Transaction Categorization Is Painfully Slow Without Rules, Review Queues, and Keyboard-First Workflows

Summary

Bookkeepers and DIY finance users are burning absurd amounts of time on the most routine part of the job: categorizing ordinary transactions. In the source, an experienced bookkeeper claims 40+ hours to process a trivially simple catch-up of ~450 transactions across one bank account, one credit card, two simple loans, and six payrolls — work that the reviewer says could be done manually from a blank chart in under a day. The poster's reaction ("I literally cannot imagine how doing so little work could take an experienced bookkeeper so long") shows the pain cuts both ways: the work is slow, and slow work is indistinguishable from low effort, poisoning trust and billing. Today's tools force users into mouse-driven, cloud-synced, one-transaction-at-a-time flows; there are no local-first, keyboard-first rule engines with review queues that let a power user blow through hundreds of lines in minutes, and no audit trail that makes speed and quality verifiable. Existing cloud accounting apps partially automate this but demand credentials and cloud sync — unacceptable for privacy-conscious Mac users — while spreadsheet-based net-worth setups have no categorization logic at all. The gap is a local-first, rules-plus-queue, keyboard-driven categorizer that turns a 40-hour slog into an hour, and this is exactly the unsolved intersection the source exposes.