There might come a time when an account you’re using and entering transactions in becomes inactive. For example, you might move from one bank to another and will want to keep the transactions from the new account separate from your old one. Or maybe your old credit card expires and you want to create a new account in MoneyWiz to track transactions made with the replacement you receive. You might wonder what should be done with the old account in MoneyWiz – it takes some valuable space on the accounts list so perhaps it’s best that it’s deleted?

In most cases, you do not want to delete the old account!

While that account will not receive any more transactions, it still contains a lot of valuable information. If you tracked transactions in that account for a couple of months, that’s a couple of months of reference information displaying your spending habits that might be useful when setting up budgets and doing forecasting. You do not want to lose this information!

Another reason to keep the account in your database is that it might serve you as a reference for when particular items were purchased – for example your TV. Knowing the purchase date might help you with your warranty claims, etc.

Last but not least, when you delete an account in MoneyWiz, all transactions inside are also deleted. This includes transfer transactions that would be deleted from both the account you’re deleting as well as the other account the transfer is pointing to. This would affect balances of your other accounts:

If not delete, what can be done about inactive accounts?

There is a very easy and elegant alternative that we recommend to all customers. Simply create new account group for your inactive accounts. You can call it however you want – “Old Accounts”, “Inactive” or perhaps create a separate account group for every group of accounts you have inactive (“Old Chase Accounts”, “Old Lloyds Accounts”). The name is up to you.

Once you create the account groups, simply move your accounts into them then click or tap on the account group name to collapse it so it takes less space. You can then re-position the account group to the bottom of your accounts list.

This way your accounts are safely archived, do not bother you in your everyday finances but are right there, should you ever need to check some transaction from three years ago.

You can read more about creating new accounts, account groups and account management in the Manage Accounts and Groups guide. The guide also includes information about deleting accounts – if you still want to do this.