Comment by NoboruWataya

There are various frictions. I use multiple different banks, credit cards and investment platforms (partially due to my life being split between two countries). Each of them has their own clunky manual process for downloading statements (including MFA). The statements are in different formats. On the most recent version of GnuCash that I used I experienced weird bugs with the CSV importer which meant it would sometimes crash when I tried to use preset rules.

Classifying transactions is probably the biggest time sink. GnuCash's auto-categorise feature is somewhat helpful but requires a lot of manual intervention and honestly I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out what a particular expense related to (often the note on my bank statement is not helpful).

Ultimately, 2 hours per month is probably about what it took me as well. But x12 that's 24 solid hours of importing. And once you go back a few months it probably takes longer because it is more difficult to recall what particular expenses were for.