[GingerMidas]

> Do people who use this kind of software manually enter every transaction they do every day, or something?

Yes, exactly that. You can do automatic imports of your bank statements but that's arguably more hassle.

It takes 10 minutes at the end of my day to record all my transactions and it gives me a complete understanding of where my money is going.

[teeray]

> It takes 10 minutes at the end of my day to record all my transactions

I’d love to be able to do this, but realistically (for me), I’d need something that works reliably on my worst days. If I’m out late, on vacation for a few days, dealing with some on-call thing all night, etc., I don’t want to be beholden to a 10-minute per day commitment that accumulates linearly. Discipline can only get me so far in the face of chaos—automation can take me the rest of the way there.

[cortesoft]

This would be a lot harder if you have a spouse and want to track your family finances. It would require both people working together to keep it up to date, and finding that time is tough with kids.

For all the concerns and problems over tools like Mint, having all 10-20 accounts we have automatically sync their data into the system makes it so much easier to manage.

[helij]

We don't find it hard. We sit down one or two times during the week in the evening and I enter all our transactions into KMyMoney. It takes 5-10 minutes to do once you get the hang of it. This is across 5-10 accounts. You might have a little more work to do with 10-20 accounts.

On Paisa (ledger). I like it! But...KMyMoney has such a nice interface for recurring/future payments and reports (that I can edit to suit our needs) that I'm struggling to see the point of ledger behind gui for our use case. It does look nice though.

[brewdad]

I do the bank import once a week. I set aside an hour on my calendar to update all of my spending accounts. It usually takes more like 15-20 minutes unless I find something unexpected.

For longer term accounts like my 401k, IRAs, and brokerage accounts, I track money going in our out but only update the gains/losses every 6 months or annually on Dec 31st.

[n6242]

I only do it every few days but pretty much the same. I find it's too easy to lose track of how much I've been spending, so by doing it manually I always notice before it becomes a problem. It also helps me save because I notice right away if I get charged for a subscription I'm not using and I can cancel it.

[BeetleB]

10 minutes a day is a lot! That's 300 minutes a month. I do it about once a month and I probably do 2-3 hours.