Having difficulty using Firefly

[RRohi]

Hello

I was tracking my expenses using Excel for some years, and since I want to get rid of Microsoft Office, I was looking for an alternative expense-tracking service, and I found Firefly.

I started using it last month and have actively used it for about a month now.

I have four asset accounts. Two bank accounts, a savings account (technically also a bank account), and the default Cash wallet asset.
Plenty of expense accounts. Expense accounts should be service providers to whom I pay for the services?
I have two revenue accounts.
I have one liability (mortgage).
And one piggy bank linked with that one savings account.

For assets and liabilities, I have used the open balance date/start of debt date, for example, 01.02.2026, and I set the amount of money/debt I had at that time.

Now, I have entered all the transactions for a month, and ALL the balances are showing incorrect sums of money, and I don't understand how that can be, if I have set the starting point and I have added all revenues and expenses.

For example, I had to change the opening balance to -902.72 and the opening balance date to 03/05/2026 (I've been unable to change the date format to my country's, so it's in the annoying US format.), for my main bank account, just so it would show the correct balance. That was two days ago, and the balance is incorrect again by today.

I've used it the way it makes sense to me, and it seems that there are some assumptions in the service I don't understand or haven't figured out.

I don't want to go back to using Excel.

Help!
(I understand that without seeing what's going on in my instance, it may be difficult to explain why I'm having these difficulties.)

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Version 6.5.3 (updated this week)
Initially installed using the Proxmox helper script.

[JC5]

Hey, thanks for starting this discussion.

I can imagine you want to go back to Excel! But what you do seems to make sense.

The opening balance should be the oldest entry, and you should work your way forward. Are you doing that?

Cheers,
James

[RRohi]

Maybe not.
The way I started with it was to set up my two main accounts and my mortgage. Added the rest a bit later.

The opening balance should be the oldest entry

While I did that with my accounts. I set the opening dates to 01.02.2026, and I entered the amounts that I had in the bank account at that time, but I entered the mortgage from its start a few years ago, and then I thought I would add one big expense covering the mortgage start until this month. So I would have a mortgage with the correct initial amount in the system, AND it would show my current amount owed to the bank, but I've been unable to make it work.

There are two things I didn't mention, now that I think about it. One is related to the savings account and one to the mortgage.

One of my banks has this "bonus system" where, when you pay for stuff, you get each day a tiny amount of money back to the savings account. In Firefly, I'm transferring money from bank A (my main account) to the savings account in the same bank A, instead of withdrawing money from my main account and making a separate revenue entry for the savings account.

Since Firefly is made in the EU, maybe this is a known point, but the mortgage interest is recalculated every six months (EURIBOR), so if the interest % is being used to calculate something, it can't anticipate the end amount to be paid.

[RRohi]

What would be the correct way to start using it?