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Clearing out old transactions (Q Mac)

JimHuff

Is there any way to archive off transactions, reports, whatever, that are a bit old, say 2022 and before? I've changed so many things, categories, businesses, etc. and my attachments have gotten pretty large. I'd like to just say: Archive off everything previous to Jan 1 2023. and have a fairly clean quicken file from that point forward - while still having a backup quicken file o everything before. Right now I have categories from 5 years ago that I don't use anymore, but I don't want to delete or merge them because that would impact my reports from back then. Can anyone advise a way to clean up my quicken file?

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jacobs

Ha ha, thanks. 😀 Happy to be of help. Hopefully in the future the developers will provide help for everyone who wants to purge old data by adding tools to do this quickly and easily.

JimHuff

wow, you may be the best tech support person I've heard from, and your a user, albeit for 31 years! Brilliant. tomorrow I am going to print out your advice, and begin culling. wish I could buy u a coffee!

jacobs

There is no simple way to purge your old activity in Quicken Mac, although that is an often-requested feature which you can vote for, read about, and comment on here:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7684427/add-save-a-copy-feature-similar-to-year-end-copy-21-legacy-votes

So what can you do now with the current Quicken Mac?

One option is to start a new data file while retaining the old one for all your historical data. The best time to do this is typically at the start of a new year.

But creating a new file means starting over with everything: creating and connecting your accounts, re-creating any custom reports, re-creating renaming and QuickFill rules, etc. And you'd lose your long-term investment history in a new file. So those are some good reasons why you might NOT want to do this. Also, having all your old data accessible along with your current data in one file makes it easy to ignore the old data when you want but access it when you need it.

So what can you "clean up" if you just continue with your existing data file? You mentioned having lots of old categories you don't use anymore which you don't want to merge or delete. The good news is that a recent update added the ability to hide categories you need for historical transaction but not for ongoing current-day transactions. Go to Window > Categories and make sure the Hidden column is visible (you may need to make the window a little wider, or scroll to the right); if not, Control-click on any column heading and click on Hidden in the drop-down menu to make it visible. First, set the filter at the top to show Unused Categories. These are ones you have never used, so you can hide them or delete them (except the investment categories and a couple others which Quicken requires.) Then set the filter at the top to show Used Categories, and you can scroll down the list, clicking the Hidden check box for any categories you no longer need for new transactions. (You can also now hide old Tags in the same way, if you've used Tags extensively in the past.)

You can do the same thing to hide old Payees, too. That's typically a much bigger task, because you likely have many more times Payees than you do Categories. But you don't have to do it all at once; sort the Payee list alphabetically and maybe do A-L one day, M-R another day, and S-Z another day.

With that clean-up, you won't see old Payees, Categories and Tags being suggested/used for new transactions, but all the old details will still be in your file anytime you need to look up old data.

One thing the developers haven't yet allowed us to clean-up int he same way is old Securities which are no longer held. They have marked a request for that functionality as "Planned", so it's likely coming within the next year.

There is no functionality built into Quicken Mac for managing Attachments at all. The only way to slim down your file by eliminating old attachments you no longer need is to find and delete them one at a time. You can go to All Transactions, make sure the Attachements column is visible, and click in the column headings on the paper clip icon. This will sort all your transacitons so those with attachments are together. Then you can open each transaction and delete the transaction. Hint: in the register view, press Command-Option-E to open the Transaction Details view; then click the Attachments tab and click Delete and then Save. So it's unfortunately 4 clicks to delete each attachment, but if you have them grouped together, after you've done a few you can get in a pretty fast rhythm to plow through deleting a lot of attachments pretty quickly.

Doing all of this will take some time, but with a bit of this spring cleaning work, you can hide away the old stuff you don't want to be annoyed by seeing any more, and reduce the file size if you delete attachments.