Purge closed accounts, payees, securities, hidden categories

jmclellan

I have thousands of transactions. securities, closed bank and credit card accounts, payees, closed investment accounts, etc since I have been using Quicken since the early 1990's. I did some kind of archive at the end of 1999, so that my oldest bank account has a 1-1-2000 beginning balance - and it is still my primary banking account. Year-end copy does not get rid of closed accounts or most of the other issues. I am NOT wanting to do this to save disk space - although I am slightly over 505,000 kb. I want to get rid of the closed accounts, hidden categories, sold securities, etc. I really don't need brokerage account activity for accounts that were closed 20 years ago!

I am a CPA, and I love having all of my history - but the bottom line is that I very rarely run any reports older than the previous year. I just hate all of the closed/hidden accounts and categories, and especially what I assume are memorized transactions that come up - and can't figure out where to remove them! The ones that come up with hidden categories are really irritating! I also trade a lot of Options and the securities list includes thousand of options with expiration dates older than 5 years.

I am VERY close to turning off services in my data file and using it for an archive, and starting a totally new data file with balance forwards. My active investment holdings would be very difficult get set-up, but since my actual tax reporting comes out of my brokerage account, I may be willing to do it!

Never being able to purge thousands of things that can never be used again is causing me a lot of headaches!

Does anyone have any better ideas than just manually starting a clean data file?

Chris_QPW

Starting a new data file might be your best option depending on how "clean" you want the data file.

But I think the best attempt at this short of that would be to make a copy without the investment transactions.

File → Copy or Backup File → Create a copy or template → Next → deselect Investment transactions.

Note this might leave you with broken transfers from other accounts and security lots especially if you have any long-term security lots because this being done based on a date.

As for cleaning up categories and payees. You can delete them at any time and if a transaction is actually using it then it becomes uncategorized, or you can just recategorize them into one you are keeping. There is an option in the category list for showing how many times it is used. Memorized payees can always be deleted if not used and there is even a setting to clean them up if they aren't used for a certain period of time. For the actual payees, they go away when the transactions go away, there isn't really any list unless you are maintaining a list customers or such in the address book.

jmclellan

I will try the copy, but I am wondering if I deselect Investment transactions, does it also remove the securities list? There are thousands, and it always pops up with ALL securities.

I am probably going to work on creating a new datafile with my preferred accounts and categories, then start from scratch.

Chris_QPW

No it will not remove securities, you would have to do that yourself and one at a time. If you have that many securities then your best bet would be to start over with a new file.