How to purge old investment accounts?

[John Ralls]

> On Jan 29, 2015, at 6:28 AM, Les <lelliott5 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi All:
> 
> I have had a number of different investment accounts over the last
> several years that I have used GC, and many of them are no longer in
> existence, either because they are no longer in business or have merged
> with other companies and their names (symbols) have changed.  Every time
> I download transactions,  I get a fairly long list of these symbols that
> could not be identified.
> 
> Is there a way to purge these accounts without having to create a whole
> new list with beginning balances?  That would involve a huge investment
> in time, which I would like to avoid.
> 
> Currently I am dealing with about 20 of these types of accounts and it
> takes longer to download transactions due to the system searching for
> these symbols. 
> 
> I would greatly appreciate any suggestions as to how to purge these
> accounts.

That's hard. You need the transactions in order to keep everything in balance, but the stock-side splits are each in a separate commodity so there's no way to consolidate them into a single account. You might also need to consult the records from time to time, even for a position you held a decade ago, because of shareholder lawsuits.

What I do is hide them: I turn off getting online quotes so that the Price Editor stops whining, and I mark the accounts as placeholder so that they can't be edited by accident and as hidden so that I don't have to look at them in the CoA. I can still get to them either by turning on "show hidden accounts" in the view menu or by jumping from the cash account where the "other" splits are.

Regards,
John Ralls