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Reports after archiving investments?

HowardSpindel

Win 10/Quicken Classic

I have just discovered the ability to archive investment transactions (which has apparently existed for years, but I never noticed it). As I have a large number of investment transactions from decades of tracking, the archive feature interests me for performance reasons.

I frequently perform various reports on my investments. If I archive investment transactions, what is the impact on reports? If I want reports to cover the time period earliest-to-date, is is just a matter of adding the archived account to selected accounts for the report?

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Mark1104

why would you want to muck with archiving transactions?

to me, 'archiving' is a vestige of the time (the 1990s!) when the power of a PC simply could not handle large Quicken files. So we used to archive older transactions to make the resulting Quicken file smaller. That is no longer the case.

I suspect you will not pick up much, if any, performance to justify archiving old transactions. Be sure to copy your most recent file before attempting to archive. That way if it turns out that my suspicion is correct, you can easily return to an unarchived file.

and no, if you want to perform YTD, an archived file is like it doesn't exist and has to be run totally separately.

What performance issues are you having? how old is your PC? etc.

Jim_Harman

Archiving investing transactions is not the same as creating a year-end archive.

When you create a year end archive, reconciled banking transactions are moved to a separate Quicken file and investing transactions are not affected. That is not what you want here.

Archiving investing transactions is a relatively new feature and is accessed from the account's gear menu. When you archive transactions in an investing account, transactions for securities you no longer hold in that account are moved to an archive account in the same Quicken file. This can help to improve sluggish performance in the original account if you have thousands of transactions for securities you no longer own. You can still create reports that include all your transactions by including both accounts in the reports.

Be sure to back up your data file before trying this in case the result is not what you wanted.

See this discussion for more information

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7951920/optimizing-my-data-file

Chris_QPW

@Mark1104 Archiving investment transactions can help performance in that investment account. I think you are thinking of the Year End Copy, which you are correct will do nothing for you.

Year End Copy is used to split up the data file, and the main reason it does nothing for performance with investment transactions is because it doesn't even touch them. On the other hand, there is a new "Archive Transactions" feature on the investment account menu. What it does is move closed security lots to another newly created investment account. Since Quicken doesn't read in transactions until you open an account moving the transactions to another account means these transactions will not be read in while using the first account. Note that for the non-investment accounts the number of transactions has very little to do with the performance, but in investment accounts the number of transactions, securities and security lots in a given account can definitely affect the performance in that account.

The old trick for trying to get the same kind of performance improvement was to use the "Shares Transferred Between Accounts" action. It did that by removing the shares from the first account and adding them back in with the correct cost basis in the second account.

@HowardSpindel As far as I know the reports should be OK as long as you include both the original and the archived accounts in the report.

Note there is a fundamental difference between Archive Transactions (and Move Transactions for that matter) "Shares Transferred Between Accounts". As stated above, "Shared Transferred Between Accounts" uses Remove and Add Shares which leaves the original transactions in the old account. Archive Transactions actually moves the transactions. This might not seem to matter much, but there are some "Return" fields that are calculated based on the transactions in a given account. So, depending on which approach you use and depending on if the "Return" calculation is being done on one account only or grouped by something different like the security you might get different results. And note that there are other fields that are calculated based on that "Return" value.

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