Removing unnecessary prior year investment transactions

bob_s · August 2020

Found nearly 200 investment transactions that are no longer relevant, the equities have been sold/traded. Is there a way these entries can be removed enmasse? Lot of time to remove them one-at-a-time!

UKR · August 2020

If you're an active trader and your current investment account has many transactions pertaining to sold securities you may want to consider this:

Archive Investment Transactions

For about a year now, a new function has been available in Quicken, Archive Transactions. It will split your investment account register into two parts, leaving only those securities' transactions where you currently hold >0 shares in the active register. The rest is moved to a new Archive register within the current data file.

Having less transactions in your active register might improve performance.

Please read and follow instructions here: https://www.quicken.com/support/how-archive-investment-transactions

splasher · August 2020

bob_s said:

> @splasher said:
> If you are dead set on doing the delete, run a Banking->Transaction report for the account & securities in question.You can select them in the report and then delete them. Be careful though, you can't undelete your mistakes.As always, make a Quicken backup prior to starting.

I learned something new today (after decades of using Quicken): Did not realize you could 'mass' delete records through a report! Always double clicked the cross-hairs and never right clicked the mouse! (Duh!)

It is one of those things that bites users every once in a while when they run a report, see a transaction they don't want in it, delete it thinking they are only affecting the report and then find their balance in the register is different.
While you can select a range or multiple transactions in the banking registers for deletion, doing it thru a report is the only way with invest accounts.

skeleton567 · August 2020

bob_s, I'll just caution you, be very careful deciding to remove investment history. This will affect your ability to do long-term analysis of your investments. If nothing else, make a copy of your account and then clean up the new one, keeping the old one intact. I had a number of various investment accounts with history going back to 1986, and made the mistake of deleting some of them. I ended up going back and bring all the history back into my current file. I'm 77 years old, retired, and enjoy seeing the history of my investment savings from employers contributions and my contributions, and the growth from various securities.

I have some investment data going back to insurance dividends and paid-up additions from 1943 forward. I love having this historical data available. The oldest is a $1000 life insurance policy that my Dad bought a month after I was born. It contains data on the dividends and additions for every year of my life. Then over the years I had other policies that provided cash value growth that was then converted in the 1960's to fund regular investment accounts that continue to this day.

So I urge you to NOT delete that data, but instead archive it in some way so you don't destroy it. I don't think you will regret the effort.

Boatnmaniac · August 2020

@bob_s - Simply deleting investment transactions because you no longer hold them is generally not a good idea because it can really mess up the historical and current portfolio values and performance data of the investment account. Help me understand more about your situation better so an appropriate recommendation can be made:

Does Quicken show that you still own shares of these equities?
Does your investment account in Quicken show a Cash Balance amount that is accurate?
Does your investment account in Quicken show an accurate Market Value?

skeleton567 · August 2020

But in case you do decide to delete, the easiest way to purge investment data is to run the Investment Transactions report, from which you can select individual transactions or groups of transactions using a visual date range and delete them from there. I've used this method to do a year-end archive by waiting until the previous year is complete and cleared/reconciled, then creating a copy of my file to go forward, and purging the transacgtions BACK to the year-end dates in accounts in the old archive file. .

UKR · August 2020

If you're an active trader and your current investment account has many transactions pertaining to sold securities you may want to consider this:

Archive Investment Transactions

For about a year now, a new function has been available in Quicken, Archive Transactions. It will split your investment account register into two parts, leaving only those securities' transactions where you currently hold >0 shares in the active register. The rest is moved to a new Archive register within the current data file.

Having less transactions in your active register might improve performance.

Please read and follow instructions here: https://www.quicken.com/support/how-archive-investment-transactions

splasher · August 2020

If you are dead set on doing the delete, run a Banking->Transaction report for the account & securities in question.

You can select them in the report and then delete them. Be careful though, you can't undelete your mistakes.

As always, make a Quicken backup prior to starting.

bob_s · August 2020

> @Boatnmaniac said:
> @bob_s - Simply deleting investment transactions because you no
> longer hold them is generally not a good idea because it can really mess
> up the historical and current portfolio values and performance data of the investment
> account. Help me understand more about your situation better so an
> appropriate recommendation can be made:* Does Quicken show that you still own shares of these equities?
> * Does your investment account in Quicken show a Cash Balance amount that is accurate?
> * Does your investment account in Quicken show an accurate Market Value?

Bottom line, these securities have ZERO shares and are from a period when my broker(s) were trading small caps in and out...
Investment account is accurate (to the penny) in both security values and cash.
Just ran an Investing Archive, as suggested later in this thread, and did exactly what I wanted...found 200+ of 700+ transactions to 'remove'.

Thanks for the thoughts and concerns.

bob_s · August 2020

> @splasher said:
> If you are dead set on doing the delete, run a Banking->Transaction report for the account & securities in question.You can select them in the report and then delete them. Be careful though, you can't undelete your mistakes.As always, make a Quicken backup prior to starting.

I learned something new today (after decades of using Quicken): Did not realize you could 'mass' delete records through a report! Always double clicked the cross-hairs and never right clicked the mouse! (Duh!)

splasher · August 2020

bob_s said:

> @splasher said:
> If you are dead set on doing the delete, run a Banking->Transaction report for the account & securities in question.You can select them in the report and then delete them. Be careful though, you can't undelete your mistakes.As always, make a Quicken backup prior to starting.

I learned something new today (after decades of using Quicken): Did not realize you could 'mass' delete records through a report! Always double clicked the cross-hairs and never right clicked the mouse! (Duh!)

It is one of those things that bites users every once in a while when they run a report, see a transaction they don't want in it, delete it thinking they are only affecting the report and then find their balance in the register is different.
While you can select a range or multiple transactions in the banking registers for deletion, doing it thru a report is the only way with invest accounts.

Removing unnecessary prior year investment transactions

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