What is so hard in personal accounting that takes an enourmous quantity of apps, webapps, web services and CLI tools to solve? Is it really worth creating markdown files for each expense and passing them to a "powerful tool"?
I'm asking honestly, not trying to make fun of it somehow.
There are lots of large, flashy programs, but in my cases UX is exceptionally poor and the tools are extremely inflexible.
Take Mint, for example. It is impossible to have an overall budget. You can only set budgets per category. There does not appear to be a modern tool that will show me a progress bar of where I am on spending per month. Every option I've ever seen requires budgets to be set per category.
There are lots of different ways people want to see data, and many of these flashy/polished tools (like Mint, Simple, whatever) give a giant "fuck you" to anyone who doesn't think in exactly the way the program was designed.
YNAB should fit your needs well - I know it does for me. Using YNAB after trying(and failing, mainly because it doesn't support my currency/location)Mint.
Not sure where you got that. It's a single file with many transactions laid out in a straightforward double-entry accounting format.
I'm a developer, so the draw for me is that that I can write a few scripts to translate my various online accounts' downloadable formats into the simple text format while automatically adding in expense categories based on regex. I can't do that with any other apps I've seen.
Its not so much that it "so hard", its just a common need where one of the key issues is working with individuals preferred workflows, which are highly fsubjective -- so there are lots of tools that serve the needs of different people.
I'm asking honestly, not trying to make fun of it somehow.