Year End Archive - Best Time to Create

Franklin D Davis

With the end of each calendar year in the US, this is like a fiscal year end in a business. Is it best to create the Year End Archive on the First several days of January when there are still transactions to be reconciled or better to create at the end of January when all the prior transactions have been reconciled? Year-end archive is more realistic as the reconciliation happens in the new year rather than waiting for the end of the month. There can be two distinct benefits with each approach, which is the one that you follow.

Chris_QPW

I don't recommend Year-end archive at all, but one thing to be aware of is that if a transaction isn't reconciled, it will be left in the register (and that goes for both sides of a transfer). So, you would certainly want to get all of the transactions in the time period that you are archiving to be reconciled first.

splasher

"Best time to create" - NEVER

Reports can give you any slice & dice of the data for any time frame, there is no reason to throw away good history because I'll bet that you won't keep the old archives usable by your current version of Quicken and when you do open one of them any reminders that you have will fire off and change the data file and make it useless.

Chris_QPW

And recently someone noted that it has even got worse. Just opening an archived data file cause, it to mess up the current data file because of some kind of interaction between the data file and the Quicken Cloud dataset. For sure, if you open an archived data file NEVER attempt any kind of online activity.

Franklin D Davis

Another reason for asking about the Year End Archive is that I attach various receipts, statement and applicable document to the transactions. As a reference point, my current file has a size of 885 mb. With that practice the file will continue to grow and at some point, the QDF will get corrupted or something and the data will be lost.

With the concern of the Interraction with the Quicken Cloud dataset, Quicken should turn off the cloud intereaction for archives. This would be the same message as when a backup is restored to have the option to just review.

Chris_QPW

The archiving function should really disable reminders and online services, but unfortunately as it sits right now it doesn't.

Note if the goal is to strip out attachments, I think using the copy/template without the attachments selected would be better even though it would be harder in the sense that you have to reconnect all your online services.

The archive function will not reduce the size of your data file, copy/template will. What's more copy/template changes the unique Id that is used to connect to the Quicken Cloud dataset, and as such should no longer interact with the old data file.

But it is all up to you. Note years ago, I dropped attaching files to Quicken. The very fact that you have to deal with them individually with no real robust feature set was enough for me to drop doing it that way.