At a Glance:
Yaffa is a self-hosted personal finance web application for long-term financial planning, supporting multi-currency tracking, scheduled transactions, investment monitoring, and optional AI-powered document processing.
Overview:
Yaffa is a self-hosted personal finance web application built with PHP and the Laravel framework, focusing on long-term financial planning. By hosting your own instance, all financial data remains on your server rather than being uploaded to a cloud service. The application supports tracking income and spending across multiple accounts and currencies, with automatic daily currency rate updates. It can process financial documents using AI to prefill transaction details and retrieve investment prices automatically. Yaffa is designed for individuals who want a browser-based finance tool they control themselves, with a responsive interface that works on both desktop and mobile browsers.
Key Decision Points:
Self-hosted architecture: All financial data stays on your own server since you run the application yourself, rather than syncing to a third-party cloud service.
No automatic bank syncing: Yaffa intentionally does not download transactions from banks, emphasizing manual review as part of conscious spending habits, though it supports recurring transaction automation.
Desktop browser focus: The interface is optimized for desktop use with responsive mobile support, but there is no native mobile app planned.
AI document processing is optional: Receipt and document scanning requires your own API key from OpenAI or Gemini, with an alternative OCR option via self-hosted Tesseract.
Single user per instance: The current version handles one user, though multi-user family support is planned for future releases.
Core Features:
Multi-currency support: Track finances in multiple currencies with a configurable default currency and automatic daily exchange rate updates via the free Frankfurter service.
Transaction management with AI assistance: Record income and expenses with intelligent suggestions while typing, split transactions across categories, and optionally use AI to prefill transaction details from uploaded documents, received emails, or Google Drive imports.
Investment tracking: Add investments and automatically retrieve current prices through the alphavantage.co service to calculate gains and losses.
Scheduled and recurring transactions: Create planned budgets and recurring transactions, with optional automatic recording and forecasted balance calculations.
Responsive web interface: Access the application from desktop browsers, with mobile support through a responsive layout.
Use Cases:
Individuals who want to track personal spending and income across multiple accounts and currencies without relying on cloud-based finance apps.
Users focused on long-term financial planning who value keeping their financial data on their own server.
People who prefer manually reviewing transactions as part of conscious budgeting rather than automatic bank syncing.
Investors who want to monitor investment performance alongside day-to-day finances in a single self-hosted tool.
Open-Source Alternative Value:
Yaffa provides a self-hosted option for personal finance tracking, letting users run their own instance rather than depending on cloud-based budgeting applications. All financial data remains on the user's server, and the application transparently documents which external services it contacts—currency rates from Frankfurter, investment prices from alphavantage.co, and optional AI processing through OpenAI or Gemini. The project is also clear about its current limitations, including the lack of dedicated decimal calculation libraries and the intentional decision not to support direct bank transaction downloads, helping users make an informed choice about whether it fits their needs.
