For journals, I use Vim with a ton of snippets, and write in markdown, using a lot of lists. The snippets are the biggest win. I have daily, weekly, monthly, and various ad-hoc templates that I basically just fill in. When I pick up a new journal, I usually begin by writing the templates.

For accounting, I’d recommend taking a look at gnu ledger. I don’t record any financial stuff in my daily journal, it all goes in the ledger repo. The value of snippets applies equally here. I use a crazy set of awk scripts to ingest transaction logs from my bank, etc. but I recorded manually for about 6 months before making them, and I’d recommend anyone else do the same.

I’m not a mobile power user, and have almost no tolerance for typing on my phone (I view it as a read-only device for the most part), so phone-laptop syncing isn’t a requirement for me. I just carve out 15 minutes before bedtime.

Programming your environment is the theme to all of this. IME vim/emacs are the best applications for these kinds of tasks. They’re superior to anything “purpose-built”, because everyone wants to do things slightly differently. They’re more intimate and grind-y to begin when nothing is automated, but it’s trivial to add incremental automation as you get bored of the toil. The early toil is as important as the later automation though, IMO it gives me an appreciation and understanding of the tools I’m later dependent on.