General web nerd. Rider of bicycles. Amateur picture taker.

iOS Shortcuts for Firefly III

Update: I’ve posted new versions of these shortcuts for iOS13 and Firefly III 4.8: www.jessedyck.me/2019/12/updated-firefly-iii-shortcuts-for-ios-13/

I built a couple of iOS shortcuts for Firefly III (a self-hosted personal finance web app) to let me add transactions on the go. I’ve shared some more details and iCloud links to the shortcuts below.

The first Shortcut is more or less a function that returns a list of accounts. That list is used in the second shortcut to submit the new transaction to Firefly. I wanted to keep the process as quick as possible, so that shortcut requests the least information possible to submit the transaction.


I’ve only just recently switched to using Firefly III; prior to that I had been using Mint for about 8 years. I’ve been increasingly uncomfortable with giving up that much data – and my bank credentials – for a number of years, so I’d been on the lookout for a replacement for quite a while. I’ve probably tried them all, but for one reason or another I couldn’t find an app that fit my requirements.

Firefly is a bit of a change in workflow over Mint, but I’ve found that it’s encouraging me to take a more active role in managing my finances. In part because it doesn’t recommend auto-importing transactions. All-in-all though, it’s working quite well so far.

There are a few places where I’d do things differently in Firefly, but part of the appeal (for me at least) is that it’s built on PHP (Laravel, to be specific) so I could feasibly contribute to it, or at least modify my own fork. It also has a nice REST API and great documentation to go with it, which of course is what these shortcuts are using.

I knew I wanted the ability to add transactions on the go, but logging into the web app is a bit too much friction while waiting in line for a $2 coffee. And let’s face it, if the transaction isn’t added immediately I’ll probably forget about it. So that’s what I’ve solved with these shortcuts.

Shortcut Requirements

  • Your Firefly III instance must be accessible over the internet (I would not do this without using HTTPS)
  • The API supports using a Personal Access Token rather than OAuth, which must be created in Firefly > Options > Profile
  • The Firefly URL and token must be added to both shortcuts

Shortcut can’t find an account?

If no accounts are returned, it’s most likely that the Personal Access Token was denied; either the token was incorrect or, as is common after a Firefly update, the Personal Access Token was essentially deactivated. I often have to delete and recreate it after updates.

Shortcut Downloads

I’ve shared these via iCloud Drive. Load up this post and download the links on an iOS device. Plug your Personal Access Token and the URL to your Firefly III instance into both shortcuts, then test out the Accounts shortcut. It should return a list the asset accounts in Firefly III, along with the current balances.

If you’re not on an iOS device, here’s the what the two shortcuts look like—warning, they’re long:

Screenshot of an iOS shortcut to display a listing of accounts and balances from Firefly III
Accounts shortcut

Screenshot of a Firefly III shortcut that adds a new transactions to a selected account.
New transaction shortcut

5 responses to “iOS Shortcuts for Firefly III

  1. Atka

    I thought I well ask do these work on Ios 13?

    1. jessedyck

      I haven’t actually tried it yet! But – I suspect not, unfortunately. I’ll post an updated version once I get a chance!

  2. Sid Verma

    I’ve been using the excellent Firefly III to manage my expenses for a while. As a result, I have developed a habit to actively monitor every transaction I do, which, in my opinion is a much better way than using other automated expense managers which can only track your non-cash expenses, without a lot of context.Android had an unofficial app which made it easier to interact with Firefly, but iOS doesn’t seem to have one, and the web-ui is not a very mobile friendly one.While searching for solutions, I came across this blog post by Jesse Dyck where they utilised iOS Shortcuts to create transactions in Firefly. Honestly, I was pretty surprised that Shortcuts is powerful enough to do this, given Apple’s approach to customization.The shortcuts provided by Jesse didn’t seem to work for me (they seem to have been written for iOS 12, before Shortcuts were revamped for iOS 13), so I decided to build one for myself, with a UX more suited for my needs.Here it is in action: Link
    To use these for yourself, you have to download the following three shortcuts from your iOS device. The first two are function-like dependencies of the third one, which is used to add a transaction.If you’re not into categories, you’d probably have to edit the Add Transaction shortcut and remove the steps where it deals with them. A fair bit of trial and error should probably give you what you want.

    List Accounts (screenshot)

    List Categories (screenshot)

    Add Transaction (screenshot)
    Note that, to be able to import shortcuts from outside the app gallery, you have to go to Settings > Shortcuts and enable Allow Untrusted Shortcuts.While adding these shortcuts, you’d be prompted to enter your firefly URL and Personal Access Token for each of the shortcut. The URL is where you’ve hosted the app, complete with the protocol and without a trailing slash (like https://demo.firefly-iii.org). You can generate the token from Firefly by going to Options > Profile > scroll down to Personal Access Tokens and click on Create New Token.After spending 3 hours creating these 150-step shortcuts on a very tiny screen, I was wondering if it’d have been easier to create a basic iPhone app itself. Not really, I don’t know Swift yet.

  3. Sid

    Great idea to use shortcuts for calling the API!

    These don’t seem to work for the new iOS yet, so I took the liberty to recreate it[0] for iOS13 🙂

    [0]: sidverma.io/2019/12/06/firefly-iii-ios-shortcuts/

    1. jessedyck

      Thanks Sid! Nice job adding the category selections too!

      I had also been working on updating my versions, and just posted them here: www.jessedyck.me/2019/12/updated-firefly-iii-shortcuts-for-ios-13/

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