Caution: BofA and Merrill accounts? Reauthorization may mess up your records, badly.

If you have both Bank of America and Merrill accounts, be advised.

The previous BofA connection has been deprecated by Quicken for a while (as evidenced by the "zzz-" prefix appearing on the financial institution.) I had trouble connecting earlier, so I assumed the next brick in the wall had appeared, and went through disconnect/reconnect to get to the current FI setup.

Here's where it gets ugly: BofA presented both my BofA and Merrill accounts — and I foolishly accepted. In the process, it switched my Merrill accounts to "Simple - Positions Only" mode (aka "completely useless for anyone" mode.)

I was Not Pleased to (apparently) lose 35 years of transaction history, as well as lose visibility to lot details, gain/loss info, etc.

Good news is it appears recoverable. (Though I've made extra backups and am watching suspiciously.) After disconnecting my ML accounts, I was able to switch them back to "Complete" view, revealing that my transaction history was still actually present. (Whew.)

Then I was able to manually delete the bogus reconciliation transactions, then reconnect those accounts by naming Merrill as the FI, without having it force the accounts into Useless Summary mode. It'll take a few more days to confirm that I'm back to getting proper transaction detail in the downloads, but I wanted to get this note out as a cautionary tale.

tl;dr: Do not use BofA connection to download your ML accounts (no matter how often Quicken pushes it).