[GNC] Removing old transactions

[Adrien Monteleone]

That is doable, but for the amount of effort required, is there some 
overriding *need* to do so? (I have over a decade of transactions and 
GnuCash does not care)

If you want to proceed, I'd recommend:

1. Make a copy of the file, rename maybe with the starting year of 2 
years ago.

2. Rename the original to match with its starting year.

3. In the original file, delete everything *newer* than your cutoff date.

4. Make note of ALL balances.

5. In the copied file (your new file) delete all transactions before 
your cutoff date. This could be done in the General Journal, or by doing 
a Find by date and working through all of them, or in each account 
separately.

6. Create new manual 'Opening Balance' transactions in any account that 
had one from the original file in the new file.

7. From now on, create a new file each time you want to make this break 
before entering any transactions after your cutoff. You may prefer to do 
this annually if it is that critical to you, in which case, you'll want 
to do the above steps several times as needed to create annual 
historical files.

Regards,
Adrien

On 12/17/25 10:39 AM, Joseph Hesse wrote:
> My gnucash file covers about 5 years worth of data.  I want to delete 
> the first three years of transactions and keep the recent 2 years of 
> transactions.  Are there any orderly ways of doing this rather than just 
> deleting transactions?