I tried to update 2000 transactions with a new category
Are there plans for performance improvements in Quicken?
I have 2000 transactions with no category assignments. Payee contains ABC and replaces category ABC category.
By mistake, I left the screen on a credit card account with many of those transactions that I wanted to recategorize. How else do I know the transactions that need adjustment?
Quicken Class Business & Personal started the replacement, but after about 10 minutes, it just slowed the i7 8core computer down to crawl and I had to kill the process. Even Task Manager was very slow to appear and refreshing anything on the screen took many seconds. CPU was only at 20% and memory was only 30% out of 16GB.
Not sure what happened, but the software doesn't scale well on mass transactions if you leave it on an account.
You'd think it's a simple update query based on the selected IDs, but it painstakingly goes through each transaction then refreshes the screen each time with the replaced category and repeats.
In the find & replace screen, it goes through the highlighting process where it selects each row individually as it scroll down the entire list of transactions. If you want to sort the find and replace screen by Cat so you can custom select the missing categories, you have to wait for all the records to be selected, clear all, sort by cat, select the records you want to change, and then wait forall the rows you selected one by one.
If you don't refresh the screen, until the find & replace is done, would this process go faster?
You don't notice the inefficiency as much when its like 50 or 200 transactions, but 2000, it really shows how bad the flow is. If only keep two years of transactions (its a lot of rows, but nothing a basic database with proper indexing can't handle) but it does show on sluggish Quicken can be. I'd like for some refinement so the software works better.
Best Answers
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I don't know if this will help but one thing I have noticed when doing edit updates for a large number of transactions is that it is best to restart Quicken before doing the mass edit. I've never tried to edit 2,000 transactions at a time, but I have done over 600. At times it looked like Quicken was choking on the edit, but I just left it alone for a while and it eventually finished. The processing capacity of your PC would be a factor in how long it takes to complete a mass edit.
Quicken user since 1991, DOS version1 -
Actually I don’t think it is the database that is at fault.
I might even call the problem “lazy programmer syndrome”.
From what I have seen in these cases what it seems to do is call a high level function to change one transaction including the GUI. And the it does the next transaction and on an on. The proper way should be to just do this at the database level and when it is finished, the update the GUI/register(s).
The reason I call this “lazy programmer syndrome” is because it might a lot easier to just call some high level GUI function in a loop, and that might work fine for a limited amount of transactions, but be terrible when doing a large amount of transactions.
Note “lazy programmer syndrome” might be more properly stated as “too busy to do it right”.
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Answers
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I tried again with 500 transactions, and it still hangs. I don't know what the upper limit is, but at some point, trying to batch update many hundreds is not doable.
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Wow, that's a lot of data entry mistakes. Does re-categorizing work on 10 transactions? If not, Quicken Support might be your next best bet other than fixing them one by one.
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You might try
- go to a banking transaction report
- Customize to only those transactions,
- select all the transactions,
- Use the Edit button to recategorize the selected transactions.
No promises that it would be better, but it might
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I've never recategorized that many in one operation but have done several hundred at once. Don't recall how much time it took but it did it. This was through Find/Replace.
I've also done this using reports. I used a generic category for "Utilities" for quite some time. After some years I realized it's too broad a category so I created a few subs for Gas, Electric, Internet, Phone and a few others. Customizing the report to include other fields (payee, tags, memo. etc) helped me narrow down the results, then pick the ones I needed to change. Even so, each change was typically under 100 transactions.
My Qdata file has transactions back to 2001.
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I don't know if this will help but one thing I have noticed when doing edit updates for a large number of transactions is that it is best to restart Quicken before doing the mass edit. I've never tried to edit 2,000 transactions at a time, but I have done over 600. At times it looked like Quicken was choking on the edit, but I just left it alone for a while and it eventually finished. The processing capacity of your PC would be a factor in how long it takes to complete a mass edit.
Quicken user since 1991, DOS version1 -
Thanks for suggestions on using Report as an alternative. I was able to get the recats done eventually breaking it down to several hundred at a time. I do a lot of repeat transactions and I am behind on categorizing so that's why I had to do the mass updates. My point is to point how Quicken's workflow doesn't work well when you take it to ridiculous extremes. Any good software should be able to handle edge cases gracefully. Sure, very few people will likely need to categorize blank categories with a certain payee at once, but if Quicken can't do this, it should set a limit, or figure out a way to perform the update a bit differently. Its nice to see categories refresh real-time for onesie and twosies, but when you're doing 2000, it should either prevent you or not refresh the data every time on screen. It just doesn't scale. The fact that you have to give it so much time to perform even 600 means there's bad design in the software where we put up with mediocre software programmining. At the end of the day, Quicken has a database that has a database that has to be added to, deleted, or updated. 2000 transactions is nothing to a database unless the graphic software is badly designed or the database is poorly designed. We need better and Intuit has gone stumbled along far too long giving us mediocre software, worst than Microsoft.
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Actually I don’t think it is the database that is at fault.
I might even call the problem “lazy programmer syndrome”.
From what I have seen in these cases what it seems to do is call a high level function to change one transaction including the GUI. And the it does the next transaction and on an on. The proper way should be to just do this at the database level and when it is finished, the update the GUI/register(s).
The reason I call this “lazy programmer syndrome” is because it might a lot easier to just call some high level GUI function in a loop, and that might work fine for a limited amount of transactions, but be terrible when doing a large amount of transactions.
Note “lazy programmer syndrome” might be more properly stated as “too busy to do it right”.
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This is my website: http://www.quicknperlwiz.com/0 -
This is a rather timely topic for me. I'm in the process of combining a bunch of old closed credit card accounts into one account called (wait for it)… Closed Credit Cards. Having so many old closed accounts was really messy so I wanted clean up Quicken a bit by combining all of these old accounts into one account. However, before I combined the accounts, I wanted to give the transactions for each account a unique Tag so that I could separate the transactions by credit card account even though they were in one account. Well, one my older accounts had over 3,000 transactions, so having read this post, I thought that "this might take a while" but decided to go for it after backing up and restarting Quicken. I watched the mass update start and run for maybe less than a minute and then decided to go do something else rather than spend my time watching the hour glass flash as the update proceeded. I came back 10 minutes later and the mass update had successfully ended: 3,081 transactions updated. Since I walked away, I don't know how long the process ran but it was less than 10 minutes.
Quicken user since 1991, DOS version1 -
@GeezerGeek That sort of lines up with my experience, where some operations are actually pretty fast and others with far less transactions are much slower. It really does seem to depend on if they are doing the operation at the high/GUI level or at the database level.
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Yes, there are a lot of factors that can account for the speed of some of the updates. I've had much smaller updates take longer even though they were also updating the Tag field. idkidk's experience has been far worse but his Quicken file, PC, and the field he was updating were different than mine. Restarting Quicken before the mass update seemed to help increase the speed of the update but since the mass updates were different, that could have been a coincidence.
Quicken user since 1991, DOS version0 -
@GeezerGeek do you know about the All Transactions register? You can access it via the link at the top of the Account Bar.
Quicken user since Q1999. Currently using QW2017.
Questions? Check out the Quicken Windows FAQ list1 -
No, I did not! Thanks for guessing that I didn't know about that. Nice feature.
Quicken user since 1991, DOS version0 -
So tags and categorizations may have a different process for updating and tags may be faster? I can't blame Intuit really because it was a mom and pop shop, not an IT startup, so probably has all these arcane irregularities that is now Quicken.
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Yes, it is possible that one is faster than the other, possibly because of database architecture.
Whenever you have software that is as old as Quicken, the software architecture is usually a mess, unless there has been an extensive rewrite. Software architecture can be begin to resemble the architecture of the Winchester House after years of adding on new features with no regard for updating the existing software core. The software becomes bloated and inefficient. Quicken was first released on DOS in 1984 and the present Quicken owner bought Quicken from Intuit sometime around 2016. Due to years of neglect by Intuit, the software wasn't in good shape at the time of the sale and Intuit provided minimal support during the latter years that they owned it. Back then, whenever you encountered an error in Quicken and you called support for help, the standard answer for any problem with the software was "Your data is corrupted". There is still a lot in Quicken that needs to be updated but, in my opinion, the software is in better shape now than it was in 2016 at the time of the acquisition. I said "in my opinion" because some disagree with that, especially those who resent the yearly subscription fee that the new Quicken company implemented. Again, in my opinion, the yearly subscription fee was necessary for the software to be economically sustainable.Quicken user since 1991, DOS version2
