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The self-hosted money dashboard: your full financial picture, on your own box

Bank, broker and pension on one private screen — no passwords shared

Portfolio, cash and net worth in one private view you own. This is infrastructure — pipes and dashboards. It contains no investment advice, no signals, and no opinions about what you should buy. What to do with your money is between you, your judgement, and your licensed advisor.

The problem

A small-business owner's money is scattered by design: a business account, a personal account, a broker, maybe a pension pot and some crypto. "What am I actually worth, and which direction is it moving?" is answered — if at all — by a spreadsheet updated twice a year, in one browser tab per institution. The SaaS aggregators that promise one dashboard want read credentials to every account, charge around €8–15/month, and are mostly built for US institutions; several have also shut down over the years, taking their users' history with them. Meanwhile the honest self-hosted answer is scattered across comparison articles that tell you Ghostfolio and Firefly III are different tools — true — without giving you the working architecture that combines them. And most of those guides still recommend a bank-feed service that closed to new registrations in July 2025. This blueprint is the current, working version.

The architecture

Two dashboards, deliberately. Firefly III answers "where does the cash go?" — Ghostfolio answers "how are the investments doing?" They barely overlap, and duct-taping one to do the other's job is how these projects get abandoned in month two. The shared box and the shared monthly ritual are the integration.

Tool choices — and why

Ghostfolio (AGPL-3.0, 8.9k stars, active — last push 09/07/2026) for the investment side: import your broker's activity export once, then it tracks holdings, allocation, performance and dividends against live market data (Yahoo Finance by default, free). Multi-currency, which matters for EU owners holding USD ETFs. It is a tracker, not a broker connection — it never touches your broker credentials, which is a feature.

Firefly III (AGPL-3.0, 23.5k stars, active — last push 01/06/2026) for the cash side: every account, categorized transactions, recurring bills, budgets. Running since 2014, exhaustively documented, and its rule engine auto-categorizes imports so month three takes minutes, not an evening.

Firefly III Data Importer (AGPL-3.0, active — last push 22/05/2026) is the pipe. It eats CSV and CAMT.053 files — the exports every EU bank must provide — with a column-mapping you configure once per bank and save as a reusable config file. It also speaks to bank-feed APIs, with a large caveat covered under pitfalls.

Licensing note: all three are AGPL-3.0 — using them internally, even in a business, carries no obligations; AGPL only bites if you modify the code and serve it to the public. Monthly cost: software €0, market data €0 at personal scale. Hosting: a €5–12/month VPS, or better, a mini-PC at home for a one-time ~€150–250 — for this particular stack the home box has a real argument: your complete financial picture never sits on rented infrastructure at all.

Setup outline

1. Deploy Firefly III + Data Importer + Ghostfolio via their official Docker compose files, on a box that is not exposed to the internet — LAN-only or behind a mesh VPN (Tailscale's free tier is the common choice; WireGuard if you want fully self-managed).
2. Create your Firefly accounts: each bank account, credit card, and a cash account. Enter opening balances from your latest statements.
3. Export 3 months of CSV/CAMT from each bank, run them through the Data Importer, and save the mapping config per bank with a clear name.
4. Write 10–15 Firefly rules for your recurring flows (salary, rent, insurances, suppliers) so future imports auto-categorize.
5. Export your broker's full activity history (every broker offers this as CSV), massage it into Ghostfolio's import format once, and import.
6. Put a monthly 20-minute recurring block in your calendar: export → import → glance at both dashboards. The ritual is part of the architecture.
7. Back up both databases to a second location on a schedule. This box now holds data you genuinely cannot recreate.

Pitfalls — the real ones

The bank-feed advice you'll find is stale. Most guides recommend GoCardless Bank Account Data (ex-Nordigen) for automatic bank sync. GoCardless stopped accepting new registrations for it in July 2025 and is sunsetting the free service — existing users still work, new users cannot sign up. The Firefly maintainer is adding alternatives (Enable Banking among them), and options like SimpleFIN exist for US accounts, but the honest 2026 position is: treat automatic bank feeds as a bonus, and build on the CSV/CAMT export, which no bank can take away from you.
Manual-entry plans die; import rituals survive. If your plan involves typing transactions in by hand, the project is already dead — you just don't know it yet. The saved importer configs are what make month six as easy as month one.
Don't put this on the open internet. A password-protected page is not enough for a box holding your entire financial picture. VPN-only access costs nothing and removes the whole attack surface.
This is not your bookkeeping. Your accountant's ledger is the legal truth for the business; this dashboard is private visibility across business and personal. Feed the business account's export into both systems if you like — but don't let "it's in my dashboard" replace the actual books.
Two tools is the honest overhead. If you only care about investments, run Ghostfolio alone. Only cash flow? Firefly alone. Deploy both only if you'll actually look at both — an unused container is just an unpatched one.

Verified repos

Ghostfolio — AGPL-3.0, 8.9k stars, active (July 2026)
Firefly III — AGPL-3.0, 23.5k stars, active (June 2026)
Firefly III Data Importer — AGPL-3.0, active (May 2026)