Why is there no deletion of transactions by date?

Question

In all my 40 years of computing experience there is always an aging / offline / archival process for a database.  Why is it such a mystical ongodly experience to even begin to find a way to delete transaction history prior to a certain data in Quicken?  Is it really that difficult for the programming team to add that feature?  I am gobsmacked at the inability to do this?  Is it some ethical thing or does the programming team just not understand the concept of database transaction deletion?

AnthonyMLV · Answer

I get it.  It is beyond most peoples abilities to post an end of year balance forward entry on any and all accounts that were active on 12/31 of a given year to be posted on 1/1 of the next year and only then delete any prior transactions on 1/1 of the next target year.  If only there was a programmatic way to do that......  But we all know as you say, users really don't know what they want and will come back asking for deleted entries to be returned.  It's inevitable.  Besides, why fix something that isn't broke?  It doesn't affect performance and it would just create some extra programming effort that would have to be vetted and tested, and really who needs that?

volvogirl · Answer

Here's some other considerations

Unreconciled transactions and investments transactions won't be cleared out.  Most of the users here recommend you just hide the accounts.  Just make frequent backups.

You can do a year-end copy but most of us here don't recommend it. It's better to leave all your data and history together in one file and it should not affect performance.  Sometime in the future we guarantee you will want to see something and you won't be able to merge them back together. You can run reports for any time period.  Just copy your whole file for a backup (which you should be doing regularly anyway) and continue on in your current file. Too many times people ask for help on how to re-merge their data, which can't be done.  Also any uncleared checks will then show up in both files.   So just continue on. And if you upgrade to a newer version in the future you will have to remember to convert all your old files too.

AnthonyMLV · Answer

OK, I get it now.  It is waaaaaay to difficult to place a "Balance carried forward" from the cutoff date to any other accounts that may be affected by the removed transactions.  My apologies for asking the impossible.