Removing old accounts from Transfer List

HWANG2010

There are about twenty accounts that appear on the Transfer Accounts that are closed or no longer needed. I tried to delete them but there is no option to remove the accounts.

jacobs

Is this a question about Quicken Mac or Quicken Windows? It's posted in a Quicken Mac category. Jon's answer is for Windows, but there's a pretty much equivalent answer in Quicken Mac: go to Accounts > Hide & Show Accounts. Here you can mark old accounts as Closed and then mark them as "Hide in Lists", or if the accounts are open but have zero value and are inactive, you can just Hide them. This will prevent seeing those accounts in the left sidebar, and will prevent seeing them in a pop-up list when you're in a Transfer field.

(I'd note that there is a bug in Quicken Mac where when you Hide old investment accounts, the activity in those accounts will disappear from the Portfolio graph of your investing history. For instance, if you move all your money from Vanguard to Fidelity and mark your Vanguard accounts as closed and hidden, the investment values for the Vanguard accounts will no longer show in the Portfolio graph. The data is still there, and your net worth at any point is still accurate, but the Portfolio graph is just not showing it. And it may not matter if you have the graph set to a short time, such as the past year, and your accounts were closed before that. Hopefully they'll fix this at some point.)

If you ever want to actually delate old accounts, there is a way to do so: Control-click on the account name in the left sidebar and select Delete from the pop-up menu. But be careful before you do this; it will delete the account and all the transaction history for that account. In most cases, hiding an account is a better option to preserve your historical record. 

Chris_QPW

You can't get rid of accounts on the Transfer list without deleting the account.  And the "hide" doesn't work for this because of a quirk in what this is exactly.

Quicken Windows uses the category field for transfers.  So, this field is "dual purposed", and if you include balance adjustments triple purposed.

The result is that transfers are neither true categories or accounts.
Here are the possible "hide" account options:


(Close account only sets the Hid in Transaction Entry Lists and blocks it from being changed).

Since it is talking about "account entry lists" it is talking about this kind of list:


Not this list:


Or this list:


BTW you will notice that there is a hide for the category, but because transfers aren't considered real categories, that option is greyed out.  Personally, I think this where they should have put the option for hiding the transfers from the category list.  If you are going to make a field dual purpose, you should provide the same options to both things using that category.

Anyways this has been a problem forever, and they have never fixed it.  About only thing that can be suggested it do something like this so that these transfers/accounts will be at the end of the list:

HWANG2010

I login and entered the question in Quicken for Windows. I tried with Quicken Support to remove the closed Transfer Accounts. There were no options to remove the closed accounts or amend them short of deleting them. I don't know how to ask Quicken in one of their updated to correct the error. i can see some uses with 50 or 100 extra Transfer Account scrolling to find the correct account.

Jon

In Quicken Windows, there's an option on the Accounts menu for Manage Hidden Accounts. One of the options for each account is "Hide in Transaction Entry lists"; I think checking that option for the accounts that are closed will produce the result you're looking for.

jacobs

Is this a question about Quicken Mac or Quicken Windows? It's posted in a Quicken Mac category. Jon's answer is for Windows, but there's a pretty much equivalent answer in Quicken Mac: go to Accounts > Hide & Show Accounts. Here you can mark old accounts as Closed and then mark them as "Hide in Lists", or if the accounts are open but have zero value and are inactive, you can just Hide them. This will prevent seeing those accounts in the left sidebar, and will prevent seeing them in a pop-up list when you're in a Transfer field.

(I'd note that there is a bug in Quicken Mac where when you Hide old investment accounts, the activity in those accounts will disappear from the Portfolio graph of your investing history. For instance, if you move all your money from Vanguard to Fidelity and mark your Vanguard accounts as closed and hidden, the investment values for the Vanguard accounts will no longer show in the Portfolio graph. The data is still there, and your net worth at any point is still accurate, but the Portfolio graph is just not showing it. And it may not matter if you have the graph set to a short time, such as the past year, and your accounts were closed before that. Hopefully they'll fix this at some point.)

If you ever want to actually delate old accounts, there is a way to do so: Control-click on the account name in the left sidebar and select Delete from the pop-up menu. But be careful before you do this; it will delete the account and all the transaction history for that account. In most cases, hiding an account is a better option to preserve your historical record. 

Jon

HWANG2010's profile shows they use QWin, so I assumed they needed a Windows answer. I probably should have just flagged the post to be moved instead.

Chris_QPW

You can't get rid of accounts on the Transfer list without deleting the account.  And the "hide" doesn't work for this because of a quirk in what this is exactly.

Quicken Windows uses the category field for transfers.  So, this field is "dual purposed", and if you include balance adjustments triple purposed.

The result is that transfers are neither true categories or accounts.
Here are the possible "hide" account options:


(Close account only sets the Hid in Transaction Entry Lists and blocks it from being changed).

Since it is talking about "account entry lists" it is talking about this kind of list:


Not this list:


Or this list:


BTW you will notice that there is a hide for the category, but because transfers aren't considered real categories, that option is greyed out.  Personally, I think this where they should have put the option for hiding the transfers from the category list.  If you are going to make a field dual purpose, you should provide the same options to both things using that category.

Anyways this has been a problem forever, and they have never fixed it.  About only thing that can be suggested it do something like this so that these transfers/accounts will be at the end of the list:

HWANG2010

I login and entered the question in Quicken for Windows. I tried with Quicken Support to remove the closed Transfer Accounts. There were no options to remove the closed accounts or amend them short of deleting them. I don't know how to ask Quicken in one of their updated to correct the error. i can see some uses with 50 or 100 extra Transfer Account scrolling to find the correct account.

Chris_QPW

When you post a question there is a "topic" and that determines where in this forum it is visible.  There is also a flag icon you can select on every post, and it will pop up a dialog where you can ask it to be moved to another category.

The main way to ask for a new feature in this forum is go to the Home page, select New Post and then New Idea.  That idea can be voted on to show Quicken Inc that people would like this changed.  Most likely the suggestion to fix this problem has been posted and forgotten many times already.  Currently that only workaround is to rename the account so that it is at the end of the list.