Should I do a Year End Copy, haven't done one since 2005

Divemaster

I never go back more than a year and then only for tax reporting.  Then on the other hand I got plenty of disk space, but I am a bit OCD on keeping clean data and not lots of stuff I don't need.  I do keep 5 years of tax forms and supporting documentation.   So I thought I would change dates on year end copy screen.  I changed only want transactions date to 1/1/2016, left archive file name to default.  However noticed the heading "This archive data file will contain transactions up to and including:" was set at 12/31/2020.  It is not a changeable field, but appears to be grayed out like it isn't used.  I have good backups in case it go wrong.  Just seems it would be cleaner to get rid of all that old data.   I assume I could open the archive file if needed?   If I run this, I would burn the archive to a DVD.  Up until 2006 I use to do one every year, then for some reason stopped.  Do most people do year end copies?  It it valid to put in a date like 2016 for "only want transactions?

splasher

I have only done YEC for testing, my data file goes back to 1996, I wouldn't have it any other way.

Divemaster

I also decided to give it a try using 2016 as date to keep.  However it kept a lot of things that were prior to 2016 such as transactions moving amounts to saving goals.  Since those don't get reconciled, I guess they won't go away on YEC.  Anyway I restored and am back with all my junk I will never access, but drag along slowing things down.   Actually, I found a number of investment accounts I never reconciled, but were all closed.  I am too old to ride all the ups and downs and stopped investing.  Still they showed up after the YEC.  Guess I could just delete them or put an R in each tran,    

Chris_QPW

Well and there lies the main reasons why people fool themselves into believing that Year End Copy is going to do anything for them.  There are accounts like house accounts/asset/savings accounts that people don't reconcile (even though you can manually set them to R) and Year End Copy doesn't remove them.  Also it would be very complicated to decide how to break up security lots that haven't been completely sold, so they punted on those and never touch any investment accounts.

If there is one place that really suffers from a lot of transactions/security lots it is the investment accounts.  But Year End Copy doesn't nothing for that.

Then there is something else that most people don't realize, for the most part an inactive account doesn't impact the performance of Quicken.  Quicken doesn't read in an account's data until you open it (or reference it in a report).  As such simply hiding an account and not accessing it gives you pretty much the same performance increase than if you were to delete it.

In the non investment accounts for the most part the performance doesn't go down based on the number of transactions.  The transactions are cached in memory and only what needs to be shown on the screen is actually loaded in the the GUI/register.  There have been some reports that when you exceed about 32,000 transactions in a given register there might be some problems, but the simple fix for that is to copy some of the transactions to a new account register and use that one.

Which brings up about the only way to increase performance with the investment accounts.  Moving transactions/security lots to another account that won't be opened it the way to speed the first account's performance up.  Needless to say if someone is an "active trader" with tons of trades a month Quicken isn't good for it.  The same would be true of a buy and hold person that hasn't sold anything in years.  The point would be to move the "inactive" security lots to another account, but if nothing has been sold, nothing is "inactive".

Divemaster

I decided to just leave it be for now.  I played around some and deleted some real old zero balance accounts.  Then ran a super validate which gave some errors.  They were transfers made to accounts I deleted.  Super Validate took care of it and used  uncategorized in the category column which is fine with me.  Overall net worth stayed the same.   Not going to go in and put a R in all those transfers to saving goals which I use a lot. 

Speed is not an issue, just don't like keep data around I have no use for.   Comes from around 40 years as system software tech for state.  Retired in 2004.    We didn't like to take up resources with useless data. 

Divemaster

Should correct think the deleting of account made the uncategorized in the category column.  To tell the truth I don't know the difference in validate vs super validate.  I have always just ran the super validate, making sure I have a backup first. 

I did figure out how to get rid of those un-reconciled trans used for saving goals.  Move the saving goal amount back into the parent account ( think that would be the correct term), then delete the saving goal and Quicken will delete all transactions in/out of that saving goal from the parent account, then if you do a YEC you won't have those un-reconciled trans left hanging around.  Then if you want, just create another saving goal and transfer the amount back into it. 

Now after figuring that out, I think for now, I will just leave it alone.