Coming from Firefly III or Actual Budget?

Firefly III and Actual Budget are the established self-hosted finance tools, and both are good at what they set out to do. Tidings sets out to do something narrower. This page is the honest comparison.

What those tools are

Firefly III is a full double-entry finance manager — accounts, balances, rules, reports. Data comes in through its companion Data Importer: CSV or CAMT files, or third-party bank-data providers where they cover your bank.

Actual Budget is a local-first envelope-budgeting app in the YNAB tradition — you give every dollar a job and reconcile against accounts. Bank sync is user-initiated through providers such as SimpleFIN Bridge (North America, about $15 a year) or Enable Banking (Europe), alongside QIF, OFX, QFX, and CSV imports.

Both are organized around accounts and balances, and getting data in means bank sync where a provider covers your bank, file exports where it doesn’t, and manual entry in between.

What Tidings does instead

Tidings builds a spending journal from the transaction alert emails your bank already sends. You forward the alerts to an inbox you control; a parser reads each one within a minute of arrival and files it once. No bank credentials, no sync provider, no import ritual — and no accounting system underneath. The trade is deliberate: give up account-balance bookkeeping, get a record of spending that maintains itself.

What you give up

• Double-entry accounting. There are no accounts and no balances. Tidings records spending and income as a journal, not a ledger that reconciles to the penny. PDF statement upload exists to catch transactions that never arrived by email, not to manage accounts.
• Envelope budgeting. Budgets in Tidings are annual targets read against the pace of the year, plus a top-level spending ceiling. There are no envelopes, no monthly rollover, no zero-based allocation.
• Bank coverage by sync. Tidings needs a bank that emails transaction alerts. Parsers for five Canadian banks ship today; alerts from other banks can be rescued with AI extraction, and any bank that sends alert emails can be added by writing a parser.

What you gain

• No manual entry, and no credentials. Nothing to type in, no aggregator holding your bank login, no sync subscription to maintain.
• A journal you actually read. A month arrives one day at a time, with budgets paced to the year, a monthly briefing, and merchant signals — closer to a statement worth reading than a spreadsheet to maintain.
• An API built for agents. Every route is a versioned /api/v1/ endpoint with bearer-token auth, and the docs ship in machine-readable form. See Tidings for agents.

Run both if you like

Tidings does not compete for your data — it reads emails the other tools never see. Keeping an accounting tool for balances and net worth alongside Tidings for the daily journal is a legitimate setup, not a compromise.

Next: A month in Tidings, or the Quickstart.