Archive off old categories...

JimHuff

Over the last 10 years, I have opened/closed bank accounts, modified my categories, rules, etc. I know I can HIDE old categories, but do these impact quicken speed/performance any? also, would love to 'delete' old accounts that I've either hidden or closed, so they no longer appear in the sidebar. Can this be done?

Jon

You can set the sidebar to not show hidden accounts. In Quicken Settings on the Sidebar tab, under the Accounts to Display section uncheck Hidden. This setting applies to all hidden accounts so you won't see any of them, you can't turn that off on an account by account basis (other than changing the account to not be Hidden anymore).

Jon

@jacobs Are you sure that workaround is still necessary? I checked just now & my portfolio graph seems to be correct even though I have the sidebar set to not show either Closed or Hidden accounts (and it would be really obvious since all of my current retirement accounts are less than a decade old). Turning either or both of those options back on doesn't change the graph.

Nevermind, I did have some retirements accounts that were not Hidden after all, hiding those did affect the graph. But as long as the old accounts are marked as Closed and not Hidden, they are included in the Portfolio graph whether they are displayed in the sidebar or not. So you can remove Hidden accounts from the sidebar without affecting the graph.

Jon

You can set the sidebar to not show hidden accounts. In Quicken Settings on the Sidebar tab, under the Accounts to Display section uncheck Hidden. This setting applies to all hidden accounts so you won't see any of them, you can't turn that off on an account by account basis (other than changing the account to not be Hidden anymore).

JimHuff

thank you!

jacobs

@JimHuff If some of your old, defunct accounts are investment acocunts, you should be aware that if you mark them as "Hide in Lists", which seems the logical thing to do, Quicken will remove the historic data from those accounts from your portfolio views. So your Portfolio graph won't include any of the value from those hidden accounts, and if you set your "as of" date in the past, the table won't include any of the hidden accounts in the data. I (and others) think this is a flaw, but so far the developers haven't deemed it worth addressing. (sigh)

But there's a bit of a workaround which relates to the Settings screen @Jon showed above… You should mark your old investment accounts as Closed, but not as Hidden; then, in Settings > Sidebar screen, set accounts to display to include Hidden but, uncheck showing Closed accounts in the sidebar. This way, your old investment accounts won't show in the sidebar — because they are Closed and you've set it to not show Closed accounts in the sidebar — but the investment activity will be included in the Portfolio screen, because the accounts are not hidden.

(The reason this is an imperfect workaround is that in this configuration, you'll still see the old closed accounts in any dropdown menu of accounts, such as for reports or transfers. To me, this is less of a problem than making the accounts Hidden to remove them from the lists but losing all my old investment history in the Portfolio.)

Jon

@jacobs Are you sure that workaround is still necessary? I checked just now & my portfolio graph seems to be correct even though I have the sidebar set to not show either Closed or Hidden accounts (and it would be really obvious since all of my current retirement accounts are less than a decade old). Turning either or both of those options back on doesn't change the graph.

Nevermind, I did have some retirements accounts that were not Hidden after all, hiding those did affect the graph. But as long as the old accounts are marked as Closed and not Hidden, they are included in the Portfolio graph whether they are displayed in the sidebar or not. So you can remove Hidden accounts from the sidebar without affecting the graph.