Every 3-4 months, this happens. The transactions are downloaded and cleared, and when you go to the balance, it is way off. How come this is still happening with BofA.
[Edited - Readability]
@Morpheus If the account reconciles correctly most of the time, the first thing I would do is determine when the discrepancy was introduced. Find the last reconciliation that balanced correctly, then compare the transactions in Quicken to either your BofA online account or your monthly statements from that point forward.
In my experience, recurring reconciliation differences are often caused by a missing, duplicated, edited, or incorrectly reconciled transaction rather than a problem with the reconciliation process itself.
When you say the account is "way off," does the difference equal one or more specific transactions? Also, when the discrepancy occurs, have you been able to identify whether a transaction is missing from Quicken or whether Quicken contains a transaction that does not appear at BofA?
As @Sceptic said, the process of reconciling isn't saying Done on a dialog, it the process of making sure what you have in Quicken matches what the financial institution has. And when there is a difference tracking down that difference to it source that you can answer your question. The "solution" of that may or may not be within your control though (workarounds usually are though, like manual edits).
And even though I wouldn't jump to any conclusion without first tracking down what was actually happening in your case, I will say that I'm seeing quite a few complaints about BofA which leads me to believe that there is a problem with the data they are sending.
And here is one example from the Moderators:
