Account list - how to clean things up.

Brent Spomer

After I retired my active involvement in investments has dropped off considerably. I no longer track the data that I once did. In fact, my overall financial picture has been simplified on several fronts. So to save income I moved to the Starter Edition of Quicken. Over the past few days I've been trying to clean up my Quicken file. After years and years of adding accounts to track this stock or that mutual fund and then selling these stocks and mutual funds I have a long list of accounts that have not been touched in years. But when I now try to remove them entirely from my Quicken file I find that I can't. I can delete them but I can't close many of them as they appear to have a share balance the needs to be zeroed. But with the Starter Edition I can't make any sort of transaction to the investment accounts. So I feel trapped at this point. I'd like to clean the slate, so to speak, and have a file that is current and only contains the accounts that I'm currently using. I got the impression that even after deleting and closing an account this data is still there.

I was wondering if there was a way to open a completely new file and add to it pieces/accounts/current data of my current file? I've been getting great support from Sherlock on my effort under another heading but felt I should open a new discussion topic.

splasher

You could try doing a File->File Operations-Copy with a date that is "slightly" in the past to see what is copied over to the new file.

"Slightly" being some date after you stopped all of your investment activity.  Making this copy can't hurt anything since your original file is left unchanged, just make sure it gets a unique filename. 

I can't test this since I have recent investment activity.

It does allow you to include "uncleared"  from before your cutoff date and to decide whether to include the investment accounts.

If you don't like the results, just delete the file.

Sherlock

If you haven't already, you may want to consider exporting a QXF file from the original Quicken file and importing the QXF file into a new Quicken file: https://www.quicken.com/support/how-do-i-importexport-quicken-transfer-format-qxf-file

Brent Spomer

I thought Splasher's suggestion was going to work but it retained the investment accounts. It did change the balance of these accounts however. They were positive amounts and it changed them to negative. I next tried Sherlock's idea of exporting to a QXF file. I don't have the option to export to QXF. Maybe this is something they removed in the Starter version.

Sherlock

Brent Spomer said:

I thought Splasher's suggestion was going to work but it retained the investment accounts. It did change the balance of these accounts however. They were positive amounts and it changed them to negative. I next tried Sherlock's idea of exporting to a QXF file. I don't have the option to export to QXF. Maybe this is something they removed in the Starter version.

Which menu options are available when you select File > File Export ?

Brent Spomer

Three entries: QIF file and two Turbo Tax reports: capital gains and tax schedule.

Chris_QPW

Edit.  I was a bit confused with the merges ideas.  Corrected.

@splasher suggestion is: File -> File Operations -> Copy.. 

And you need to deselect the ones I have indicated here:


This should certainly remove the investment transactions (but not the accounts) look to see if the transactions are gone.

On the idea of QXF export/import.  The Starter version doesn't support either.