While I don't think this approach meets OP's requirements (they seem to be looking for something a little more turn-key), I hope other readers of this thread will fall down this rabbit hole.
I'm now in my 5th year of tracking every penny in and out of my life with hledger[0], with a mostly manual approach. Some benefits:
- as noted by a spreadsheet user, it adds friction to spending money, which has curbed frivolous/ unplanned expenses for me (and double entry accounting makes it impossible for money to "disappear")
- if you subscribe to Files over Apps[1] hledger and its ilk (beancounter, gnu cash) are hands down your most mature, stable options
- I've learned a great deal about accounting and how money works in general
- the reports I can generate from my ledger give me a decent starting point at tax time
Only reason I stopped going down the PTA path was I always struggled to figure out a viable way to organize everything.
I tried one file per account, one file per account per month, multiple accounts in one file per month, and eventually everything in one massive file per year. No matter what I seemed to choose I always seemed to end up with just a complete mess.
I've faced this as well. One of the big sources of "mess" for me in a years-long ledger is inconsistencies in account naming. I get around this with a big block of alias that rename accounts to use my newer, preferred conventions (without having to comb through possibly hundreds of postings to update by hand).
I also went through a couple file organization schemes and have (tentatively) settled on file-per-month since that leads to a nice cadence where setting up the new monthly file coincides with paying bills and is a good time to do any necessary account reconciliation.
PTA does give you a lot of flexibility, sometimes too much.
More guidance/opinion on this is probably needed. https://plaintextaccounting.org/Organising-files talks about it a little.
Also if you make it to any of the support fora/chat rooms, you'll usually get help on this.
Quite a bit of a ramp up to get used to it, but no other tool outside of spreadsheets comes close to flexibility.