With two busy working (and shopping) adults, a teenager, and a little kid, online shopping, cash, cards, etc, I think I would need to hire a data entry clerk to use something like this.
I felt the same way trying to use ledger. Apparently there's a way to import your CC charges from online banking CSVs, but I never tried it out. I ended up giving myself a weekly allowance and plugging that into the books at the end of the week. Things got a lot easier when I was dealing with broad budget categories instead of logging transactions for a single cup of coffee.
I use beancount ( a plaintext accounting tool) and yeah, I feel it's a coherency challenge among developers who have different preferences around structure and workflow that makes it a challenge.
The importers have historically erred towards being something the user writes on their own. But there's also some powerful helper tools for importing but they carry a different user experience than the other tool for financial reports & visualization.
Im starting to think a unified experience (think vscode + built-in extensions) for it all might help align intentions and broaden the userbase of plaintext accounting.
Just because someone reading might find use of this, but if you use Bank of America you can export your transactions relatively easily.
1. Login not on mobile (and also extend your browser winder size until the mobile mode is gone. Mobile mode changes how you login, because of course it does...)
2. Click one your bank accounts.
3. Click "Download", "Custom date range", from some time ago to today*.
4. Download as Printable Text Format
This will give you a simple CSV file of all your transactions.
I'm horrible with money, but still try to export all my transactions and merge them onto one spreadsheet so I can plan out money stuff as needed.
* You can only download up to 6 months at a time, but you can go pretty far back in your banking history.
I have my own SQLite-centered setup with a Haskell UI to glue it together. I have (relatively) simple programs that parse incoming CSVs or OFX from the banks, so there is practically no data entry. (Not disagreeing with you though, as I have no idea how well GNUCash handles importing.)
Yeah, it’s a lot of work. I used to manually budget with Google Spreadsheets but eventually threw in the towel and gave into Mint. I still have to go in and manually change certain categories or add tags, but it’s way less work than what I was doing before.
I'm sure this is less scummy than Intuit Mint but I did not like having to browse around for a good while to find a link to their pricing page - even though it is just at the standard url.tld/pricing[1]. Companies that push their 'free trial' without readily mentioning what their product will cost when the trial runs out annoy me.