Issue with Merrill Lynch account since reauthorization - account balance is wrong [Edited]

Quicken Anja · December 11

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20526948#Comment_20526948

@jdparker225 Thank you for sharing these details and submitting those files! They have been attached to the ticket.

jdparker225 · December 11

@MELCO I expect a dividend reinvestment late December. The previous one I got at end of September appeared to work OK. I remember thinking that it was an improvement to see one transaction (ReinvDiv) rather than the three we get under Direct Connect (Div, Added, Withdraw). But there were other issues as noted in my posts at that time that may have led me to think it worked when maybe it really didn't. I wish I'd saved the Synclog from that time period but I did not. I'll try to make note of what happens to see if our experiences differ. I won't be too suprised if they do.

Thanks

Jim

jdparker225 · December 11

@Quicken Anja I have a pending long term and a pending short term capital gains transaction. I can hold off downloading ML transactions for a while if there is a fix pending. I expect a fix would be on the server rather than to the application. On the other hand, maybe you guys would prefer I do the download to capture more data.

Let me know what you want.

Thanks

Jim

jdparker225 · December 11

@Quicken Anja FWIW: I now have 3 pending long term capital gains and 2 pending short term capital gains transactions pending.

Jim

Quicken Anja · December 12

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20527114#Comment_20527114

@jdparker225 That’s really a personal choice on your end—you can hold off if you prefer, but it’s also completely fine to continue downloading in the meantime. We don’t have an ETA on when a fix will be released, and continuing to download won’t impact the investigation on our side.

If anything changes or we receive updates, we’ll share them here.

MELCO · December 12

@jdparker225 @mrzookie

All my Dividends, Short Term Capital Gains and Long-Term Capital gains today (12/12/25) required complete review with the Merrill Lynch web site and near complete manual entry with the proper coding, accounts, memo and reinvestment information. I had to re-build all these transactions while flying today.

This is beyond frustrating.

jdparker225 · December 13

@MELCO @mrzookie My short term and long term capital gains required editing. They all came in as simple deposits.

My dividends came in "fine" and have been doing so for quite some time. Then I brought up the edit panel for pre-EWC+ and post EWC+ dividends and there is a difference: the memo entry field is empty in the post EWC+ transactions but contains something in the pre-EWC+. Since memo is not displayed in the transaction register I missed that. What is in the memo field for pre-EWC+ dividends is something like "Dividend: <security-name> PAY DA". That seems, in part, to be a truncated version of something I have seen in the logs and qfx files: "<security-name> PAY DATE mm/dd/yyyy" where mm/dd/yyyy is something near but not equal to (usually preceding) the transaction date.

Then I looked at the edit panel of pre-EWC long/short term capital gains transactions and they have a similar thing in the memo field: "<Long/Short> Term Capital Gain: <security name> …". Since "<Long/Short> Term Capital Gain: " is longer than "Dividend: ", even more is truncated from what was originally "<security-name> PAY DATE mm/dd/yyyy".

So I am wondering why we should be concerned about what is in the memo field since the only useful information, mm/dd/yyyy, is likely to be truncated? It appears that that information is in the Cloud Sync Log for the transactions that are supposed to be capital gains but aren't but is not available for dividend transactions. So I could, if I wanted to, provide that for my hand edited captial gains transactions but not for dividends. How would doing that benefit me? What am I missing by not having that information in my dividends transactions?

Does any of that make sense?

Thanks

Jim

mrzookie · December 13

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20527468#Comment_20527468

Interesting. I've gotten about 15 div/st/lt txns in the past week. ALL are in IRA accounts. ALL are set to reinvest. Dividends were perfect. ST/LT CGs came in as reinvested dividends, so the share quantities and $values need to be cut/pasted to the appropriate CG fields. @jdparker225 -are your transactions in IRA or taxable accounts? Perhaps the account type might explain the difference?

Regarding memos, NONE of the txns I've gotten have the memo field populated. That doesn't bother me bc it doesn't give me anything that isn't included in the txn data itself (security name, date, share quantity and $ value). Where the memo field DOES matter for me is with other types of transactions such as account fees, mutual fund rebates, transfers, splits etc. My experience so far has been that the memo data has been showing up in Security/Payee field (title depends on whether you're looking at the register or the txn entry dialog). As such, its truncated and thus missing info not found elsewhere in the transaction. Hence, I have to go to the ML Activity page to get it, then edit the txn. Pain in the onions.

I've not yet received any foreign taxes/fees transactions but I expect they will have similar issues.

All that being said, I've learned long ago that different people use applications differently. For example, @MELCO apparently attributes more importance to the Memo field than I do. I in no way, shape manner or form am questioning or judging that. We each do what works for ourselves.

jdparker225 · December 13

@mrzookie my dividends are in both taxable and IRA accounts. My capital gains are in IRAs. I wonder if someone is thinking that in an IRA capital gains don't matter - it's just a deposit. But then even a dividend would just be a deposit.

As far as account fees and mutual fund rebates, I get those in my managed IRA. What appears in the register post-EWC+ is similar to but not identical to what appeared in the register pre-EWC+. No information useful to me was lost. Again, the memo field is blank post-EWC+ and was not pre-EWC+.

I have had stock splits/consolidations in both IRA and taxable but I haven't had any in taxable post-EWC+. There was one in an IRA that came through OK.

I do reinvest the dividends in one IRA. Expecting that to happen again at end of year. As I noted earlier, it apparently worked in Sept but there was some confusing stuff going on then and I am waiting to see what happens in Dec. June, of course, was pre-EWC+.

Like you I am not questioning anyone's judgement (other than my own). Perhaps I am missing out on something that I don't know about. Which is why I am wondering what he (@MELCO) was getting prior to EWC+ that he is not getting now and what he was using it for. Or maybe he has some kind of account that is different from any of mine.

Jim

MELCO · December 13

@jdparker225 @mrzookie My sensitivity to the memo field is that the memo field was populated with Direct Connect, the information is on the Merrill Lynch web site, the information provides detail such as pay date and the information should be populated. I want to get back to the days when I just reviewed, trusted, and accepted a completely downloaded transaction. THIS IS WHAT I AM I PAYING FOR. Can I live with it, certainly. Do I want to just live with it, No. Am I detail oriented, yes. Either way, I don't trust the EWC+ downloaded data, and I am spending time going to the Merrill Lynch web site to verify all the information for which should be downloaded. Dividends come through, almost OK, but without the memo field, reinvestments come thru as just deposits, so I have to completely re-build the entry as I can't just move the downloaded deposit information. This is true for short and long-term capital gains as well. Do I miss the three transactions per each reinvestment, no, but at least all of the detail was there, and I trusted the information.

This is Quicken's business. This is what I pay for. This has been an issue for ~90 days. Why would anybody find this acceptable? With the number of accounts I have, data files I use, and the volume of transactions I receive, and given my detailed monthly reconciliation process, this is totally unacceptable.

jdparker225 · December 15

@MELCO @mrzookie Based on recent posts, I decided to look into the memo field with regard to investment transactions. This is what I've found so far:

Prior to EWC+, Merrill Lynch provided a memo field for dividend transactions. It was formatted thus: "Dividend: <something-close-to-security-name> <number -of-shares-owned-to-4-decimal-places> PAY DATE mm/dd/yyyy" This field was truncated to 64 characters so the pay date was often completely or partially lost. I saw one case where the memo started: "Foreign Dividend: …" The useful information is the number of shares, which could be useful if you bought or sold shares after the ex-dividend date, and pay date which could be different from the transaction date and thus might be useful. I can't see any use for <something-close-to-security-name>.
After EWC+ no memo is provided for Merrill Lynch dividend transactions.
Ameriprise, which is still using Direct Connect, provides a memo for dividend transactions formatted thus: "DIVIDEND PAYMENT - <security-name>". So there is no usefull information in Ameriprise's memo.
Empower, which managed two of my 401K's for a while had no dividend transactions but did have ReinvDiv transactions with nothing in the memo field. Interestingly, prior to EWC+, Merrill Lynch did not use ReinvDiv for dividend re-investments but used Div, Added, Withdraw transactions to accomplish the equivalent and each of those transactions did have various flavors of memo fields. I don't know what connection method was used for Empower. The last transaction was in 2021.

Still mulling this over and there are other transactions to explore but one thing comes to mind based on my 50+ years of software develpoment on government contracts: One of the import things about government contracted software is that the software's behavior is governed by requirements (sentences with "shall" in them). We designed and coded to those requirements and testers wrote test plans based on them. That experience made me wonder: What is the Quicken "requirement" for the memo field?

At this point, just food for thought.

Jim

Lance W. · December 16

@jdparker225 @MELCO @mrzookie I too wish the memo field would return. One use for me was the following:

My setup is duplicate files in sync and reconciled on my Mac and Windows running Classic Premier. With Merrill Lynch I have 4 non-retirement accounts and 4 retirement accounts.

The non-retirement accounts consist of 1 cash, sweep, non-managed stock account, 2 ETF (wife & mine) accounts, and 1 managed stock account. Dividends sweep from the last 3 accounts into the first account.

On Windows with direct connect, in the sweep account there would be a downloaded deposit transaction with a memo looking like SPDR NUVEEN BLMBRG MUNICIPAL BOND ETF TR FROM 701-XXX10. When adding the transaction into the register, I would change Deposit to Xin and add the transfer account in with the ML account that corresponding to the one ending in 10 above.

In doing it this way, there was no need to search for the transfer account in Quicken or use the ML website. Starting with the sweep account allowed me to then accept all transactions in the other 3 accounts because the Withdrawal download was matched with the Xout.

This did not work if starting with the ETF or Stock accounts by entering a Xout and adding the sweep as the transfer account. The Xin would not match to the deposit download and there would be duplicates.

On the Mac, Quicken automatically found the transfer account match.

This may sound convoluted, but it worked for me at least a couple of times a week for over a decade.

Lance

jdparker225 · December 16

@Lance W. What has been your expeience since ML switched from Direct Connect to EWC+? Did you have to change how you do things?

Thanks

Jim

MELCO · December 16

@Lance W. @mrzookie @jdparker225

Interestingly, my Quicken EWC+ Merrill Lynch transaction downloads today (12/16/25) had the Dividend, Short Term Capital Gain, Long Term Capital Gain and associated reinvestments categorized correctly. This has not been my experience. Various transactions were not in my cash account, incorrectly. The only thing missing was my memo field. I added a memo field, but again, I would prefer that the memo field be populated as Direct Connect had and with the information on the Merrill Lynch web site.

Naturally, not trusting the transaction downloads, I did compare them all to the Merrill Lynch web site. Thankfully, they were accurate.

This is a positive change, if indeed this is a Quicken change to address what this thread has been reporting.

Keep pushing Quicken.

mrzookie · December 16

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20527983#Comment_20527983

Same for me. Received CG LT & ST txns, both categorized and reinvested correctly. No memos. I have pending Divs, ST and LT CGs which will come down tomorrow. Hopefully they will confirm that the categorization problem has been fixed.

jdparker225 · December 16

@MELCO @mrzookie @Lance W. @Quicken Anja Got one CGLong, one CGShort, and two Divs today and all were correct but without any memo. I have a Div and CGLong pending. Don't expect a ReinvDiv until late December.

Assuming that ReinvDiv works, then the transactions I see from Merrill Lynch are, finally, working but:

The kinds of things I see are harldy a stress test of what Quicken should be able to handle
I was blithely unaware of even the existence of the memo field in investment transactions so I can, I guess, live without them. So what is to be done about that?

Thanks

Jim

Lance W. · December 17

@jdparker225 @MELCO @mrzookie I'm a retired IT guy as well. Been with Quicken since the 1980's on DOS. Been with ML since 2010, so I have experience with both companies. Running on both Windows and Mac gives me an interesting perspective because what works and what does not differs between the two platforms.

I have BOA checking and savings accounts and the move from Direct Connect to EWC+ was painless. So when I first got the notice ML was going EWC+, I did it on both platforms. It was so bad, I had to fallback to backups and Direct Connect in a few days.

I stayed on Direct Connect for as long as I could, at least a couple of months, until the final shutdown. I tried EWC+ again on both platforms and so little had been fixed, I returned to by backups and disconnected from ML. Manual QFX downloads were my only sustainable option. When ML indicated that QFX would end, I moved back to EWC+ on 11/1.

Today, my two main issues are the pending transactions that download and the lack of a memo field. I can manually resolve those. I currently have CGLong pending transactions on my Mac retirement accounts that are causing a reconciliation issue. I'll wait a couple of days for the Windows download and then see if I manual intervention on the Mac.

I easily spend twice as much time to maintain the platforms daily than I did a year ago.

Lance

mrzookie · December 17

UPDATE: Received Div and LT/ST CGs this morning. All were classified and reinvested correctly. It appears that particular issue has been resolved.

Still no memos, and I expect that other misc, less common transactions (account fees, mutual fund rebates etc) will continue to come down incorrectly. Small steps.

MELCO · December 17

@Lance W. Bingo! Well said. I'm pretty close to matching you background and history…

Frustrating experience for sure.

jdparker225 · December 17

@mrzookie I have NOT had a problem with account fees or mutual fund rebates for a couple of months now. They were bad at the start of the EWC+ switch. Can't remember exactly when it started to work. It's probably buried in one of my posts on this thread. I have one IRA account that is charged a monthly fee and gets a mutual fund rebate. The content of the Security and Description fields in the transaction register has changed from what is with under Direct Connect but they are Withdraw and Deposit action as they were under Direct Connect. The differences in the Security and Description fields are minor: from "Advisory Program Fee Inv. Advisory Fee May" to "Inv. Advisory Fee Dec" and "Advisory Program Fee Mutual Fund Rebate" to "Mutual Fund Rebate". Both Security and Description come from the Payee field in the transaction.

In case you want to look in your logs to see what you get and compare with mine, these are redacted versions of this month's fee and mutual fund rebate as found in synclog (edited with notepad++ and reformatted by plugin json viewer):

	{
		"id": "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
		"createdAt": "2025-12-03T14:02:12Z",
		"modifiedAt": "2025-12-03T14:02:12Z",
		"dbVersion": 0,
		"source": "QCS_REFRESH",
		"accountId": "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
		"postedOn": "2025-12-02",
		"payee": "INV. ADVISORY FEE DEC",
		"coa": {
			"type": "UNCATEGORIZED",
			"id": "0"
		},
		"amount": -xx.xx,
		"state": "CLEARED",
		"matchState": "NOT_MATCHED",
		"knownCategoryId": "3000000000",
		"cpData": {
			"id": "20251202AR173553412511682",
			"txnType": "FEE",
			"postedOn": "2025-12-02",
			"txnOn": "2025-12-02",
			"payee": "INV. ADVISORY FEE DEC",
			"amount": -xx.xx,
			"inferredPayee": "INV. ADVISORY FEE DEC",
			"inferredCoa": {
				"type": "UNCATEGORIZED",
				"id": "0"
			},
			"cpCategoryId": "16",
			"investmentTxnType": "FEE",
			"units": 0.0,
			"unitPrice": 0.0
		},

	{
		"id": "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
		"createdAt": "2025-12-10T01:56:56Z",
		"modifiedAt": "2025-12-10T01:56:56Z",
		"dbVersion": 0,
		"source": "QCS_REFRESH",
		"accountId": "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
		"postedOn": "2025-12-08",
		"payee": "MUTUAL FUND REBATE",
		"coa": {
			"type": "UNCATEGORIZED",
			"id": "0"
		},
		"amount": xx.xx,
		"state": "CLEARED",
		"matchState": "NOT_MATCHED",
		"cpData": {
			"id": "20251208IB153106001656206",
			"txnType": "DEBIT",
			"postedOn": "2025-12-08",
			"txnOn": "2025-12-08",
			"payee": "MUTUAL FUND REBATE",
			"amount": xx.xx,
			"inferredPayee": "MUTUAL FUND REBATE",
			"inferredCoa": {
				"type": "UNCATEGORIZED",
				"id": "0"
			},
			"cpCategoryId": "50"
		},
		"mlKnownCategoryId": 5750000000,
		"type": "CASH_FLOW"
	}

Jim

mrzookie · December 17

@jdparker225

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20528171#Comment_20528171

We've had this discussion before. The transactions are coming through as dep/withdrawals for me as well. What's changed is what ML is sending, and you can see it in the synclog you posted. The Payee field, prior to EWC+, was always "Advisory Program Fee". That label is nowhere to be found now. The former Memo field data was "Investment Advisory Fee Dec", or "Mutual Fund Rebate", both of which are now appearing in the Payee field. That's a mis-mapping on MLs part. The Rebate change is no problem for me. In fact, it makes more sense for it to have a separate "payee". The former causes a me a headache bc all of my IRA advisory fee withdrawals are taken from one account. The memo field used to contain the account numbers for which the withdrawal was taken. Now I need to add them manually, so I can sort the fee transactions by account. I also need to remove the month from the Payee field because that causes multiple payees to be created. Is it a major issue? No - just more manual work.

jdparker225 · December 18

@mrzookie You say 'The Payee field, prior to EWC+, was always "Advisory Program Fee"'. That is not what I got prior to EWC+. It was, as the example in my post showed, "Advisory Program Fee Inv. Advisory Fee May" So the month was in the payee field prior to EWC+, which for me, started in July. Month is and wasn't in the mutual fund rebate.

Sounds like, not only are people getting inconsistent results under EWC+, they also got inconsistent results under Direct Connect.

I think it odd that Payee for the advisory fee is not Merrill Lynch and that Payee for the rebate is not the account owner. Memo should be something that tells you that one is the advisory fee and the other is the rebate (including account number and month in both would be nice). Category should be Financial for both. But this has nothing to do with this thread.

Jim

Quicken Janean · December 18

Hi All, we have been told a fix has been implemented for transactions starting on the 17th. The fix does not apply to transactions from before that date. Please let me know if you are still seeing the transactions download with the incorrect categorization so we can report it as soon as possible. Thanks!

mrzookie · 7:03AM

@Quicken Janean

Looks like categorizations of Div, CG ST & CG LT transactions are now working correctly, although memos are still missing. Not sure about other types of transactions yet.

Issue with Merrill Lynch account since reauthorization - account balance is wrong [Edited]

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