[wbadart]

+1

While I don't think this approach meets OP's requirements (they seem to be looking for something a little more turn-key), I hope other readers of this thread will fall down this rabbit hole.

I'm now in my 5th year of tracking every penny in and out of my life with hledger[0], with a mostly manual approach. Some benefits:

- as noted by a spreadsheet user, it adds friction to spending money, which has curbed frivolous/ unplanned expenses for me (and double entry accounting makes it impossible for money to "disappear")

- if you subscribe to Files over Apps[1] hledger and its ilk (beancounter, gnu cash) are hands down your most mature, stable options

- I've learned a great deal about accounting and how money works in general

- the reports I can generate from my ledger give me a decent starting point at tax time

Happy accounting!

[0]: https://hledger.org/index.html

[1]: https://stephango.com/file-over-app

[hirvi74]

Only reason I stopped going down the PTA path was I always struggled to figure out a viable way to organize everything.

I tried one file per account, one file per account per month, multiple accounts in one file per month, and eventually everything in one massive file per year. No matter what I seemed to choose I always seemed to end up with just a complete mess.

[wbadart]

I've faced this as well. One of the big sources of "mess" for me in a years-long ledger is inconsistencies in account naming. I get around this with a big block of alias that rename accounts to use my newer, preferred conventions (without having to comb through possibly hundreds of postings to update by hand).

I also went through a couple file organization schemes and have (tentatively) settled on file-per-month since that leads to a nice cadence where setting up the new monthly file coincides with paying bills and is a good time to do any necessary account reconciliation.

[simonmic]

PTA does give you a lot of flexibility, sometimes too much. More guidance/opinion on this is probably needed. https://plaintextaccounting.org/Organising-files talks about it a little. Also if you make it to any of the support fora/chat rooms, you'll usually get help on this.

[howeyc]

I just put everything in one file. Over 15 years worth of transactions in a single ledger file ordered by date.