What is facto?

Family Accounting Tool (facto) is a self-hosted web application for families to track every transaction, extract spending statistics by category, calculate who owes whom for shared expenses, and monitor cash flow to catch unaccounted spending. It supports multiple users with separate accounts and a common family account, using categories like 'endowment' for transfers to the shared pot. The application runs on Java 11 (JDK 11) with a MariaDB or MySQL database, and can be installed either from pre-built release binaries or via Docker Compose (though the latter is discouraged for production). A default admin user is created on first run. The project is maintained by a single developer (Jens) and licensed under Apache-2.0.

Should you self-host facto?

facto scores 44/100 on selfhost.directory (how scoring works) and ranks #7 of 11 in Accounting. It has 372 GitHub stars.

It shipped 9 stable releases in the past year. The latest, v4.32, came out on 26 October 2026. New versions land roughly every 2 weeks.

Setup is advanced: plan for several services and some ongoing maintenance. An official Docker image is available. It is Other-licensed and written mostly in Scala.

Its closest alternative on selfhost.directory is akaunting (67/100, 10 241 stars). It scores higher overall, so compare the two before you pick. See facto vs akaunting side by side.