1. Use excel
2. See ledger/hledger. Think this must be 'the way'. Go all in.
3. Constantly wrestle with ledger/hledger because you only do your accounting once per month/quarter which is not enough frequency to really grok it.
4. Use excel with a new sense of calm that you're not missing out on something better
I've found it easier to use a spreadsheet. Sheet 1 contains the csv export to which i constantly append, sheet 2 the hierarchical acoount structure: an account name like "expenses: groceries:walmart" is followed by a regex that matches the expense description on sheet 1 for that account (walmart). On sheet 1 I have an "detected Account" column, into which a formula outputs the detected account based in the regexes.
Sumif formulas sum up the totals per account. Since no compilation step is necessary, rule changes are picked up much faster
I have a single sheet per account (current accounts, share accounts etc). I download csvs and append to the relevant sheet - usually once per month.
In each sheet I've added a column called 'tag'. And I just tag anything that I want to keep track of - which is a small percentage of transactions. Then I can filter transactions by that tag.
Whilst it was a nice idea in theory to book every transaction to an account in a chart of accounts, I found that I very rarely looked at the PnL. And so it didn't justify the time involved in booking each transaction.
Toward the end of every year, I go through the ritual of preparing to move back to ledger and getting files ready. And shortly after the start of the year, I abandon it. Maybe one year I will stick with it. Maybe.