Old Categories

Swanson

In Quicken there are a large number of income and expense categories I no longer use. The same with tags. If I now eliminate these categories and tags to clean up the account will anything happen to the old items I have categorized and tagged? Is there any downside to this strategy?

Chris_QPW

Any transaction that has a category/tag that you delete will also have that category/tag deleted, leaving them uncategorized/untagged.

Individual transactions don't have "copies" of the category/tag they have "link" to the category/tag that you selected.  That is why if you rename a category it changes in every transaction that you used that category.

James J

To “clean up”, you would probably need to start an entirely new quicken file, eg starting 1Jan2022.   Hmm, or else, Quicken doesn’t let you merge categories so that old ones are not actually deleted and can still be searched on?

Scooterlam

@Swanson Curious, what problem is causing you issues?

When I started using "budgets" some time ago, I went through some clean up on my category list and I found that using Find and Replace extremely helpful. Image.   If over the years you've created bunches of category names for essentially the same expense or income item, you can combine or merge these using Find and Replace.  Maybe it will be helpful for you.