I agree. They are too verbose. One line is enough.

I actually think personal logs are useful for all things, not only money. In my business we use a text-file with logs for all the events, money, business stuff that happens, and then there's a program that reads all the lines, parses them and turns them into a final "state" of the company with everything that is being done and so on.

From that we generate dashboards, reports and stuff.

This is the system we use: https://github.com/fiatjaf/journalstate (but really the power is in the concept, not the implementation).

I've also turned that into a TodoMVC app: https://journalstate-todomvc.alhur.es/, so you can see it in action in a fancy, useless way.