How the devil do you start a new year file without any of the transactions. (Q Mac)

300 Guy

[removed - off-topic/disruptive/violation of community guidelines]

I want to keep all my payees and categories but without any transactions for the 2021. In the old 2007 version this is a piece of cake process. Why does this version make it so hard and to find the help for it so difficult!!!!!!!!!!! My idea of this being a very good software has gone from a 7 or 8 to a ZERO!!!!!!

John_in_NC

I am sorry you are dissatisfied with the product, and you probably won't like my answer any more. Please forgive me, as I am just a fellow user/messenger. 

The older Year End Copy found in older versions of Quicken has been deprecated/removed. It is intended that you keep all your data for multiple years in a single file versus breaking it up.

You could create a copy of your data file and remove all the older transx and enter new opening balances to set it to the current value.

You might wish to reconsider keeping your data in a single file. 

300 Guy

I tried that and it keeps wanting to open the old account.[Removed-Disruptive]

jacobs

What is the problem you're trying to solve by having as separate data file for a new year?

As John said, there's no easy way to do that, as it works against the way the program was designed to be used continuously. Date filters for registers and reports generally make it easy to focus on record transactions and hide older ones except when you need to see the history.

300 Guy

This is the way I want to look at my farm business account and I do NOT want to look at all the stuff from past years, just the present!!!! I had help last year getting it done, but that person was in the USA and was able to help me get it done in a very short time.[Removed-Rant/Violation of Community Guidelines]

jacobs

@300 Guy  As you've seen, railing about the nationality of the Quicken Support rep on this forum will get your comment censored by the moderators. The simple fact is that Quicken employs supports reps in call centers in both the US and Central America, and no matter where your call lands, it's sometimes simply luck of the draw whether you get someone who is better at understanding and resolving a specific problem than someone else. And as with all companies you may call for customer support, if you don't get someone who understands you, or who you can understand, or who resolves an issue to your satisfaction, you always have the option of calling back and trying again at another time with another representative. 

In your original post above, you asked to create a data file in current Quicken Mac with all your Categories and Payees intact, but none of the prior transactions. You say this was easy in Quicken 2007, and indeed it was -- but as both John and I have answered, there is no comparable process in the current Quicken Mac.

The developers have in the past explained that that functionality was needed in the legacy Quicken because of limits in files sizes and the capability of its database, limitations which don't exist in the modern Quicken Mac. They felt that by making it easy to limit what you see in both registers and reports to the current year at the click of a single button, the program offered the best of both worlds: limiting what people see when they want to see only a limited time span, yet having all the old data in the up-to-date data file available for the times one needs to look up something from he past.

Some Quicken users agree with this approach; personally, it works fine for me. I find it simple enough to set the date filter to This Year or Last Year on both reports and registers, and I do so frequently. Other Quicken users have asked for them to build capability to separate prior year data similar to what existed in Quicken 2007; you can view a long-running Idea thread on this site on that exact topic by clicking here. You should add your vote for this functionality by clicking the little gray arrow in the blue box under the first post. But while doing so, you should note that the idea is marked as "Not Planned" with a note from the developers that "this is not on the roadmap for future implementation."

If you want to create a current-year only data file, you can do so manually, but it's a bit messy. After making a copy of your data file, you'd go through each account register selecting all transactions and clicking delete, then entering a new starting balance for the start of the year. (You can't really do the same with investment accounts, since the historical data is required to support your security balances and cost basis history.)

300 Guy

Thank you for the reply. I am sorry f or any negative feelings, but after talking to people in Central America that you cannot understand 3 times, getting disconnected once after waiting for 33 minutes, each one of them by their comments had no idea of what I was asking even though they said they did, a chat that went the same way and then feeling like I was being criticized for asking this question. I have been using Quicken for over 20 years and the past 4 years have had help getting a new file generated by the tech people and then all of a sudden being told it is not possible. So you can see my frustration. Unfortunately I did not remember exactly how to do it. As I see you comment about making a copy of the file and editing, I did and it just kept trying to opening back up the original file. Again more frustration. Finally, I was told to ask for a USA tech and I have a call from them scheduled for Monday morning. This could have been done right away and would have saved a lot of hard feelings and problems, both by the people on the call line and here. I am serious about changing to another software after all of this. As a 35 year retired teacher, when I asked a question I wanted an answer, not another question as to why I was asking it. Again thank you for your help and sorry for any negative feelings from my comments!

jacobs

@300 Guy Glad to hear you've got another call scheduled for Monday, and I wish you luck in getting a resolution that's satisfactory to you. As noted above, there's no process in modern Quicken Mac to start over each year with your Categories and Payees intact, as there was with the legacy Quicken 2007, so I'm not sure exactly what steps support reps have taken to help you these past few years. If I knew of a quick way to do what you're asking for, I definitely would have suggested it.

"When I asked a question I wanted an answer, not another question as to why I was asking it." I can't speak for the support person you were talking to, but generally support people don't ask questions like this to annoy customers. It's because they can't give a direct answer to the question that's been asked. So they ask why you're trying to do what you're asking about to better understand the end result you're seeing to accomplish.

In this case, for instance, if you ask how to create a separate file with no prior history, they may know there's no direct way to do so, and therefore ask what you're trying to achieve in order to figure out how to proceed. As I mentioned above, you can make a duplicate of your file, then try to select and delete all or most transactions, but that can take some time, and creates issues with getting account balances correct for the new year.

Here's another possible wrinkle. If you delete all the transactions for a particular Payee, then Quicken deletes that Payee from its list of Payees entirely. This is different than it worked in Quicken 2007, but in modern Quicken Mac, a Payee is linked wherever it appears. So if you deleted 100% of the transactions from your Quicken file, you'd have a Quicken file with no existing Payees. That said, deleting a Payee does not delete any QuickFill rules for the deleted Payee.  (I'm not sure if this is intentional or a bug, actually.) So if you delete all the transactions from your copied Quicken file, you'll have no Payees, but may -- depending on your preferences for saving QuickFill rules -- have QuickFill rules which will be applied as you re-enter those Payees in the new year. And that might be exactly what you'd want to happen… or maybe it's not what you'd want, in which case some additional steps would be required. But this is why a support rep -- or even me as a fellow user trying to help you -- tends to ask you what you're wanting to do and why, in order to guide you to the right course of action. 

300 Guy

Thanks for the reply. to be honest about it, I don't care for the payee history function much at all on the 2019 version. It has too many payees that show up if you enter it with a different type of purchase. That is why I have requested for years to add a preference box for adding new ones or not like the old version. I think I generally just start adding a payee each new year and go from there. In fact I have started setting up the old version file to match what I have been using on 2019. If it gets too complicated, I will dump the 2019 version and use the old one completely again. Luckily several years ago when the new version of OS said my Quicken would not work on it, it did and have been using it for our personal account all these years. I am seriously going to look for another software also. Again thanks!!!

Bev S

I am also very upset that the archive function for the Quicken for Mac has been deleted. I have 10 years of transactions in my data file, and several accounts are so screwed up that I can't even reconcile them. I want to start over so I can reconcile these accounts! I do not want to start over with all my categories anld other basic account settings, though. That would take forever. This is simply MADDENING!!

300 Guy

I agree 1000%. I have been asking for this for years. There are over 150 people listed who what this option if you add up all the comments related to this. Yet these different places are not combined and so they say there is not enough support. Baloney!!! I think the programing people are just suborn! My accountant does not want to sort through all the previous yeas stuff to find what he wants. He wants to open a ONE year file.

jacobs

I'm not here to argue against this idea… only to note that trying to repeatedly pound a square peg into a round hole an exercise guaranteed to produce frustration. I know you're used to the way Quicken used to work the way it was originally developed back decades ago. Some of those designs decisions in the 1980s and 1990s were driven by things like small screens, limited database table sizes, and other constraints which were gone when the program was being re-created decades later.

@300 Guy "My accountant does not want to sort through all the previous yeas stuff to find what he wants." He shouldn't need to. Both transaction registers and reports can be limited to show only the past year. 

@Bev S If you want to start over with a messed up account, you could create a new account, and rename your old account with "OLD" so you still have the data, but can have a clean start as of this year so you can reconcile the account.

300 Guy

I understand some of that, but when a lot of customers request a change or addition to the program, why don't people listen and try to incorporate into the updates. I have worked service related business and when we had customers request something, we tried to help them, not just ignore them. Just because this was the reason for making that option years ago does not mean it could not be done today and let the customers do as they want, make a new yearly file or let them all run together. As a customer that is MY choice and no one hear seems to be listening to all the requests of the Quicken customers for this option!

jacobs

I agree that although they designed it on way, they could respond to user requests to do it differently. And I can think of many times when that's happened -- which is good. The developers do listen! Maybe not 100% of the time, but many times. You can't jump from "they didn't yet implement this feature I (and others) want" to "they don't listen to customers." Every feature they've released over the past few years has been something users have requested. It's just that there are so many requests, they can't tackle them all. Maybe someday, but it will take years.

300 Guy

I agree with all of this but this has been something I have personally requested of one of the senior programing people who helped me create a new file back in 2015 I think when I bought the very first version of the new Quicken and wanted to create a new file back then. So it is nothing very new.

jacobs

I didn't say it was new. There are many, many feature requests submitted back in 2014 and 2015, when the new Quicken Mac debuted, which haven't been dealt with yet. And a bunch which have.

I'm not sure why you think because you submitted a personal request to a senior programmer that it deserves to have been done. (I've been pleading with the product manager since Quicken Mac was in its original beta in 2014 to implement the QuickMath feature of Quicken 2007. I wish it had been done, and I still hope it will  be some day, but I understand there have been bigger needs and features more people have clamored for.)

In this case, though, the developers said no. They apparently thought when people used Quicken Mac for awhile, they'd discover they didn't need this feature the way they did in the old Quicken 2007 days. They were probably right for many users… but there are users like you who keep asking for this, and giving reasons why -- and the more people who chime in, the greater the chance they'll reverse course and tackle this sometime in the future.

300 Guy

Yes I understand all of this but when you look at several comments combined related to this exact item and over 100 people want it, that should be enough to maybe look at it. Anyway this is my last comment, I will not reply again as I received my renewal notice for next year from Quicken and will NOT be paying for it. in fact I am starting to use a couple of other accounting programs that have exactly these items. I really like one of them and will not be using Quicken any more until some of the exact same things Intuit was doing to the program that is being done now. I have been a Quicken user since the 1900's, maybe even the 1980's and will not be using it any more nor will I recommend it any more. I will not buy the software any more unless there comes a time when Quicken reaches out to past customers with the info that you can now work with individual years! I really hope this comment string is sent up to the CEO so he can see that people like myself and Bev S are not happy with the product!

DCase

I agree with many here. I've only begun a new file two or three times in approximately 30 years of use. My life has changed drastically in the last few years, and I'd like to unload a lot of data that reflects my old life. I want a clean file with only my current life, but I would like to roll over the last three & 1/2 months of transactions. I found my way here, because I couldn't locate instructions. I too will need to find a new program. Another issue - they won't even allow copy/paste into this window. What a lousy deal. . . and I pay an annual fee for this?

300 Guy

I totally agree 1000 percent!!!! But how do you get the big cheeses to agree and do something about it. I have said this before that these comments need to be seen by the big cheeses, but that never happens. So I have switched to another program and love it. I am NOT paying a high membership fee for the type of service, response and help I got this year with my problem. So right now ADIOS Quicken unless they advertise that you can start a new year each year and maybe, just maybe I might look at a new membership!!!!!! I don't want 10 years of old financial junk each time I open a file!!!!!!!!!!!

Quicken_Tyka

Hello all,

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to provide us with your feedback, although I apologize that the feature you enjoyed from a previous product is not currently offered.

We do have an Idea post available here for the year-end copy feature. This Idea is currently being reviewed by our development team to determine if will be added to the product roadmap.

I do not have a definite yes or no that I can provide, however, you may visit the alert and select the gold star in the top right to be notified via email of any updates or changes.

-Quicken Tyka

d.gerety.

> @Bev S said:
> I am also very upset that the archive function for the Quicken for Mac has been deleted. I have 10 years of transactions in my data file, and several accounts are so screwed up that I can't even reconcile them. I want to start over so I can reconcile these accounts! I do not want to start over with all my categories anld other basic account settings, though. That would take forever. This is simply MADDENING!!

d.gerety.

The same issue here. I've managed to make a real mess of Quicken and would love to archive all and start anew with 2021. I have a lot of entries in categories that I want to remove, but fear that if I do those entries will disappear along with the categories.
Is the only solution to export 2021 data, buy a new copy of Quicken, use a different user name and login, then start from scratch?

300 Guy

I agree again 1000% but no one in their white ivory towers want to listen to us small people to what makes thing work best for us. Yes if you erased a category, it erases them all the way back the ten years and if you were just lucky to be audited by the IRS, you would have to figure out what those unclassified items were and how they related to your taxes. But NO ONE in the ivory towers can figure that out!!!! That is why I am NOT using Quicken anymore. Their support is terrible compared to what it was 2 to 3 years ago. The people you talk to are hard to understand and etc and etc!!! Do what you can to try to get their attention but I have given up. I only hope someone on here from the ivory tower people will see these comments and maybe do something about it. I really doubt it but?????? And finally I do not understand how there are almost 200 people that have requested this on various blogs and no one again looks at all of them together. I think they like keeping everyone divided up so they only have to do the very basic stuff!!!!!!! I am to the point right now Intuit was way better back when they were not very good than this company is now!!!!!

300 Guy

Yes that probably be the easiest way to do it. I had a guy FINALLY call me 7 weeks after I tried to get support that I could understand take me through the steps to start a new year, but believe me, it is NOT easy!!!!! I don't know if I could do it again even after take extensive notes!!!!! I never use their cloud either so I have no idea if you could us your original login and such or not?????????

jacobs

d.gerety. said:

The same issue here. I've managed to make a real mess of Quicken and would love to archive all and start anew with 2021. I have a lot of entries in categories that I want to remove, but fear that if I do those entries will disappear along with the categories.
Is the only solution to export 2021 data, buy a new copy of Quicken, use a different user name and login, then start from scratch?

@d.gerety.  No! You don't need to buy anything more. You have a few options:

1) You could start a new data file. Keep the old one for reference, and move forward with a completely new one.

2) Keep your existing data file, but create new accounts and hide others. For accounts which are messed up, but you want to retain the transaction data, you can make them separate and hidden, so they will not affect your total net worth, and remain out of sight unless you go digging into them. Disconnect any such accounts from downloading data, then hide them away. Create new accounts where you want to record transactions moving forward, download your most recent transactions, adjust your starting balance if necessary, and move forward.

3) Don't delete categories you've used. If you want to clear up clutter of categories, do either or both of these things instead: (a) Merge categories together if they are similar and don't need to be separate categories. If you need help with this, search this forum or post a separate question about it. Merging categories will change all transactions which use these categories in the past automatically. (b) If you have categories you once used, and you still want to retain those details, but not see them all the time, consider editing the names to make them drop (mostly) out of sight. Add a prefix like "z-" in front of categories you no longer use for current transactions, and they'll drop to the bottom of the list so you generally won't even see them. Uoi could even make a main category like "z-Retired Categories" and make all the other sub-categories of that one.

@300 Guy I have explained in other posts you've made about the realities of adding functionality to Quicken Mac, but you keep posting the same exasperation again and again. I understand you (and others) want this functionality. In at least one place, it's indicated that the idea is under review by the developers. But you keep citing that several hundred people have asked for this and acting incredulous that hasn't triggered action. You understand that there are (a) hundreds of thousands of Quicken users, (b) several hundred requests for features, and (c) a small development team which can implement, at most, a few significant new features per month. So not everything people are asking for can get done, and not everyone is asking for the same things. I'm not saying this isn't a reasonable thing to ask for, in all the channels Quicken makes available to do so. I'm only saying it doesn't help to keep expressing outrage that this feature hasn't been implemented, and saying it means the developers and management live in ivory towers and don't listen to customers. Most of the features which have been added over the past years have been things that hundreds of people have asked for, so they're definitely listening.

300 Guy

Well I will say this if he does what you say about starting a new data file, it will not work!! I have tried that several times and got a bunch of garbage for a file or it goes back to the original one and then you loose a month or two of data that I have had to enter several times again. It takes a LOT of steps to start a new year that I did this year with a support person!!!!! Yeah blah blah blah I have kept hearing under consideration for 4 or 5 years now and NOTHING has ever been done. That's why I went to another program!!!!!! And I don't care if a zillion people are with quicken, when almost 200 customers want something, then the ivory tower people should get it done!!!!! I am sure I have worked in customer service for many more years then you at this time and we always tried to meet ALL of our customers requests!!! END OF COMMENTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

jacobs

@300 Guy You absolutely can start a new, clean data file. I'm sorry that whatever you did didn't work properly, but I want to be clear to @d.gerety. that it certainly can work -- and many people have done so. Data is not co-mingled between two different files, but users can accidentally switch between two different file if not careful. I'm not questioning that you had problems, but please don't tell other users that they can't do it. It literally takes only a handful of clicks to start a new blank data file -- but that's not going to be a satisfactory option for all people, so other techniques are available, as I mentioned above. 

As for the bigger picture, you keep saying they should "just get it done." So let me ask you about an overly simplified and hypothetical version of the problem.
   • Improvements customers want: 300
   • Average time to implement each improvement (prototyping, designing,
      coding, testing, revising, more testing): 3 person months
   • Number of developers: 10
So that's 900 programmer months, divided by 10 programmers, equals 90 months, equals 7.5 years.

You say "just do it!" and "meet all customer requests!" -- but how do you do that if the resources don't allow tackling all the work to be done? Assuming you can't work faster, and you don't have funds for more programmers? The reality is you can't do every request, at least for many years. So what do you do? Well, you prioritize to work first on the features the most customers are asking for, or that you feel will have the most positive impact on the most number of users, right? Seriously, how else would you approach the problem? 

In any case, if you've moved to a different program that meets your needs, great -- so why keep railing about Quicken if you've moved on?

300 Guy

The fact still remains that this option was available on the older version of Quicken says it should NOT take that long to figure out since this Quicken I was told many years ago very similar to the old version. I was told by a senior programmer right after Quicken when on it's own back in around 2015 that was one item they had planned on adding right away. HUM, still waiting!! Yes if you start a new data file it will work, but you have NONE of your payees and categories and all have to be reentered again. I have been there done that. Why do I keep pounding the keys here, because I have been told this, told this again and again and lied to and ignored for support and etc. I became very irritated by all the talk and no action for 2 months this year with support. The only way to get the this message to people is to let others know what happened. I have had to take weeks to do items for my customers, but you know what, I GOT it done. All the past years of saying this to support people with them saying they would relay this to the team and nothing happens, why would I stop voicing my freedom of dislike for the product!! The old saying that the squeaky wheel gets the grease is exactly what I have been doing. Too many years of this being requested and nothing done as many other people have requested. I might even come back to Quicken IF the yearly file option is ever added, but for now it is a pain to start a new file and that is why I keep pounding the keys here to let other people know this product does not have that option. Besides I am the only one really complaining because of the years of lip service with no action! If you don't speak up, nothing gets done!!!!!!!

jacobs

300 Guy said:

The fact still remains that this option was available on the older version of Quicken says it should NOT take that long to figure out since this Quicken I was told many years ago very similar to the old version.

Actually, the current Quicken Mac and the old Quicken 2007 are radically different under the hood. They are so different that no code could be "brought over" to the new version; everything has to be created from scratch.

300 Guy said:

I was told by a senior programmer right after Quicken when on it's own back in around 2015 that was one item they had planned on adding right away. 

I don't know who you spoke with or what the context was, but the statements from Quicken about this have been exactly the opposite. For instance, back in 2016, product manager Quicken Marcus wrote this in response to a Quicken Windows user seeking the year-end copy functionality:

@Quicken Marcus said:
If you do make the switch to Quicken for Mac, let us know if you find your data file too sluggish to work with even with many years of data. We do want to bring lots of the features of Quicken Windows to the Mac that continue to make sense. We don't want to bring over the features that were only there to work around issues from a previous era. I'm hoping this is one of those but let us know if you run into issues.

I added the emphasis to highlight that at that time, he was indicating that they didn't plan to implement this feature, because they thought it was something the older Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac 2007 databases required but that the modern Quicken Mac database did not.

As recently as last year, one of the Idea posts for this functionality was marked as "Not Planned":



But nothing is immutable. In fact, a different but similar Idea thread is currently marked as "Under Consideration."

As I've posted elsewhere, I originally thought Quicken was right not to implement this because the database solved the limitations in the older-generation products, but came around to seeing multiple valid reasons why users need this functionality to move beyond old data that makes their work with Quicken more difficult. If users can get the developers to see and understand those reasons, I think there's a reasonable possibility they will implement this functionality at some point.

How can users help the cause? First, click on the two links I posted above, and if you haven't already added your vote (in the blue box under the first post of each thread), do so. Then, if you haven't done so, add a comment to explain why you want/need this function. To be effective, pretend you are talking to one of the engineers. So don't yell at them for being stupid or unresponsive. Instead, lay out how not being able to purge older data is adversely affecting the way you work with Quicken. Be calm; be clear. Give your real-world examples. As you can see from the quote from Marcus above, the developers often think one way about an idea, and need to understand the why from users to see things differently.

The developers do listen. If you look back over the release notes of Quicken versions since 2015, almost every new feature is something many users have previously asked for. As I wrote in the example I gave in my previous post, the problem is that they don't have the resources to tackle all the things users want right away, or even over a period of years. Quicken Mac continues to evolve, but there are still hundreds of feature requests awaiting the developers' time to act on them. We all have our top feature requests we hope to see them tackle next, but across the Quicken Mac community, we collectively have many, many different top requests, and it will take months and years for them all to reach to top of the queue.