Merill Lynch Transaction Mismatches [edited]

I have been downloading ML transactions without "mismatch" issues from 6 accounts for at least the past 5 years. The questions Quicken Francisco asks are very important. The key things:

1) When you first created your ML accounts in Quicken, did you make sure all your starting share and cash balances agreed with your most recent statement at the time? If you've owned your ML accounts for any length of time prior to using Quicken, simply starting to download transactions does not provide all that past history. If you didn't start with an accurate baseline, your Quicken account share balances will never agree with the account balances on your ML statements. I can't remember what ML offers, but when you start downloading transactions into a newly created Quicken account, many financial institutions only provide the last 60 or 90 days of transactions in that first download.

2) When you download transactions into Quicken, do the transactions agree with the transactions listed on ML Online, or your monthly statement? Given my experience with ML downloads, it's difficult for me to believe that, for example, a buy of 23.5 shares of mutual fund X gets downloaded as a buy of, oh, 24.6 shares. That kind of mismatch seems very unlikely to me.

I'm guessing 1) is what is causing your "mismatch" issues. Your account balances are based on just your downloads after starting to use Quicken, and you never properly adjusted your share and cash balances in your new Quicken to get an accurate start.

As an aside note: sometimes the downloaded ML transactions need some tweaking to get them to record properly into Quicken. That usually happens for unusual events like stock splits or mutual fund reclassification. You can't just blindly accept the downloaded transactions--you should be doing a sanity check of each one to make sure what ends up in Quicken reflects reality. And that's not Quicken's fault--it's only downloading what ML gives them. Garbage in, garbage out.