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.

@rustyhoo Actually, according to IRS, you generally only need to keep records for 3 years from the date you filed your original return (or 2 years from the date you paid the tax, whichever is later) for IRS audit purposes. You only need to keep up to 7 years of data if you file a claim for a loss from worthless securities or bad debt deduction, or if you do not report income that you should report, and it is more than 25% of the gross income shown on your return.

In any case, in the event of a detailed IRS audit (which seems increasingly unlikely as employees are slashed), you always control what documents you share with IRS. They will not come into your home and access your Quicken file to look back into the past! 😉 An IRS audit would specify what time periods and data they want to look at. The only time they would request to look further into the past would be if they find proof of false information on your returns indicating taxpayer fraud.

Bottom line: unless you're committing tax fraud, or not filing tax returns, there is no increased risk of maintaining a Quicken data file with decades of data.

That said, this functionality would help users in certain cases, so I continue to believe it should be built, as I've written previously in this thread. 😀

@Apache1492 I am not disagreeing with the request to have this feature added, but I wanted to touch quickly on two points in your post…

I found in the past, windows quicken performance seemed better after a year end clean up. So far I have not seen this in Mac.

And I don't think you will see it in Quicken Mac moving forward. Quicken Mac uses a much newer and modern industrial SQL database than Quicken Windows, and the design of the database should make it not experience slowdowns as your data grows. (Of course, there are exceptions, such as if you generate a report with all transactions from all years, it would be slower than a report for just last year.) There are a number of us here who have more than 30 years of transactions in our Quicken Mac data files, and don't find any significant performance penalties.

I would suggest for year end copy that options be provided. For example allow budgets to carry over from year to year (no detail behind budget amounts but just monthly totals

Quicken Mac's budget basically works like that already. You can choose to create a budget for a new year using your prior year budget values or blank budget values if you want to start over. (That said, the developers are apparently working on some (hopefully) major enhancements to the budget section of the program, in order to incorporate a number of features users have long requested, so the way the budget works today may change significantly when they release updates later this year.)

Referring to businesses, they close the books each month and close out year. Starting over each year from zero in both income and expense.

Quicken Mac Business & Personal does not close months or years; it is not a true double-entry business accounting program. Just like the rest of Quicken, users can edit transactions from prior months or years because there is no period close. However, for reporting on a business, everything on-screen and in printed reports allows for selection of a date range, so it's easy to just look at/report on the current year; it won't co-mingle data from prior years except where you want it to (e.g. unpaid invoices from last year).

I do think Quicken Mac works best when users keep at least some data from at least recent prior years, and it isn't necessary to start a new data file each year as some people might have in the past. But as I've written elsewhere in this thread, I do think it would be beneficial to be able to create a new data file with banking (not investment) history prior to a user-specified date removed. This would make it much easier for people who have married, divorced, widowed, remarried, added kids, sent off grown kids, and other "life events" purge their older transactions so they can easily remove old categories, tags and payees from a prior stage of life. We'll see if the developers come around on this and agree to implement it; they have said no in the past.