With a bit of technical knowledge you can get pretty far with accounting without AI or cloud services.

I run a small business (no employees) and GnuCash was ok. Then I got tired of battling it for years to do certain things.

Spent a few days human coding a command line income and expense tracker a little over a year ago at https://github.com/nickjj/plutus.

I do my estimated quarterly taxes with its assistance in literally 5 minutes. All I do is download the CSV files from my bank and run the reports I'm interested in seeing through it. At the end of the year I run through the full numbers and triple check things in about 10-15 minutes. These numbers give me complete confidence to file my taxes accurately from a business income / expense perspective.

Of course you can use the tool for personal income / expense tracking too. Personal vs business is an arbitrary category name.