QWin/2010 slow -- your experiences?

[Green Eyeshade]

Back in January, I went through the process of migrating my 12 years of Quicken data from Mac (2007, running on 10.5.8) to Windows (2010r4, running on XPSP2). Once complete, I found that Quicken/W has unacceptably poor performance when working with accounts containing a large number of transactions.

In an investment register with about 5000 transactions, attempting to add, remove or modify an investment transaction takes six seconds or more to complete after hitting <Enter>. In general, this "lag time" seems to vary linearly with the number of transactions in the investment register. Switching from single to two-line registers makes no difference. Validating, super-validating, saving a copy also make no difference.

Based on my testing, this does not appear to be a machine, RAM or disk speed issue. Other software runs at acceptable speed, and Quicken produces reports and graphs reasonably quickly. It appears that any operation on an investment register causes Quicken/W to revisit most or all transactions in that register! I'm astonished that a product like Quicken would have such a fundamental flaw in its datastore, but the evidence seems to point that way.

Searching Intuit's support forums produces no advice other than "delete old investment transactions." This is not a practical solution, as I find that several times a year I need to delve into historic data, and also I would lose historic performance information for long-term holdings. Also, it ignores the basic performance flaw: in a modern database with only 20-30 transactions displayed at a time, it's unheard-of for there to be a multi-second transaction lag time!

I posted on this topic back in January, asking if anybody on this forum had run into a similar problem, and what workarounds or best practices they use to resolve it. Although I did not get any replies then, I'm certain that there are forum members who are responsible for larger and more complex Quicken data sets than mine, and who would have run into this problem. Alternatively, if you have a large data sets and have not experienced this slowdown, please post a reply as well, as it will help me in my efforts to solve this.

Thanks.

 

[spatesw]

Quicken Performance with large Number of Transactions

I am not an accountant, so I don't know if the this approach is usable for you. I have used Quicken for a number of years and also have hit a performance issue dealing with accounts with a large number of transactions. I have taken a large account and created a new one, think of it as a continuation of that account. Then entered transactions to transfer the cash and securities from the large to the new account. At that point, all new transactions are entered into the new account and the performance is great in the new account. I my case I also had the large account tied to a online account. I had to remove the link from the old account and link it to the new. You could do this on a periodic basis, such as year end processing to keep the accounts a reasonable size. I don't delete any historical transactions in this case. My Quicken file is now about 25 Mbytes and performance in general is good. If your account has a large number of transactions for even a years worth of transactions, you might want to break up the account on some other category as well such as set of securities. Hopes this helps.

 

[Rick]

I have 31 years of Quicken data. I've also had the slowness issue in larger files. The only solution I have found is to do the year-end new file creation, which I have done for each of 30 years. The only mistake I made was to purge out debt and asset (investment) transactions for which I would like to have history from the start. This is essential for doing a complete net worth historical analysis. This CAN be recovered by doing export/import operations to re-combine data into a single file.

With the proprietary file format instead of a database, managing data is very difficult. I'm a database developer, so have wanted to get my complete data into a standard relational database, I use SQL Server. The best solution I have found is a set of programs by ProperSoft. I just bought their QIF2CSV utility. I export Quicken file data to a .QIF file, then convert that to .CSV format using QIF2CSV. This format I can then import into SQL Server. The only thing necessary is that in QIF2CSV, you need to select the 'Clean to avoid quotes' option which will replace any commas in the data before export. Then SQL Server doesn't have a problem parsing the data.

QIF2CSV can export three files, the 'register' file, a Category file, and a Memorized Transaction file (probably not of much value).

ProperSoft has done a great job in decoding the Quicken proprietary format and the utility is very inexpensive. Microsoft also has a freebee version of SQL Server that probably will work well for this. I'm loading each Quicken year file into a separate database table. Remember this is a format standardized to contain the complete variety of Quicken transactions, so you will need SQL language skills to parse what is essentially a flat file table into a good relational database structure. I'm working on this now. I hope this helps others wanting to work with Quick data in a 'standard' format.