Dead Accounts

I had the same issue (CD's closed out years ago, since I've been a Quicken user since 1995) and I simply hid the accounts. If you delete them, you loose the history forever. And, if there were ever any transfer to or from the deleted accounts, you will throw those other accounts out of balance.

if you want to track net worth for example, deleting those accounts will mess you up. Better to hide them. They dont take up much disk space compared to all the other stuff you have in Quicken

alan

I'm with Z Man. I go back to late '92 with Quicken, and I've got a bunch of accounts that are dead now. Still, sometimes I want to see what I spent on mortgage interest or vacations way back then (among my dead accounts are some checking accounts I changed over), or how much investment income I had (those CD's again). Like Z Man, I just hide 'em so that I keep the data for deep dives into my income/expense patterns. That way, I see them only when I want to, but I DO see them when I want to. Bill

Isn't the "Start a New Year" function supposed to do something like that. Distill dead accounts into placeholders in current accounts and get rid of transfers involving dead accounts. I have never had the courage to test it lest it cause some hidden problem that won't be discovered for a long time.

I realized several years ago that I, simply, wasn't using multi-year reporting -- except for my investment account -- so I really didn't have a need to keep multi-years of data in my Quicken file.

So, every year I go thru the process of:

This will allow me to do the prior year research, on the rare occasions that I need it, yet keep my QDATA file down to reasonable size AND allow me to just delete any non-investment accounts that no longer have any data in my current file.

Start New Year does keep you in balance, but it does not make any distinction about the status of the accounts it deletes from; any non-investment account transaction that qualifies (is earlier than the cutoff date and is reconciled), is deleted; the net amount of the deletes in a given account becomes a balancing entry in that account.

No you don't. The transfer becomes an uncategorized transaction in the remaining account. have you any evidence to the contrary or did you just sit there and imagine what would happen?

It is perfectly OK to delete old accounts that, presumably, have zero balances. The transfers into those accounts will become uncategorized transactions in the remaining registers, so won't throw your remaining accounts out of whack. You can go back, review the uncategorized transactions and either assign them to a category or just leave them as they are presumably not relevant to current reports, etc.

I think I did it one time by mistake. Here's what I think happened. I had paid a credit card bill by recording a transfer from my bank account. I then deleted that particular bank account. If I recall correctly, the credit card account no longer showed the payment, and consequently the balance was wrong. What do you think?

I did it earlier this week in a test account. What was a transfer before the deletion got changed into uncategorized transactions in the remaining accounts.

The OP can easily verify this by creating a copy of his files and experiment on them before attempting it on his real data file.

On Sat 21 May 2005 07:47:53p, Z Man wrote in news:0GQje.31761$ snipped-for-privacy@fe10.lga:

Maybe that was an old version of Quicken.

I just deleted one of my savings accounts in Q2004D. It had transfers coming in and going out to many accounts. Quicken handled it well with totals in remaining accounts staying as they should. All transfers in either direction involving the deleted savings account still had one side there, uncategorized in the other remaining accounts involved in those transfers.

As some mentioned, very easy to test... backup, then do it & check it out, then restore.

How about 'copy your current file, and test on the copy!'. I'd never run a test on my 'real' file regardless of whether or not I made a backup copy.

What is the difference. If you made a "backup", you can return to that if you do not like what happens. And, you can plan to "restore" that backup under any conditions; even if you do not find anything you do not like.

Working with a "copy" and reverting to the "original" is no different than making a "backup", testing on the original, and reverting to the "backup" ... as long as you plan it from the start. And as long as you do not assume that a Quicken "copy" is the same as a Quicken "backup" ... so you make a *Windows* "copy" of your fileset if you want to insure you are working with the *exact* same data.

On Sun 22 May 2005 06:45:46p, Andrew wrote in news:FQ8ke.98$ snipped-for-privacy@fe10.lga:

That is allowed also.