How to purge old investment accounts?

[Les]

On 01/29/2015 09:11 AM, John Ralls wrote:
>> 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
>
Thanks John:

Those are some great ideas.  I try implementing them now.