Archive
Nick Elliott
Hi, As the end of the year is fast approaching I was looking to see how I can archive my transaction for the 2022 year, but cannot see anywhere on the menu how to do this, can you please advise how I go about this.
Many thanks
Nick
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1 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on Nov 23, 2023 @ 07:37 AM
Sorry, you can’t….
2 Posted by dwg on Nov 23, 2023 @ 07:47 AM
The archiving feature was removed in one of the Moneydance 2015 releases. It was found to be particularly problematic especially where Investment accounts were involved where you cannot arbitrarily archive before a certain date since those investments can still be active. You cannot just exclude investment accounts either since they often involve transfers between accounts and with Moneydance being built on double entry accounting principles if you remove one side of the transaction you must remove the other side.
The Developer said some years ago that it was very unlikely if archiving would ever be reintroduced in Moneydance.
To look at archiving in more detail there are two common ways of archiving:
1. Date based Archiving – This is where all transaction before a certain date are archived or removed
2. Account status based archiving – This is where you typically archive accounts that are no longer active i.e. typically these are accounts that have been closed.
Date Based Archiving
The problem with date based archiving is that Investments in particular are not compatible with this type of archiving. The reason is that if you remove transactions based on a date but those investments are still held and active you have lost data, and critically these could be buy or sell transactions and this would corrupt the investments data that is held.
Date based archiving will also generally filter through to other accounts from Investment accounts as there are generally transfers to/from investment accounts for things like purchases, sales and income events.
So if you do not hold investments date based archiving can possibly work, but you do have to adjust items like initial balances to compensate, but if you do hold investments then it is very likely that any date based archiving operation would corrupt your data.
Account status based archiving
Archiving closed account is another method used.
Investment accounts could potentially only be archived once the investment has closed, but the problem there is you could be archiving data that is effectively current in another account e.g. a transfer for the final end balance.
Trying in some way to mix date and account status archiving would just make for a very complex solution and it is arguable how effective it would be.
Moneydance is based on Accounting principles and this means that every transaction is really a transfer between accounts/categories. This is why archiving is problematic because you cannot disconnect one side of a transaction from the other side and if you were to allow such a thing to happen this breaks the most basic accounting rule and in turn breaks how Moneydance works.
Many people think that archiving old data will improve performance, experience has shown that this is not the case with modern computer systems. Trying to reduce the storage used i.e. reduce file sizes, is also an often stated aim. Because of data integrity we know this is not a good idea, however it is suggested to use the Toolbox extension which can remove redundant data and can also perform tasks like pruning old share price data and thus reduce file sizes without the loss of user level data.
In general it is recommended to use the filters provided in Moneydance to limit the amount of data viewed and to use reports with date ranges if you want to see specific data. Views or in Moneydance terms Filters are the way that Databases restrict the amount of data showing without removing data since once removed it is no longer usable in any way.
For no longer used accounts you can also mark them as inactive and remove remove them from displays and various drop downs, so the data is still there but you are not seeing it.
3 Posted by Nick Elliott on Nov 23, 2023 @ 08:02 AM
DWG
Thank you very much for a very comprehensive answer
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On Thursday, November 23, 2023 at 07:47:32 AM GMT, dwg <[email blocked]> wrote:
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4 Posted by Nick Elliott on Nov 23, 2023 @ 08:02 AM
Stuart
Thank you
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On Thursday, November 23, 2023 at 07:37:29 AM GMT, Stuart Beesley (Mr Toolbox) <[email blocked]> wrote:
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5 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on Nov 23, 2023 @ 09:19 AM
👍 (I think my answer was more comprehensive!!)
6 Posted by Nick Elliott on Nov 23, 2023 @ 11:40 AM
Hi Stuart,
It was certainly clear
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On Thursday, November 23, 2023 at 09:19:50 AM GMT, Stuart Beesley (Mr Toolbox) <[email blocked]> wrote:
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7 Posted by Kyle Manning on Jan 01, 2024 @ 10:21 PM
As an alternative to archiving transactions, it would be nice to be able to have Mondydance create a new file with the same accounts and categories as the existing file, but no transactions. The initial balance of the accounts and categories would be set to he current balance in the source file. I have done this manually before and it is a labor intense process.
I would use this to create a new file at the beginning of each year. If I need to look at transactions from a previous year I can open the file from that year.
8 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on Jan 01, 2024 @ 10:27 PM
Toolbox extension can help. Advanced menu. Clone dataset. You could then enter the balances.
9 Posted by Nick Elliott on Jan 02, 2024 @ 11:17 AM
Thank you for your answer, it all sounds a bit too much hassle to make it worthwhile, especially as people have said the file size isn’t too large.
Thanks anyway
Nick
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Maddy closed this discussion on Jan 02, 2024 @ 11:20 AM.