).
You can reportedly download your data from Frollo in CSV, JSON or xlsx formats, although I have not done this yet. (Permissions on the webpage are much more restricted than in the app.)
Frollo is free with no advertising and bound by the Federal government’s strict security requirements for ADRs. Of course, “if you not paying for it, you’re the product.” Frollo makes its money by making the mortgage broker’s job much easier. Everybody (who needs to know) then has how much you make, how much you spend and how much you’ve got.
That’s OK with me. I have reached that stage in life when I want to get poor, slow.
It took me a long time to realise that these were always the killers for me.
I spent decades with Microsoft Money, variants of Quicken/Reckon, GNUCash (is that still around?), and tried YNAB briefly.
The friction of “go online, download file, pick the right dates, upload without making sure that I don’t miss or dupe any transactions, categorise, repeat for each account, yada yada” was always the biggest issue. I’d have great intentions but never end up using any of it properly, and ultimately spend more time feeding the beast than actually getting any sort of decent insights out of the data.
I did play with Frollo for a while and it was excellent. The only place where it didn’t suit me was being mobile only (perhaps that has changed). “Important things happen on big screen and not little screen” is probably one of the places where I’m a bit old fashioned too.
Just over two years ago I switched to PocketSmith. It’s not self-hosted, it’s paid, and I’m sure there are plenty of reasons it won’t suit some people. However, for $120 a year it does all the transaction magic via CDR (I refuse to use Yodlee or other scrapers for security reasons) and completely removes the friction of the manual CSV/QIF import. I deliberately haven’t included any referral codes and have no connection other than being a happy customer. This is the one thing that I’ve stuck with, and has the right balance of control and advanced features for me to manage things the way I want to, while also having a lot of automation and intelligence built in.
Something to consider if you find that the friction rather than the features is the reason why you are looking elsewhere 
.