Hi, Tom.
My Merrill Lynch CMA account is over 25 years old now. It started back in the days (late '70s) of high interest rates when we got as much as 14% on CDs, and money market funds sometimes made 20% or more. Banks were not allowed to pay interest on checking accounts in those days, and there were no interstate banks with branches all across the USA. The CMA account was the first one that I saw that would let me write checks on my stockbroker account. My former firm's bookkeeper could carry my monthly check across the street to the local ML office in California and deposit it into my CMA account and I could write a check on it the next day in Oklahoma - without waiting several days for the postman. And it would earn interest until my check cleared. In those days, every day of "float" was worth something. We had a whole different mindset then from the last couple of years when accounts have paid a small fraction of 1%.
The CMA account originally swept available cash into a money market fund, then redeemed shares to cover any of my checks after they cleared, or to pay for any stocks that I had purchased. My monthly statement showed the flows into and out of the MM fund, along with any small cash balances outside that fund. I made it a practice never to pay bills with CMA checks, because I didn't get those cancelled checks back. (That was long before Check 21.) Instead, I would write myself a CMA check and deposit it in my local bank, then pay bills from that bank account. Also, when I received cash or checks - for professional fees or anything else - I would deposit those in my local bank account, then write a check to move all or some of it to CMA. It was a little bit of extra work, but it kept both my CMA account and my local bank account(s) "clean as a whistle". Nowadays, I make the transfers with ML's FTS (Funds Transfer Service), using the Internet.
I've never bothered to set up a separate "account" in Quicken for this ML MM fund. In MY books, it's all "just cash" in the brokerage account. In recent years, ML has switched from the MM fund to a "bank account program" for my uninvested cash. Each month they report how much interest I've earned on that banking program and I record that as interest income, increasing the cash balance in my ML brokerage account. The invested cash, plus any uninvested cash (often less than $1), plus the market value of my securities, add up to the balance on my monthly CMA statement, which I reconcile to my ML Account in Quicken.
Each broker has a different system, of course, and yours might not work the same way. I have another broker account which carries a small cash balance and pays me interest on it each month. It theoretically allows checkwriting, but on the few occasions when I've withdrawn cash from it, I've phoned the broker, then driven to the office and picked up a check from them. It's more hassle, but the bookkeeping is the same: simply allow my Quicken account to show the cash balance, along with the securities the broker is holding, and reconcile the account regularly.
It has been so many years (and Quicken versions) since I set these up that I don't know how I would do it today. I don't know what the wizard looks like or says. But I think I would create a single Quicken Investment Account. Then I would write a check on my local bank account and give it to the broker. In Quicken, I would use this check to record a transfer into my new broker account. Then I would record purchase of any securities from this cash balance. I probably would not record movement of swept cash to and from the MM fund, so long as the broker manages those funds as a part of my single account.
Setting up the broker account and making the initial investment may seem like a single event, but I think it would be easier to understand - now and in the future when you are looking back - to record it in two or more steps: (1) create broker Account; (2) deposit cash or securities into the Account; (3) use cash in the Account to purchase securities, which remain in the Account. Later, of course, (4) record interest income, increasing cash balance. But (4) might be to record dividend income, rather than interest, since this is a MM FUND. As we've discussed here before, a MM fund is a special kind of mutual fund: The fund itself earns interest income, then issues new shares as a dividend to distribute its earnings to its shareholders; the fund earns interest but its shareholders receive dividends.
You'll need to ask your own CPA whether my recollection of these rules is still current. I've been retired for over a decade and tax rules change every day. Banking and brokerage rules and practices have changed a lot, too.
RC