Year-End Copy Doesn't Delete Most Old Transactions

Some thoughts :

1. If a transaction is not cleared (for example, in a bank account), it doesn't go away.
2. Not all transactions are deleted when you do a year end copy anyway; e.g. transactions in Investment Accounts are not deleted if they are needed to maintain cost basis. And I've found that this almost ALWAYS is the case for me even when I sell securities since the monies realized stay in Q somehow anyway.
3. I assume you checked the option to delete transactions starting at a certain point using a decent date rather the (the default) that says 'do nothing'.
4. You're not looking at the copied account that is provided 'free of charge'!

"Walt Bilofsky" wrote

Year-end Copy will not delete any investment transactions, nor any un-reconciled transactions.

Also, I don't know when the policy started, but I believe current versions of Quicken won't delete one half of a transfer even if it's reconciled, when the other half of the transfer isn't reconciled ... to avoid orphaned halves of transfers.

A plain Quicken Copy can delete unreconciled transactions and investment transactions.

Thanks for pointing this out, John.

What I need to do is delete all investment transactions except for buys of stock positions that I still hold.

Last time I did this - back in 2001 - Year-End Copy did that. I see that now it does not, which makes it rather useless for investment accounts.

Is there any way to accomplish this other than by hand? Can it even be done by hand?

I would think, at the least, you'd want to keep all transactions that affect the share balance of securities you now hold. Buys, reinvests, sells, add shares, remove shares (can't recall if there are others).

Personally, I don't want to delete any of my old transactions. I don't know of any meaningful advantage to doing it.

You can delete multiple investment account transactions using the Investment Transaction report. In that report, you can select multiple transactions as you would select multiple files in Windows Explorer. Then you can click the Edit button (in the report, not the Quicken menu choice), and select "Delete transaction(s)". The delete process can take quite a bit of time.

You'll have to take care of any resulting account balance changes manually (both the Quicken "Copy" features normally do that for you).

Select ng multiple transactions does not work in the Investment Transaction report, or in an investment account register. Does this work in Q2009 Deluxe?

When I upgrade to a later edition, will it work?

"Walt Bilofsky" wrote

My apologies. I meant to say, use the Banking > Transaction report.

Yes, it works in Q2009, and even in some earlier versions.

Brilliant! Especially since the Banking > Transaction report works on investment accounts!

So - my plan would be to:

1) Do the Year-End copy to remove old checking and credit card transactions prior to 1/1/10. 2) Make a list of all securities owned as of 1/1/10, or bought during 2010.

3) Customize the Banking Transaction report to include all the other securities, and all accounts.

4) Delete all those transactions using the report

5) Customize another Banking Transaction report to exclude Buy, Sell, swap, etc., transactions, and everything after 1/1/10, and then delete all those transactions.

6) Adjust account cash balances.

Should clean things up nicely. The only thing left would be to go through the Securities list and delete the old securities - which probably will have to be done one at a time.

Thanks for the pointer.

Why go through all this hassle?

Because with 11 years of data, every transaction I enter takes two or three seconds to update.

Probably little to do with Quicken, more likely your hard drives need to be defragged and/or your computer upgraded. I've been running Quicken since

1993 with lots of investment transactions. Updates are instantaneous.

I think a lot of folks here have VERY large Q files and don't see them as being particularly slow. Like Sharx35 says, you might try other avenues of 'speedup' first. Not to say it might not help, but you may very well spend a lot of time doing this without much success. Good luck!

Not unlike what everyone else is saying, it doesn't sound like Quicken, but more like your system.

Every 6 months, or so, I do an new OS installation. Quicken was one of the more obvious improvements... Before, a backup took quite a long time, whereas after the new installation, only a few seconds. (My data files go back to 1996.)

"Uncal Bob" >> Quicken since 1993 with lots of investment transactions. Updates are

Bob, we need more details about your hardware, system, etc.. For example, even though you regularly do a OS reinstall, how often do you defrag? I find that a daily defrag makes a big difference. My HD is far less than half full. The fuller a regular HD is, the greater the degradation in performance, in my experience. The new, more expensive flash HDs may be immune to the preceding. VERY important: how much RAM do you have? Have you tested it to make sure that it is all operative? Maybe others can add to this list.

end of padding necessary to shut aioe.org's nagging off

I started in 1996 and the file size is 85mb. I have no problem with updates or anything else. Perhaps you ought to super validate the Quicken file and then defrag your drive.

I defrag at least once per week, sometimes more, have 4GB RAM (3.25GB usable) and have greater than 100GB of free space.

I attribute the problem to all the programs I've tried, removed, but manage to leave orphaned files behind.