Long processing times
I have a Morgan Stanley IRA account. I download transactions weekly during One Step Update. When accepting individual transactions, it takes Quicken an average of 23 seconds to process before I can move on to the next transaction. Extremely frustrating.
I have learned to have Quicken select shares to sell for sold transactions. Formerly I used Average Price; now that option causes a crash every time it is used.
The size of my Quicken QDX data file is 303 MB.
I use Quicken Premier, Release R51.12, Windows 11 Home, version 22H2, Processor is Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8550U CPU @ 1.80GHz 1.99 GHz, 8 GB of installed RAM.
Any suggestions to speed this up?
Answers
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Go to Tools >Account List. Click On Options at the bottom and check Show number of transactions. How many transactions are in this account?
Are other operations in Quicken, such as adding transactions to a banking account, also slow?
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This account has 12,939 transactions.
My checking account has 14,212 transactions, my largest credit card account has 2,844 transactions. Processing a downloaded transaction for either of these takes 5-10 seconds each. Still unacceptable in my opinion, but not as maddening as the investment account.
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You seem to have bad performance all around, which is probably contributing to the problem, and I'm not sure what the fix would be for that, but 14,000+ transactions in one investment account are definitely on the high side and by itself can cause these kinds of performance problems in that account.
Because of the more complicated transaction data and frankly how Quicken has implemented those accounts, investment account is much more restrictive (performance wise) than non-investment accounts. Non-investment accounts should perform well to at least 32,000 transactions. Whereas even after a few thousand transactions in an investment accounts the performance can go down.
I suggest you try using the "Archive Transactions" menu item on the gear icon/menu in that register. This will move closed lots to another investment account. Since Quicken doesn't read in accounts unless you directly access them this will speed up the current account which should now have a lot less transactions in it.
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After creating the archive account, be sure to include it in any investment reports that you want to include historical info.
Q user since February, 1990. DOS Version 4
Now running Quicken Windows Subscription, Business & Personal
Retired "Certified Information Systems Auditor" & Bank Audit VP0 -
My approach with investment accounts over 10,000 transactions has been to:
- Backup the file
- (possibly validate the file)
- Create a new account as an offline account.
- From the prior account, use a Shares Transferred entry to copy all open positions to the new account.
- Transfer any Cash with a separate transaction
- (This does not transfer for short positions. An alternate is necessary.)
- Disable the old account from any download/online connection.
- Enable (if needed) the new account for the online connection.
- (It has been a while since I needed to do this, and that list is from my sometimes faulty internal memory banks.)
- Fundamentally, this starts a new account as of a specific date. I have always chosen January first for that transition date.
I developed that methodology before the Move Transactions feature was available. I do not use that newer Move feature so I cannot comment on its effectiveness as an alternate approach. Others have said it works fine and I am not disagreeing with them.
The 10,000 number is not a hard limit but rather tends to be where I see my system bog down. YMMV.
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@q_lurker I have actually never had to use either approach because I have never had an investment account that large, but I would have to say that I would prefer the new Archive Transactions approach, which BTW is a bit different than just using Move Transactions.
With the "Shares Transfer" action what happens is Quicken does a remove shares action/transaction in the old account, and an add shares in the new account for all the lots that are moved. Which can in fact result in a lot of extra transactions in the old account and new one. What's more even though the cash basis will be correct the "return" numbers in Quicken will no longer be correct because they are based on where the original buy transactions are, account wise.
The Archive Transactions and Move Transactions move the original transactions and preserve that history better.
BTW the difference between the Archive Transactions and Move Transactions is in how it deals with the cash. Archive Transactions puts in transactions that "should" properly adjust the cash balances in both the old and the new archived account. I said "should" because in my testing I have had times where I had to tweak those transactions to be correct. Another thing to be aware of is that if you go to archive the account again then Quicken will create yet another account for archiving, it will not reuse the existing account used for the last archive.
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I appreciate the suggestions and comments.
I have used the archive function, # of active transactions is now 12,396.
Speed of processing downloaded sell transactions has not improved.
I am intrigued by suggestion of q_lurker. I am not convinced that this will result in a lower number of accounts than what I have already achieved with the archive function. However, if it does, will this cause you to lose access to historical data when running reports on the newly created account?
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However, if it does, will this cause you to lose access to historical data when running reports on the newly created account?
You retain access to historical data IF in the reports you include the accounts for the applicable time frames.
I have one real world account that generates more transactions than others. The oldest period covered 1991-2011 with about 11,000 transactions. The second period covered 2012-2020 with about 9,000 transaction, the third period is 2021 to present with I am guessing about 2,500 transactions.
@Chris_QPW commented about the number of transactions generated by my method. In my case most holdings in this account are single lot, a few multiple lot. So the account being shut down gets one extra transaction per security (about 75-100 in my case); the next period account gets maybe 25% more than that. In the context of a 10,000 transaction soft limit, I don’t find those added transactions to be a problem.
Hope this helps
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Thank you.
I think Quicken has some work to do. Granted, these are a lot of transactions, but in comparison to other spreadsheets and databases, this is small potatoes.
Quicken, are you listening??
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I've always noticed noticeable improvement when I get a new computer - as Tool Man Tim used to say, "More Power"! so think processor, RAM and Hard Drive stats.
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I have found for the most part Quicken runs about the same one old vs new, and low powered vs high powered, with a few exceptions. This one is very old, but having enough memory, these days I don't think that comes up, but the "hard drive" change gives the biggest bang for the money. Hard drive to SSD SATA, big change. SSD to NVMe, moderate change.
As for new laptop, unless it is very old to new, usually speed ups have more to do with cleaning up Windows, where even a full reinstall might do the same thing.
And you will notice that I didn't say anything about a GPU upgrade. That is because I have yet to see anyone announce that it has speed up Quicken, and in some cases slowed it down, maybe because of newest driver kinds of problems.
But in all cases, none of this is going make an investment account where you are waiting 30 seconds for a transaction entry to happen, go down to say 1 or 2 seconds.
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