Reconcile not available after archiving investment transactions

Question

My quicken was painfully slow so I opted to archive the transactions in my 401(k) account. Voila, Quicken was fast again. It was amazing. That being said, when my next quarterly statement came out, I realized the reconcile feature is no longer available in the new account. It is available in the archived account. Then I look at the transactions, it didn't archive chronologically at all. The beginning of the original account was in 9/2018. I archived in 10/2021. I have transactions in the new account that begin in 9/2018 too. In addition, I can no longer download to the account. It so happens that I am going to close this 401(k) account and roll it over, BUT, this would be a huge problem if I wasn't.

I saw a previous post that said you could undo the archive; I don't see where that is available. I may want to do that when I roll it over so I can reconcile and close this account properly.

I am running Quick Premier Release R38.30.

Chris_QPW · Answer

I don't understand this statement.  The whole purpose of the new archive function is to archive investment transactions.  I think you are thinking of Year end copy which is completely different.

The archive feature works on closed lots.  It doesn't care about the clear status.
As a test I set all my transactions in an investment account to cleared. and then ran archive.

After the backup the transactions were moved to Joint XX1559-Archive, as shown below, and I was able to start the reconcile with no problem.

What makes you think that the reconcile feature is missing?
After the test above Ctrl+R works fine for me in both accounts.

And as for this statement "it didn't archive chronologically at all" it wasn't supposed to.
In archives the closed lots, which can be sprinkled all over different dates.

As for reversing the archiving beside restoring from the backup that was made and redoing things, you can move the transactions in the archive account back into the original account with the gear icon menu -> Move Transactions.

And if you do this you should a bit to clean up.  Here are the last three transactions in the register.

When archiving the transactions, a certain amount of cash had to be moved to the archived account so that it balances.  Quicken doesn't try to find the exact transactions that funded each buy in the original account and transfer just that before each transaction.  Instead, it just sees what the total would be and transfers that amount.  Those last two transactions are the two offsetting transactions that would have been in the two different accounts, and since I just moved all the transactions from the archived account to the original account, they both end up here.  The clean-up is to just remove these two transactions.

Frankx · Answer

Hi again @Janice,

So, there is one other area where the archiving process does not apply - that is for investing type accounts.  Quicken will generally not archive any investment transactions, however if you have a large number of investment transactions, many of which are for closed positions, then you might get better performance archiving them.  Here's a LINK to an article on how to do that.

Frankx

Janice · Answer

Hmmm, the majority of my transactions would have been reconciled because I do reconcile every quarter. That being said, the statements are slow to come out so perhaps there would have been 3 months or so of unreconciled transactions. It doesn't explain why the transactions from 3 years prior are in both accounts.

Also, this was done months ago, so I'm not willing to go that far back. If it was weeks, I would have.

Quicken is SO quirky.