archive investment transaction in the new 2018 Quicken version

Unknown · October 2017

How do you archive investment transaction in the new 2018 Quicken version ?
I don't see a gear box in my 401K investment registers.. only in the account overview section and there is nothing that says archive? thanks

larschnur · October 2017

Use the investing display. Select the gear box above on the right. That is what the directions state but there is no option to archive there!

larschnur · October 2017

You must be in the account register to find the option. Select the account to display the transactions. The gear box on the top right has many options, one of which is the archive transactions option. Be sure to make a backup before starting this process.

splasher · October 2017

I just added a 401k account, see the screenshot on how to activate the investment archive routine.

Jim_Harman · October 2017

The gear in the Investment transaction list is not is not available if you are using pop-up registers so:

Select View from the menu at the top. If Use Pop-Up Registers is selected, de-select it.
Select the account to display the Investment Transaction List (Register)
Click the gear at the top right
Archive Transactions is about half way down the list. Read the instructions carefully to make sure you want to do this.

Unknown · October 2017

Awesome thanks!!!!

mshiggins · October 2017

What, exactly, does archiving investment transactions do? Once transactions have been archived, can they be unarchived?

Snowman · October 2017

This is the dialog box that comes up for archiving investment transactions.

I would seem that somebody at Quicken did their homework because before the archive is done Quicken will backup your data file, then validate the file. Something that I recommend everyone do before doing anything major in Quicken.

I will play around with this some. I would suspect that no you can not unarchive once it is done but why would you. In my case it looks like it would remove almost half of the transactions. I will let you know what I find out...after I backup my file and validate it on my own. Trust but verify!

Jim_Harman · October 2017

I haven't gone through with it myself, but from reading the prompt that comes up when you select it:
-- creates a new empty account called <your account>-Archive
-- moves the transactions associated with closed positions in your account to the new account
-- initiates a Validate to clean up.

By removing these transactions from the old account, this should improve performance for adding transactions and reports.

They don't say anything about un-archiving, but this *should* be non-destructive, so presumably you could move the transactions back using the new Move Transactions feature if you change your mind. Also If you include both accounts in any performance reports, the long term performance should be preserved.

splasher · October 2017

It moves the closed positions to a new account to make the active account smaller. It just automates the process that has been suggested for a long time but in an opposite way. The end result is the same.

mshiggins · October 2017

Interesting. Of course the implementation is backwards from the way we always proposed it.

mshiggins · October 2017

Thanks, Fred, for the screen shot.

Snowman · October 2017

I just did a test of this. The archive process went smoothly and I then used the move command to put the archived transactions back in their original place. Quicken once again did a backup, validate and viola they were back in their original place. The only thing I had to do then was delete the empty archive account and rearchive the account. I deleted the old account so that I would not have 2 archive accounts one with a "1" at the end of it.

mshiggins · October 2017

That sounds like a handy new feature.

Snowman · October 2017

Well thought out and executed as well. Hopefully a sign of things to come?

J_Mike · October 2017

It is an interesting new feature.

One drawback is that the historical running cash balance can go awry in both accounts. QWin does do an automatic adjustment at the end to correct this.

In my test case, the archive account shows an increasing positive cash balance over time while the 'production' account shows an increasing negative cash balance. QWin automatically adds a correcting cash transfer on the date of the archive operation and one ends up with a zero cash balance in the archive account and the correct cash balance in the 'production' account.

I have on occasion had to track down an error following an update or conversion and I use the month-end running cash balance to help narrow down the search. This will be difficult or impossible if one has archived the account.

Don't see any practical work around for this issue - something one will have to live with if one chooses to archive.

splasher · October 2017

If you included both accounts in the report, wouldn't that get you the correct running balance?

J_Mike · October 2017

For this exercise, I am scanning the register running cash balance and comparing to a month-end statement balance - looking for a discrepancy.

Would need a transaction report - the two accounts combined - with a running balance. Which happens to be the original account :<~

Edit - thinking about it some more - best solution might be to undo the archive - find/fix the problem - then redo archive.

Rocket J Squirrel · October 2017

I just tried this, and my experience with the running balances is exactly the same as JM's. I don't think I'm willing to live with the ugliness this creates.

But it seems non-trivial to undo the archive operation because I cannot select multiple transactions in an investment register. Shift-click doesn't work. I have over 300 transactions in the archive account, and moving them one at a time back to the original account is impractical.

(Of course, this is a copy of my production file, so no real transactions were harmed in the performance of this experiment.)

Unknown · October 2017

Evidently they figured it was too hard to make multiple select work in the investment accounts, so instead for the move transaction function in the investment accounts you select "Move Transactions" from the settings (gear icon) and that brings up a dialog where you can do multiple select.

Note I think I see a bug in that Dialog. I deselected "Select all transactions for the same security as a group", and it is still selecting multiple transactions (the whole "group") instead of individual transactions.

larschnur · October 2017

The archive account created also has a balance amount. This is used as an XOUT and XIN transfer to the old account. It would seem that you would need to keep the archive account because of the transfer amount. Can the transfer links be detached by zeroing the archive account and adding the balance to the active investment account?

Rocket J Squirrel · October 2017

Yeah, I found the Move Transactions command under the gear moments after posting above. My first impression was that it would simply move the selected transaction. It should properly have a trailing ellipsis "..." to indicate it will open a dialog rather than instantly performing an operation.

I'm not seeing the selection bug you report. I get proper behavior when the "Select all as a group" box is unchecked.

Unknown · October 2017

It is behaving "strangely". Thinking that it might have been related to the account type I started this time in a non retirement account, and it seemed to behave fine.

Then I switched to an IRA account it worked for a couple of selections fine and then started selecting the "group". So I thought maybe it is a certain action type, but when I went back to the ones I did before they selected the group.

I went back to the original account and now it is doing multiple select too.

Snowman · November 2017

Interesting because when I archived my transactions, the cash balance did not change one penny. It stayed the same, no change. The "cash" in the investment archive account was $0.00 as it should be. My "cash" accounts for my investment accounts are separate, linked checking accounts. I do not know if this makes any difference at all.

The investment accounts are straight investment accounts they are not an IRA etc. I do have an IRA account but I did not try this feature on that account as the benefits would have been very minimal in my case.

When I "moved/unarchived" them back to their original investment account the cash balance did not change then either. I am not sure exactly where or what you all are seeing?

Maybe this feature only works with certain account setups and that should have been disclosed if it was known.

Snowman · November 2017

Interesting because when I archived my transactions, the cash balance did not change one penny. It stayed the same, no change. The "cash" in the investment archive account was $0.00 as it should be. My "cash" accounts for my investment accounts are separate, linked checking accounts. I do not know if this makes any difference at all.

The investment accounts are straight investment accounts they are not an IRA etc. I do have an IRA account but I did not try this feature on that account as the benefits would have been very minimal in my case.

When I "moved/unarchived" them back to their original investment account the cash balance did not change then either. I am not sure exactly where or what you all are seeing?

Maybe this feature only works with certain account setups and that should have been disclosed if it was known.

J_Mike · November 2017

@Snowman

Useful observation - using a linked cash account eliminates the cash balance issue.

Reflecting on this, it makes sense. The cash balance in the investment account is always zero as the cash flows in and out of the linked cash account. The linked cash account is not affected by the archive operation - other than the transfer account is changed.

q_lurker · November 2017

"Reflecting on this, it makes sense."

While Snowman identified that the cash balance in the investment account remained correct at $0, he did not indicate if the cash balance in the linked account remained as it had been. As (I believe) buys and sells etc become BuyX and SellX, etc., when the cash is moved to linked cash account, when those BuyX and Sell X transactions are moved to the archive account, they may still point to the linked cash account -- or they may not. If they still point there, the cash balance there should be unaffected. If they no longer point to the linked cash account, that account's balance must be badly affected.

Not playing with 2018, so I cannot test.

Snowman · November 2017

@q.lurker

The cash balance did not change in either place. My accounts have always had the linked cash accounts. This may be one "of those features" where the "fine print" of the way it should be used needs to be developed because there certainly seems to be situations where an abundance of caution should be exercised.

Could it be a possibility that in my case it is not "looking" at the cash part of the transactions at all, that it is just removing those transactions from the "active" file.

Anybody from Quicken care to comment on the ins and outs of this feature? I have attached a screen shot of the "help" screen in Quicken for this feature.

larschnur · November 2017

Well, I tested archiving in two accounts that contain only bonds with monthly withdrawals. There has always been a lot of activity in these accounts, one of which dates to 2006. I backed up and nvalidated the accounts as well as using a non production copy. The archive proceeded with the smaller account and appeared to complete successfully, I then ran validation again before proceeding to the large account. This account did not end successfully. The cash balance is incorrect. The transfer from the archived account appeared to transfer cash partially. The final validation performed during the last step of the archive process now has 41 damaged transactions in both of the archived accounts. The damaged transactions are mostly early monthly withdrawals from the large bond account. All I can say is beware using the archive process! If anyone wants more details from my test I will be happy to provide. At this point, I am not a happy customerl

larschnur · November 2017

I tried again with two stock accounts. The first went smoothly and validation reported no errors. Then I ran a validation from the menu and errors appeared. I left the errors alone and archived a second account. Again validation from the archive reported no errors. The cash balance was destroyed. I can not even imagine would happened from looking at the new numbers. A validation from the menu reported no errors from the previous account but new errors from the second account. Something is definitely wrong with the way the cash is handled. I think Quicken QA needs to look at the real world!

Unknown · November 2017

I wonder has anyone having the problem with the archive function tested using the "move transactions" function?

As I understand this basically when they decided to put in the move transactions function, they must have realized that they could use the same functions to "archive".

archive investment transaction in the new 2018 Quicken version

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