[patrick451]

For several years, I tried keeping track of each expense, using both quicken and gnucash. I found the same thing as you: entering each transaction is too tedious. If I got real benefit from it, I'd have stuck with it, but honestly I never found the data actually useful. Currently, I've adopted your idea, and just track basically month-to-month net worth in a simple spreadsheet. Even that is more of a motivational tool than something that provides actionable data.

This maybe different for everyone. Currently, I'm fortunate to be saving about 80% of income. But even a decade ago when I was much more in a paycheck-to-paycheck situation, I didn't know what to do with this per-transaction double entry data.

I also think that the entire design of accounting software, where you assign a given expense to a specific category ("groceries", "fuel", "household", "vacation") is too limiting because they are artificially orthogonal. What if I have a "fuel" category and a "vacation" category, but I'm filling up on vacation? Same with groceries, but it's even worse because I needed to buy those anyway. It's really hard to use these categorized transactions to figure out if I need to cut back on vacations, or buy a more fuel efficient vehicle.