Merrill Lynch Reinvestments

GTmem

After cutting over to the new update method, I am no longer getting sufficient transaction data to process a dividend reinvestment. I am getting a single transaction with the value of the dividend, but no information about purchased shares or purchase price of the reinvestment. Prior to the method swap, I at least got the three transactions involved in a dividend reinvestment. The best method is a single Reinvestment transaction, like I get from Fidelity.

Quicken Kristina

Hello @GTmem,

Thank you for sharing your experience. When did you transition to the new connection method and notice this issue? If you have multiple accounts, is this happening in all of your Merrill Lynch accounts, or just one? Please post a screenshot of how the reinvestment is appearing in Quicken.  If needed, please refer to this Community FAQ for instructions on how to attach a screenshot. Alternatively, you can also drag and drop screenshots to your response if you are not given the option to add attachments. It would also be helpful if you provide a screenshot of how the same transaction appears on the Merrill Lynch website (please make sure to redact any personal information).

I look forward to your response!

GTmem

Same experience for all Merrill Accounts. I transitioned to the new method last week and this the first transaction that occurred since. This example is a Dividend only.

Screenshot 2025-09-20 204147.jpg

Screenshot 2025-09-20 203449.jpg

GTmem

This example is the Dividend Reinvestment example. Quicken does not seem to be differentiating a straight dividend payment vs a reinvested dividend payment as the Quicken screenshots look the same for different transaction types. The Merrill website matches whats I got in Quicken BEFORE the transition: 3 distinct transactions to reflect a single reinvestment.

Screenshot 2025-09-20 204655.jpg

Screenshot 2025-09-20 204344.jpg

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for your reply and for the screenshots,

Is more information visible once the transactions are accepted into your register?

So that I can check how the information is being sent to us from Merrill Lynch, please navigate to Help>Report a Problem and send a problem report with log files attached.

Please let me know once the problem report is sent.

Thank you!

GTmem

Nothing comes across. it looks like a Deposit transaction with minimal information. Normally, its shown as a dividend and the security name/identifier is pre-populated. I have reported the problem as requested. I did note this same problem back on July 19th when I first moved to the new method. I reset the accounts last week under the new method as well.

Screenshot 2025-09-21 190329.jpg

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for your reply,

I checked the logs, and it looks like the logs are showing the correct information. That makes me suspect this is either file-specific or a program issue.

To test if this may be something file-specific, please backup your file, deactivate the problem account(s), navigate to Tools>Add Account, follow the prompts, and add the problem account(s) as new rather than link to existing.

In the newly added account(s), test to see how the data displays. Is it correct, or still showing the same incorrect information?

Please let me know how it goes!

GTmem

that turned out to be a loaded question.. When I created a new account, all 3 of the reinvested dividend transactions do show up. However, because the Merrill method does not correctly account for the cost basis, the entire account no longer has the correct cost basis. Totals do match.

GTmem

I played around with this last night, and found the perfect sequence of activities did get this fixed, and better than before because Reinvested Dividends now come across as one complete transaction. The sequence: deactivate all Merrill and BofA accounts. Add a new account for one of the Merrill accounts and link. This particular only added 2 accounts directly owned by the USerID. Next time, I tried to update this account, got a message that I needed to reauthorize, which took me to a Merrill page that allowed me select all of my Merrill and BofA accounts (both owned and authorized). Once selected, came back to quicken and let me link all those accounts to existing Quicken accounts. (even though the original reauthorization was only requested for the new account I created.). Will keep monitoring.

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for the follow-up,

I'm glad to hear you found a way to get reinvested dividends to display correctly.

Please let me know if the issue returns!

GTmem

This stopped working correctly over the weekend. I am only getting a DIV transaction when I should be getting a REINV transaction. There is not enough info to back into the REINV transaction (ie share amount is missing).

lcdetwiler

I think this is the same issue I am seeing caused by pending transactions being downloaded as if they are completed, despite the fact that I don't even have pending transactions enabled for this account.

If I happen to download on a day when the dividend transaction is pending on the website, it appears as the minimally informative Dividend transaction you are seeing (but NOT on the Pending tab, it is on the Downloads tab). This occurs for all Dividends, whether or not they are to be reinvested, but you will only see it if your download schedule catches the pending transaction.

EDITED to add: These transactions must be manually deleted to avoid duplications.

Once the website shows the three transactions ML has always used for Reinvestments (usually the next business day), Quicken now downloads all three but reinterprets them as a single ReInv transaction (like Fidelity)

And for debugging purposes, here is the offending pending transaction in the cloud sync log:

[Edited - Removed Account IDs]

GTmem

Great observation……When I compared against the ML website, I only see the Dividend transaction and the negative against that dividend for reinvestment transaction, but the share purchase transaction is not yet listed. None are in Pending status. Quicken downloaded the first, but not the second (and of course, the third is not yet available to Quicken). Will be interesting to see how Quicken handles once the share transaction posts. In the past, it appears that Merrill completes the reinvestment on the same day, therefore all transactions are sent at the same time.

lcdetwiler

Now that WILL be interesting - I suspect you will end up with three separate transactions as we always used to receive, since Quicken won't see them all at the same time. I wonder if you got unlucky and caught the ML site in the process of doing the updates - I have received all three final transactions at once on multiple securities this past week. If you download again later today do you get the other two?

GTmem

Well, now we know… if the DIV transaction comes in before the Revinvest transaction (ie all three transactions dont come in at the same time), Quicken views these as BOUGHT transactions when the reinvest with share count comes in. But, its still different than previously, where I got all 3 transactions. Now I just get two, a DIV and BOUGHT. Accepting both seems to be mathematically correct, but would lose direct REINVEST type. Pretty easy to convert the BOUGHT to REINVEST, but would have had to know delete the original DIV only transaction

GTmem

Still think something is wrong in the mapping. Today, I got a different behavior. these two show as pending on the ML website. The positive is the actual dividend, the negative is not supposed to be a dividend, but the cash spent on reinvestment. The other oddity… on the ML website there is another security exactly like this one, but it did not download to quicken. I would rather not see any Pending and wait until the transaction is complete. Its just creating other issues.

GTmem

I left both of these in the Downloaded Transaction section to see what happens as they moved from Pending at ML into full transactions. Both of these eventually turned into REINVEST transactions, but that created a duplication scenario.

Quicken Kristina

Thank you for the updates,

Since this issue was already reported in CTP-14623, I added the additional information and screenshots you provided to that ticket.

Thank you!

rakeshg

Div reinvestment transactions are still messed up. I am getting only one transaction for Div/Reinvestment (it has # of shares and price, but extended amount). The dividend amount is not brought in and neither is the purchase amount (old = 3 transactions, new = 1 transaction). Anyone else seeing the same? Is there a fix?

Quicken Kristina

Hello @rakeshg,

Thank you for letting us know you're also seeing this issue. It has already been reported to our teams for further investigation and resolution.

Thank you!

(CTP-14623)

SomebodyInGNV

I've had similar problems. I'll make a point of not downloading transactions from Merrill until I know all dividends have completed the reinvestment process, to see what happens.

lcdetwiler

@rakeshg I'm a little confused by your issue. The single ReinvDiv transaction replaces the previous three transactions. The dividend amount and purchase amount are the same and can be seen in the Inv Amt column of the ReinvDiv transactions. The shares and price/share are displayed below the Description heading. What exactly are you missing? The memo field was still not being included the last time I had a transaction download, but otherwise the download seems OK.

The problems with pending transactions being download as if cleared seem to have been addressed - today for the first time none of the pending transactions visible on the ML website were downloaded. (I did have to reset the connection for ML accounts to get rid of today's CC-501 error, but updating seemed to go smoothly after that. I didn't bother trying the reset connection fix on Schwab and Fidelity accounts as there were no transactions there.)

mrzookie

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20518716#Comment_20518716

@lcdetwiler

I just transitioned my 6 ML accts to EWC+ earlier this week. I've been downloading "pending" txns all week, which can be a positive or a negative, depending on the txn (and, perhaps the acct type). For dividends, buys and sells, to me, getting the pending txns is a plus, because for most accounts, it makes Q match up to what ML is displaying on its site. The couple of div reinvest txns I've received were cases where all 3 (div, withdraw, add) came down at the same time, thus Q combined them perfectly into 1 div/reinv txn (as Fidelity as always done) which is a big improvement. But, I can see downloading the pending txns being a negative when the component txns come in on diff days for the reasons mentioned in the prior posts.

Today, I too did not receive any pending transactions and I was happy to read that I was not the only one who experienced it. I attributed it to the CC501 glitch from earlier today, or maybe a more serious problem, but perhaps you're right - they just fixed it. Assuming they come through tomorrow, it'll be a mixed blessing. I kinda liked getting the pendings in a lot of cases.

SomebodyInGNV

I can report that my dividend reinvestment posted correctly for the 1st time in my Merrill Edge account. I intentionally did not update the affected account until the day after (i.e., today) the monthly reinvestment settled (yesterday). All 3 steps that Merrill records as account activity were complete. It downloaded as a single transaction.

This is the first time it downloaded correctly. They were always downloaded in the past as separate transactions. Sometimes all parts were present; other times one or more were delayed. Even when all 3 parts were present, they weren't recorded as ReinvDiv. I had to edit them myself. Maybe it worked now because I waited long enough for all of the pieces to be present?

There's very little activity in the account in question. I'll exclude it from OSU until a few days after my Fidelity accounts post the monthly ReinvDiv on the same ETF. Hopefully it will work consistently in the future.