Permanently deleting old year transactions and starting new from 2022

Back to Jon - your workaround is fine, except for shared transactions between accounts, so if I purge from my main checking account, it obviously messes up any of my other accounts where there may be a linked transaction, i.e. a transfer, CC payment, etc. Any ideas?

I'll suggest a way to deal with this, but be sure to make a backup before you work on this just in case something goes badly

If you delete old transactions, you're correct that linked transfers will disappear. You get this warning:

But if you delete an entire account, Quicken does not delete all the linked transfers; it replaces the transfers on the "other side" accounts with generic transfers (Category="Transfer") rather than deleting each transfer entirely. So let's say you have a credit card account and a checking account, and there are monthly transactions transferring a payment from the checking account to the credit card account. If you delete the checking account, all those payment transfers will be deleted — but in the credit card account, the transfers will remain as generic Transfers, so the balance won't change.

So how is this practical for what you want to do? Let's say you have a checking account you want to purge through 12/31/21. Write down today's balance. Create a temporary new checking account (a manual account, not connected for downloading). In the old checking account select all the transactions from the beginning of time through 12/31/21, and drag them to the new account in the sidebar. Then delete that checking account with the old transactions. You'll be left with only transactions from 1/1/22 forward in your checking account, and any transfers to other accounts which were in the deleted account will still be intact in the other accounts. Finally, insert a new adjustment transaction dated 12/31/21 in the account to force the balance back to what it was before the purge.

You'll need to repeat this process for each account you want to purge, but it allows you to do it selectively.

I'd suggest one adjustment… instead of moving the transactions you want to keep to the new acct, I'd move the transactions you do NOT want to keep the new acct, then delete the new acct. Why? Because if you have reports, scheduled transactions, etc, that are created that are dependent on the original account, those will break and you will have to recreate or modify those entries.

@smayer97 I thought that's what I was describing: create a new temporary account, drag all the old transactions into that account, and then delete that account; the existing account remains, with the transactions left in the account. Unless I'm misunderstanding something, we're both describing the same thing.