Placeholders changed my account balance

Question

Please don’t lecture me that placeholders are helpful.  They are NOT.  I  unchecked everything in “compare account portfolio after download”  so I don’t get these pesky things, but I still got placeholders anyway.  The placeholders appeared in my 401 account that should have a balance over $300K.  When the placeholders were put in the balance changed to over $1000,000.00.  When I deleted the placeholders my balance sunk to just over $75K.

This account agreed 100% to my 401 statements before these [removed] placeholders screwed it all up.  How do I fix my balance, and how do I stop these placeholders from appearing?   Again, please don't try to tell me I need to adjust my balance according to the placeholders.  I have tried that in the past and it was a disaster.

Mark256 · Answer

I checked and there are no check marks for either of those things.  These placeholders are like a bad nightmare that keeps showing up even though I've done all I could to make them not happen.  Why is it that even after I immediately delete them they still alter my account balances?

Tom Young · Answer

I don't see how placeholders could be created if all Accounts are unchecked in the “Compare account portfolio after download” area since there's presumably no comparison going on.  Updates have been known to change Preferences so you might look at that again.Also, make sure that "Automatic entry is:Off" for all investment accounts.  That should prevent any placeholders that somehow are generated from slipping silently into your transaction list.  
As far as fixing the balances, you might rename a backup during the time of 100% agreement and open that and without doing any updating compare what you're seeing there to your "live" file.  If that backup is fairly recent so you don't have a lot of transactions to reconstruct, you might consider making that file your live file, with all the setting that might produce a placeholder or enter them into your Accounts turned off.