files in quicken for my chequing account go back to 1997.

Alfun

Can I delete 15 years worth without affecting the current balance and info.

splasher

Yes, but you will need change the Opening Balance transaction to make the Ending Balance the same as before the deletion.

Chris_QPW

What I would recommend instead is to move the transactions to another account and then just hide that account.

Alfun

Thanks guys, but I tried both of those on a small number of old files. The first completely screwed up all the other accounts that had had transactions with that account, such as transfers between accounts. The second does not reduce the size of the Quicken file, which is my is my goal. I've been using quicken for all my financial interactions such as several bank accounts, investment accounts, stock portfolio, mortgages and loans since 1997 and they are all interconnected. I simply want to archive those old files without causing problems and reduce the size of the file I am backing up regularly, which is massive. I don't understand the instructions on archiving which seems to indicate each account ends at the end of a year and then can be archived. I also don't know if that actually reduces my active file size.

Chris_QPW

What do you consider "massive"?

In general removing transactions doesn't affect the performance and the size of the file shouldn't be that big considering the size of drives these days.  Now if you are storing attachments in the file they can get really large fast, especially if you are storing images.

Note the suggestion for moving transactions wasn't meant to reduce the size of the file, only remove them "from view" since that seems to both some people.  Or in the case of having more than about 32,000 transactions in a non investment account has been known to cause problems.

Jon

"The first completely screwed up all the other accounts that had had transactions with that account, such as transfers between accounts. "

You can't delete old transactions in only some of the accounts, you have to delete them in all the accounts. If you want to delete transactions from before 2012 (for example) do it across the board. As splasher pointed out, you'll have to update the opening account balance for each account to whatever it was on the date that you decided should be the new starting date of the file. I used to do this every year back in the 90's but ultimately decided it wasn't worth the hassle. My current file goes back to the beginning of 99.

Alfun

Thank you both for your information. I think I'll just leave it as is rather than setting up separate files. I've fixed most of the issues caused by deleting some files, glad I did a test run. I'm sure as time goes on I'll find a few other issues. I'm surprised Quicken has not found a way to "archive" really old transactions in the same account just to make the program work a little more efficiently.

Chris_QPW

Alfun said:

I'm surprised Quicken has not found a way to "archive" really old transactions in the same account just to make the program work a little more efficiently.

In general in a non investment account there isn't any performance difference if you have 20 transactions or 20,000 transactions, so there is little reason to archive in this case.

In the case of investment accounts where it does matter, there is an Archive Transactions menu item for moving old closed lots to another account.