What to do with old transactions

Question

Okay. Full confession. Until a certain time, about 7 years ago, (the time frame for statements I can access easily). I never reconciled my accounts. I entered them manually years ago, then downloaded them starting about 2012. I went back and reconciled against the bank statements I can access, as mentioned above.

My question is what should I do with the earlier ones, just to clean up the reconciliation process. I have hundreds of transactions that still appear on the reconciliation page.

My first thought is to simply go through them all and select the "R" tag, so they will not appear in the list. I made a adjustment on the first transaction I actually reconciled. So the current balances are correct. I only want to keep them so I can go back and research a distant purchase occasionally, so I don't want to delete them.

Any ideas?

Chris_QPW · Answer

@UKR why 12/31/2023?  From what I understand all the transactions for the last 7 years are reconciled.

Personally, I would do what you suggested @dougcolemandec and mark all the old transaction with R/reconciled. You can do them all at once by selecting the first transaction and then holding down the shift key and right clicking the last transaction and then select "Reconcile status" → Reconciled.

UKR · Answer

If you look at the month-end balances in your account register, do they match the bank statement ending balances for each month?

Or, asking this in a different way … would, for example, the bank statement ending balance on 12/31/2023 match the register balance on 12/31/2023 (+/- any transactions made in December which cleared in January)?

If that's the case, you can IMHO safely assume that all your transactions prior to 12/31/2023 match your bank statements and you can run a Reconcile to the 12/31/2023 date and balance, marking all unreconciled balances in one fell swoop.

If you find discrepancies, try to make the necessary corrections or record a "Balance Adjustment" transaction to fix the difference.

And, yes, you should definitely keep all the historical transactions. One never knows when you need to review something.