Purge defunct accounts, old transactions

Question

I've continuously upgraded my Quicken since 1989, and have retained every account.   I now have about 40 defunct accounts, and only three active accounts I want to keep — 2 checking, 1 credit card.  Current .QDF file is over 24,690 KB — very unwieldy, sometimes won't load at all.  How can I streamline my .QDF, keeping only my 3 active accounts?  And in those 3 accounts, I'd like to purge thousands of entries from before 2015.   How do I proceed?

Quicken Kristina · Answer

Hello @Tim Carr,

To assist you with this, a little more information would be helpful.  When you say you want to purge these accounts, do you mean you want them to no longer be in your Quicken at all, or are you still wanting to retain some of the history?  Are you having any issues with your current file that are prompting you to want to purge some of the data?

If you are wanting to completely remove those defunct accounts and don't care about retaining any history, then you would want to delete those accounts.  Before deleting any accounts, please make sure to backup your Quicken file.  If you accidentally delete an account you wanted to keep, or later change your mind and decide you did want to keep some of those accounts, restoring a good backup from before the account(s) was deleted is the only way to recover it.

To clear out older history, there are a couple options.  You can manually delete transactions.  It is a good idea to backup your Quicken file prior to doing this.

The other option to trim off unneeded history is to make a year-end archive of your file and choose the starting date for the transactions you want to keep in your file.  Make sure to backup your file prior to creating the year-end archive.  To create the year-end archive, please navigate to File > Copy or Backup File... > Create a year-end archive (see examples below) which will also allow you to select a date for your file to start with.

Please be aware that the year-end archive will not trim off all the transactions from before 2015.  It will trim off only transactions that are reconciled, not investment transactions, and not transfers.

[Edited to correct final suggestion]

I hope this helps!

Tim Carr · Answer

How can I purge defunct accounts, and ancient transactions?