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Large Amount of Transactions / File Size / Reliability and Stability

eqpu

Hi,

I am using Quicken 2012 Premier.

I have a curiosity question.

I have a file with an account where number of transactions are in excess of three thousand and may add few more thousand over next few days. These are actually line item transactions from orders placed on online website over period of past few years. (e.g. Kindle Books, Grocery Items etc.) and few thousand will be added if I enter all past transactions.

Sometimes, I feel that if I can just enter the net amount for a category (Books, Groceries) instead of entering each line item separately, the number of transactions will reduce dramatically.

On a personal front, I find it much more useful to enter line item transactions to track in details on my spending habits and do not mind spending the time to enter these line item transactions, I have following questions

a) Is it worthwhile reducing the number of transactions in the account (will it have any major effect on the file stability, reliability, performance etc.). I do not find any performance issue as of now. (If I do decide to reduce the number of transactions in Quicken file, I will still end up entering them in Excel or somewhere else to keep track and I prefer Quicken much better than those tools as it is perfect for tracking expenses etc.). So my question is mainly from a stability, reliability and performance perspective (Quicken support states that number of transactions are limited by hard drive size which runs into terabytes these days and my file is around 43 MB as of now).

On this note, I will also like to ask other community members as to what are the maximum number of transactions they have entered for a single Quicken Account if it exceeds few thousand in number and if they have faced any issues do to this?

b) Does the Quicken file size reduce if a large number of transactions are deleted from the account ?

Thanking in advance,

Regards,

eqpu

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Comments

NotACPA

Please do HELP and hold down the CTRL key while you click About Quicken.

If you can take a snapshot of the resulting statistics window, and post it here, such would be helpful in understanding your issue.

Snapshots (preferably JPG files) can be posted here by using the "paper with a folded corner" icon, to the right of your avatar.

eqpu

Attached jpg for the file statistics using CTRL Click About Quicken.

it was also good to know about this feature. I never knew such a feature existed.

Quicken Data File Statistics.jpg

q_lurker

a) Is it worthwhile reducing the number of transactions in the account (will it have any major effect on the file stability, reliability, performance etc.).

IMO, for spending accounts, No. I don't think number of transactions has any impact on any of those behaviors. For investment account, I have found in older versions of Quicken slower responsiveness as number of transactions exceeded some gray line (dependent on other software, hardware, OS, and user expectation). I have three spending accounts wit over 5000 transactions in each. No issues. I have been using one data file for all record-keeping since 1991.

b) Does the Quicken file size reduce if a large number of transactions are deleted from the account ?

The file size only reduces if you follow up that deletion with a File / File Operations / Copy operation.

NotACPA

@eqpu Your "Size of QDF file" is 1/3rd the size of my file. Even with your upcoming "few thousand transactions" you'll still be approx 1/2 my file size.

SO, I wouldn't worry about it.

And, file size has no identified impact upon Q's performance. If you're having performance issues let us know and there are other things to try. BUT in letting us know, we'll need to know the specific actions that you believe are involved.

eqpu

q_lurker said:

a) Is it worthwhile reducing the number of transactions in the account (will it have any major effect on the file stability, reliability, performance etc.).
IMO, for spending accounts, No. I don't think number of transactions has any impact on any of those behaviors. For investment account, I have found in older versions of Quicken slower responsiveness as number of transactions exceeded some gray line (dependent on other software, hardware, OS, and user expectation). I have three spending accounts wit over 5000 transactions in each. No issues. I have been using one data file for all record-keeping since 1991.

b) Does the Quicken file size reduce if a large number of transactions are deleted from the account ?
The file size only reduces if you follow up that deletion with a File / File Operations / Copy operation.

Thanks for the update. I find it comforting to know that same file is being used from 1991 transactions and some have more than 5000 transactions. I too am using same file for all my transactions but may be going back to late 1990s for some investment transactions and late 2000 for spending accounts.

I do expect to someday find and make the old Quicken Backup from around 1998 on floppy drive working which will provide me transactions in the late 1990s when I started using Quicken which I can manually enter in the current file.

eqpu

NotACPA said:

@eqpu Your "Size of QDF file" is 1/3rd the size of my file. Even with your upcoming "few thousand transactions" you'll still be approx 1/2 my file size.
SO, I wouldn't worry about it.
And, file size has no identified impact upon Q's performance. If you're having performance issues let us know and there are other things to try. BUT in letting us know, we'll need to know the specific actions that you believe are involved.

As of now, I am not facing any serious performance issues as I have a good machine with Windows 10, 16 GB of RAM and Intel Core i7 from around 2016. I was more worried as this is the main and only file which contains all my financial transactions going back around 15 to 20 or even more years for few investment txns and though I have backups and once in a while export all transactions to .txt (which Quicken says is Excel compatible) for backup.

NotACPA

The size of your Memorized Payee List COULD be a factor in Q's performance ... since Q loads the MPL when starting.

If you do EDIT, Preferences, Data Entry and Quickfill ... there's a place at the bottom of the window where you can trim that list of Payees not used recently. There's MANY discussions about how many months to keep, so you'll need to decide for yourself. Some say a year, and I trim mine to 4 months.

Other transactions are "Scheduled" and they don't need to be on the MPL also.

And, if "Automatically memorize new payees" is checked, you might want to uncheck that. After all, do you really need BOTH "Exxon #247" and "Exxon #123" as memorized payees?

My MPL has 20 entries.

eqpu

This was very useful tip. I appreciate it.

I checked out my Memorized Payee List and find that I have a lot of entries that may almost never be used again and many of them are also having multiple transactions under same payee name so they must have been counted for each transaction I presume in the number shown in CTRL About Quicken.

I will remove the entries not needed over next few days manually and make the list much smaller. That may be better choice for me instead of trimming to last n months.

Rocket J Squirrel

You may have the Quicken preference "Automatically memorize new payees" enabled. I find this to be overkill, memorizing everything. I keep my list trimmed to 13 months just so I don't lose any annual payees.

After any mass deletion, do File > File Operations > Copy as @q_lurker mentioned above. Only this copy operation lifts the data records and drops them into new tables, leaving behind items marked as deleted.

eqpu

Rocket J Squirrel said:

You may have the Quicken preference "Automatically memorize new payees" enabled. I find this to be overkill, memorizing everything. I keep my list trimmed to 13 months just so I don't lose any annual payees.
After any mass deletion, do File > File Operations > Copy as @q_lurker mentioned above. Only this copy operation lifts the data records and drops them into new tables, leaving behind items marked as deleted.

Sure, I will do this. I also found that lot of memorized payees are there in the list from very old transactions but which I have entered in Quicken over past few years. They will almost never get repeated and I can safely remove them from the list.

I am learning a lot of new and useful things about Quicken although I have been using Quicken from many years now.

NotACPA

Rocket J Squirrel said:

You may have the Quicken preference "Automatically memorize new payees" enabled. I find this to be overkill, memorizing everything. I keep my list trimmed to 13 months just so I don't lose any annual payees.

But it's for those annual payees that I have scheduled transactions ... and those don't need to be on the MPL list also ... especially since each one is only used annually.

Sherlock

We have not found the size of the Memorized Payee List to have any impact on Quicken's performance. We have over 4000 entries in our data file.