> The trick is doing a manual entry for each transaction. Kind of like a spending journal, food journal or just a journal. There still seems to be power in manu

> The trick is doing a manual entry for each transaction. Kind of like a spending journal, food journal or just a journal. There still seems to be power in manually entering a transaction, although it might not be by pen and paper. This was a big realization for me. I tend to prefer getting the "robots" to do things for us (in other words, automate things). Developing an intuition of what's happening with your money is hard when you use an automated tool though. The process of managing the ledger bi-weekly really adds something more for me. Working on each entry to determine a category, writing down amounts, noticing how many entries I've entered into a category each session, and looking at it in aggregate afterward gives me some greater sense of how my financial life works. I can almost picture writing the transactions in GnuCash before I even do it. I get what you mean about it being complicated though. I learned the bits I needed to get by and mostly stick to that. So that works for me. In the long run, the double-ledger manual style is what I think is most important.