A FIX for: Year End Archive Not Deleting Old Transactions - Checking and Savings Users

CashMan

This post is just to help users of Quicken who may primarily be using just checking and savings type accounts within Quicken, and are running into the issue where you attempt to make some form of year end archive, and even though you specify "I only want transactions* in my current data file starting with this date:", after the process completes, you find you still have older transactions in the file.

Like me, you may have already ensured that you met the conditions asterisked there: "only reconciled, non-investment, non-transfer transactions will be removed", and yet still in a regular checking account, hundreds or thousands of transactions remain after the operation that should be gone because they were from before the date specified.

What I noticed in the Validate & Repair Log was the statement "Maximum security reference: 15, number of securities: 15. All security references are within the normal range." This was odd, because the investing tab didn't even show up for me and the only accounts I had were a checking and savings account.

However, at some point in 2024, I toyed with the idea of pulling in an investment account, but ultimately deleted it. This turns out to be the issue: even though the account was GONE from quicken, some vestige of it remained in a way that was breaking my archive function.

So here's what worked for me:

1. Add an offline Account > IRA, and basically fill in no information about it at all. Just keep hitting Next or Continue until you create one with minimal information.
2. This gave me the "Investing" tab back, from which I selected Tools > Security List.
3. From there, I deleted ALL the securities, which of course there were 15 left over from the time I had once imported an actual investment account.
4. Then I deleted the shell IRA account I made.
5. I did a One Step update to sync everything with my regular bank and the Quicken Cloud (and left OFF the checkbox to Download quotes and investment information, even though that wasn't even an option on this screen for the past 15+ months).

After doing this, I went to make a year end archive that would write all of 2024 to an archive file and only leave me January 1, 2025 to today: the same "keep at least last year" thing I have been doing for 10+ years in quicken that had always worked until this year. And finally, it worked!! It finally dropped 2024 from the current file as I desperately wanted it to do since this January, when I typically clean house on my quicken file by archiving all the year+ old transactions into their own archive.

Good luck! Obviously this may not work for all scenarios in which this archive function isn't working for users, but it finally solved it for me.

Quicken Anja

Hello @CashMan,

We appreciate you taking the time to document and share these details. It’ll be helpful for others who run into the same issue.

Thank you!