Add "Save a Copy" feature (similar to "Year End Copy") (21 Legacy Votes)

As a Mac user, the first thing I'll add to this discussion is not to do this:

My Quicken file is 130MB and takes time to upload/download from my iCloud every time I use Quicken ON MY MAC.

You should not store your Quicken file on iCloud (or any Cloud storage service). Because your Quicken data file is actually a collection of hidden folders and files as well as a database, using cloud storage for your data file is not recommended because it can result in file corruption

It is strongly recommended to keep your active Quicken data file in a location on your Mac's hard drive that is not stored on iCloud. For instance inside your user home folder, create a Quicken folder and place your data file there. And with your data file stored locally, you'll find startup time much faster. 😀

It is fine to store your Quicken-generated backup files on iCloud though, because those files are compressed and protected from corruption. You can do this in Settings > General by clicking the Backup Folder button and selecting a folder on iCloud, or in a folder like Documents which you have set to be stored on iCloud.

If you want to add your vote for functionality similar to Quicken Windows for saving reduced-size copies of data files, you can add your vote and comment here…

I will note that I have about three decades of data in my Quicken data file. One of the things I love about Quicken is having all that history of our financial life in one, up-to-date data file; I often search for old transactions to see when we purchased something or went somewhere. And with my data file stored locally, it takes only about 3-4 seconds to launch Quicken.

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In addition to my above comment another reason to add it is many categories that are no longer used adding to clutter. My kids are no longer in school so those are obsolete but since the file is for multiple years I can't just delete them. I no longer work in real estate, many sub categories there. I create sub categories for each trip I take. Also Payee lists are full of payees no longer needed.

@JuliaMS This isn't a comment against a save-a-copy feature, but I wanted to make sure you were aware that you can reduce the clutter of both old Payees and old Categories by marking them as Hidden. Hiding Categories is a recently-introduced feature. Pull down the Window menu to select Payees or Categories and you can click the checkboxes in the Hidden column to hide old ones you no longer use. (This is easier with Categories, since there are fewer of them than Payees. One suggestion is not to try to go through your entire Payee list at once and give up in frustration; plan to do one or two letters of the alphabet at a time, and work your way though the list over a few weeks or months.) This leaves all your old transactions unchanged so searches or reports which include old data will be intact, but it will prevent you from seeing old Payee or category names when entering/editing transactions.

For your old "work life" categories, another option is to select a bunch of the real estate sub-categories and merge them into one if you no longer need to keep track of them individually.

They’re not listening to the many times this has been requested.

@rrtorrenti They probably are listening; they haven't yet taken action on those requests! There's a difference. 😉

What's hard to keep in mind is the volume of feature requests we users have presented to the development team. Just because they haven't acted on features doesn't mean they disagree, of that they've decided not to do it, or that they aren't listening. It only means that they haven't move a particular request to the top of the heap yet.

To prioritize, they have to take into account myriad factors: how much development time they think it would take, which individual programmers are needed to implement it, how many users do they think it would benefit, how critical is the need for those users, how does it fit in among other planned changes in the program, does it have compatibility issues with Quicken Windows and/or Quicken Mobile, does it help move towards feature parity with Quicken Windows, and so on.

For every update release, there are some users cheering because one of their top requests has been implemented. And probably many more users booing because the newest feature(s) is/are not the one(s) at the top of their personal wishlist. Sometimes, the new features they bring out are head-scratchers: why did they choose to do {this} instead of {any number of other features}. Over time, hopefully everyone gets some of the features they've been waiting for.

Looking back over the past year or two, there are number of features implemented which I've seen Quicken Mac users pleading for over the years — there's really no doubt the development team is listening. They just don't have a big enough team to move more quickly on implementing the long list of feature requests. (Last spring, I made list of my top feature requests so I could periodically look back and track progress or lack thereof. Two of my top 12 have been released, and two others are marked as "Planned", meaning they're on the development calendar. So that's clearly progress; it just doesn't feel satisfying enough because there are many others which haven't been tackled yet.)

So instead of giving us a year end copy option spend weeks or months on a workaround

I'm only a fellow Quicken Mac users, and I was only trying to be helpful in suggesting that you didn't need to review a large list of Payees all at once, or give up on it because it seems too daunting. If you want to sit down and have at it, it's probably a couple hours of work, more or less, depending how long you've been using Quicken and how many Payees you have. It's certainly not weeks or months of work, even if you have several thousand Payees; my suggestion was just that you could break it into smaller chunks of work over time.

If you've read my posts in this thread, you'll have seen that I support the Idea of the developers creating a save-a-copy feature. I don't think it's needed for those who saved a new copy every year in Windows and want it just because that's the way they've worked in the past. The Quicken Mac database is leaps and bounds better than the one powering Quicken Windows, and it just isn't necessary to separate years for data security or performance reasons. And there are actually tangible benefits to keeping years of Quicken data together in one file. (I believe that's why the developers never built such a feature.) However, I do think there's a valid case for being able to make a clean break with old data due to life changes, such as kids being grown, divorce, retirement from work, etc., and for that reason, I hope they will implement such a feature in the future. In the meanwhile, I was only trying to offer suggestions about how to best make do with the status quo.

@minepenge First, it’s no liability if you’re not cheating on your taxes! Second, IRS isn’t going to raid your house and break into your Quicken data. Even if you get audited (pretty rare for folks in the wealth range who are using Quicken), you can produce reports limited to the time period being audited.