is move transaction faster than copy/paste/import/export?

questionsforever

i noticed you can move transactions faster than exporting and importing, or even cut and paste. Is it some special internal method of moving that is faster?

Chris_QPW

This is one of the main reasons why I think people are wrong about Quicken's "old database performance".

They think because it is so old it must be slow and that is why they are having performance problems. Mind you having a modern database would be nice for doing things like having better "undos", but in my testing Quicken's database is quite fast.

So, what does this have to do with your question?

For some operations what Quicken is clearly doing is just repeating a top-level GUI command. As in repeating the same operation that they would do with one transaction, over and over for everyone you selected. This is very inefficient.

Other operations they do at the database level and then update the register when they are done.

And note that you get striking differences between doing pretty much the same thing in an investment account and in a non-investment account. That is because the "GUI overhead" in the investment account is far larger than in a non-investment account.

questionsforever

Thanks. I thought it had to do with 'pointers'

Chris_QPW

In a way it does have to do with "pointers" sometimes. If I'm in a database there is going to be records that point to records Account records that point to transaction records for instance. Looking at a file system, there is the "records" of the account names and some details, where the data for the file might be scattered all over the disk. If you want to move a file from one folder to another folder you only move the account name/details to the other folder, not actually go a move all the records of the data on the disk.

Databases can do things like this, and it is very fast they can take requests to more many records and do it before they come back for more instructions. Every time you have to go up and down the chain of asking for a transaction to be moved takes time.

Clearly a copy is slower than a move given this "pointer" kind of moving, but I can tell you that a copy can be fast enough that unless the number of transactions is really huge you wouldn't notice the difference.

And BTW I have noticed that they have pretty recently cleaned up some of these and pushed them to database level.

I select 55 transactions, and then copy and paste them. Copy less than a second. Paste. It stops to ask me about a check number, but other than that is less than a second.

Now I select 55 transactions and select Edit transactions, and select them and brings them up in find and replace, which does do them one at a time. While it changes the payee's name, I can watch the register flash for basically all of them, but it flashes quick enough that I can't count them, but it takes about 10 seconds.

questionsforever

so copy and paste on my big register takes 30 minutes to an hour!

move? About 5 seconds plus validation .

can a move to a new account of a different currency cause problems with reports if everything looks normal on the register surface?

Chris_QPW

Yeah, I was actually wondering about where you were talking about. The times I was giving are for non-investment accounts. In the investment accounts it is extreme (the difference in performance). The move in the investment account is done entirely at the database level (I consider validate pretty just database level too). But the others are done at the register level and are terrible.

can a move to a new account of a different currency cause problems with reports if everything looks normal on the register surface?

What you see in the register "should" represent what is stored but isn't a 100%. For instance, linked transfers from what I can tell are two different transactions with some kind of special notation or link information thrown in. I base that on I have seen linked transfers get "disconnected" where you select Go to the other side of the transfer and it tells you that it is missing.

In general, I have never experimented with investment accounts and multiple currencies, so I can't say much about them, but I have done a bit in non-investment accounts. And I can say that Quicken doesn't handle transfers 100% correct with the move if the other side of the transfer is reconciled. And I believe that transfers between accounts that have different currencies will only be more of a headache.

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7945368/move-transactions-doesnt-handle-other-account-side-of-transfer-correctly

Arctic Hare

In my tests, Move carries the F/X rate with the transaction, whereas copy/paste loses the F/X rate attached to a transaction. i.e. if F/X rate is 1.3 before a Move then the F/X rate (assuming same currency between accounts) is 1.3 after move; but, with copy/paste the transactions F/X rate will be 1.0 after the paste.

questionsforever

Fx rate is always regenerated..not worried about that. But do you think a cut and paste would be better for linked accounts in different currencies or it should be the same as a move?

Arctic Hare

I have limited experience with what is being discussed here, but Move should handle inter-account transfers correctly, whereas copy/paste does not.

Chris_QPW

The thing is that first off, most SuperUser (US) have no experience with using multiple currencies, me included. I only do it for testing, so I have very little actual experience in it. On top of that the Canadian version has the "most complete" implementation. It is definitely more complete than the US version (which BTW is much more complete than Quicken Mac or Quicken Mobile/Web). So, even if a US person (or a person using the US version say in another country) were to try things they might be different than what is in the Canadian version.

So, just getting "expert advice" on this is going to be very hard.

And now the part that you REALLY don't want to hear, that is going to extend into the Quicken Windows development team. They are definitely more familiar with the US code than the parts that are the Canadian code.

I can't really "prove it", but I suspect that some of the things that you are seeing broken were caused relativity recently (within the last year) when they merged the Canadian development branch back into the US branch.