Why can't I create a new file with a specific start date?

kmtellier

I would like to create a file that starts on a specific date. I have been told that is not possible in Quicken for Mac only available in Quicken for Windows. Currently to create such a file, I need to back a file up and then delete all the information that I do not want in it.

JustMeHere

Well whoever told you that you can do it on Windows is wrong.

When you first connect an account for downloading both Windows and Mac leave it up to the financial institution on how far back that download should go.  Typical is 90 days, but in some cases it can be years.  But in no case can you control it.

jacobs

You have been informed correctly; there is no mechanism in Quicken Mac to purge old information as of a specific date.

That said, my question is whether you find that the way Quicken Mac works is problematic for your needs and why you feel you need to split off old data.

Some users ask for this functionality because "that's the way it's always been" -- but the developers don't consider that a compelling reason to build a feature. There are lots of reasons why both legacy Quicken Mac and Quicken Windows had year-end purge functionality, largely related to problems with databases that became too large and sometimes corrupted over time. But those old database cores are very different from the modern SQL database that Quicken uses, a database that's resistant to corruption and is mostly unaffected by the amount of data it contains.

And Quicken is built on the idea of having your financial history in one place, rather than scattered across multiple old files which may or may not even be able to be read by the current software. (We periodically see stories on this site of users who split off their data many years ago, and now that they need to access something, discover their data files can no longer be read by the current software.) If you're getting more data on your reports or register screens than you want to see, it's easy to set filters to limit the data to the past year or two or three.

There is a long-running Idea thread about this functionality here, and you can vote for it if you'd like. The developers have previously market this feature request as "not planned", but if  enough people vote for it, it might eventually help change their minds. But providing a use case for it -- a reason you want/need it beyond "it always used to be there" -- in that thread will go even farther in lobbying the developers to consider building such functionality.

JustMeHere

Note I read this question "differently", which is probably the difference in what Quicken Windows can do and can't do.  I took the question as you are creating a brand new data file and setting up and want it to start at a given date.  As say start at the start of the year.  That is what I was talking about.

On the other hand if the question is "I have this data file and I want to trim it to start at a given date."  then yes Quicken Windows has that feature, and Quicken Mac doesn't (Year End Copy).  But is also one the features that gets the most complaints because it doesn't work the way people think it would, because they don't think through all the ramifications of just truncating data at a given date.  Like for investments you certainly can't remove the buys of two years ago when you still own the security.  So Quicken Windows doesn't even try to truncate data in investment accounts.  And it also only removes transactions that have been reconciled.  And people have transactions that are of a reconcile transfer in one account, but not in another, and can't figure out why the transaction isn't removed.

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