Year-end file decisions
It's that time of year again to figure out how to split up your data into years, etc. I will tell you that having data from 1986 forward in Quicken files, I am spending more hours modifying and organizing my history than I ever did just entering and reconciling the data originally.
I currently have annual files for every year from 1986 thru 2015, which contains everything from 2015 onward. I used to just make the simple annual update to a new file, and would not migrate accounts that were cloesd with no balance. But then I figured out that I want all of my investment/asset/liability in a single file for historical reporting, without all of the checking/credit card history. This has required that I spend lots of time moving the accounts forward into my current file. I have also decided that I would like to have all my cash/credit card history in a single file for historic reporting.
Warning: when you get old you won't care so much about year-by-year detail or balances,etc for you bank and cash accounts, but the asset/liability/investment data will be important,
Then of course there are all the organizational things that I did that I now regret and am having to undo, such as intermediate accounts for activy that should have been direct account to account.
My overall scheme of things is that I want my complete asset/liability/investment data in one place, and my cash/credit/spending data in a single place and not split between many seperate files.
Considering that we can only export/import non-investment accounts, and can't ever go direct file-to-file, my goal is to get all the cash/credit accounts collected into a single archive file via the export/import process and all the other accounts related to historic net worth accumulated into my current active account file.
I have found that leaving the several most recent years in my current file avoids as least some of the issues with having to make corrections to data, especially when transfers are involved. The down-side of this is the oft-debated effects of file size on performace. At this point havning 7-8 years in a single file seems to be a decent tradeoff on performance, mostly in the area of saving new data and making changes to existing records. And seperating the elements of splits and transfes becomes less of a problem as my data ages.
As winter sets in here in the upper midwest I will be back at this project. Part of my work will be re-merging the cash/credit data from the annual files back into a single archival file where performance will not be an issue.
In summary, year end would be a good time to think about your financial history and consider how you might want to have it organized for the future considering the features (liimitations) of your version of Quicken