Recording your first transaction

The fastest way to make Gold Silver Ledger feel like a real ledger is to record one purchase. The form takes about a minute per item, and as soon as you submit, the dashboard, holdings, and analytics pages all start showing real numbers instead of zeros.

This article walks through the Record Purchase form field-by-field so your first entry goes in cleanly and the cost basis is set up right from the start.

If you haven't logged in yet, start with Creating your account. If you've never seen the dashboard before, A tour of your dashboard is a useful detour first.

There are two paths to the same page:

Both buttons land you on the same Record Purchase page. The URL is /dashboard/transactions/new if you want to bookmark it.

The top half of the form is about the purchase as a whole: when it happened, who you bought from, and any costs that apply across all the items in the transaction.

If you only have one portfolio (the default for new accounts), this is set to My Portfolio, and you can leave it alone. If you've created additional portfolios — say, one for your own holdings and one for a household trust — pick the right one from the dropdown before you go any further.

Items recorded against the wrong portfolio aren't catastrophic to fix, but it's cleaner to get it right at entry. See Switching between portfolios for the broader concept.

Defaults to today. If you're recording a purchase you made earlier — last week, last year, the box of Eagles you bought in 2019 — change this to the actual purchase date.

A free-text label for this transaction. Useful if you do a lot of buying and want a quick way to find a specific purchase later — examples: "Birthday APMEX order," "Tax refund stack," "Local coin show, March." If you leave it blank, the transaction is still searchable by dealer, product, and date; the name field just gives you another hook.

Who you bought from. Click the field to open a searchable dropdown of dealers you've used before. Start typing a name and the list filters as you go. If the dealer you used isn't in the list yet, you'll see an option to add it as a new entry — click that, give it a name, and it's saved to your personal dealer list for next time.

A few quick notes on this field:

Free-text, anything you want to remember about this purchase. Some users use it for the order confirmation number; others for a quick description like "BU condition, original tube." It shows up in the expanded view of the transaction on the History page and in any CSV exports.

If your dealer charged you for shipping, insurance, or handling fees, enter the total amount for this transaction here.

The form will allocate it proportionally across all the items in the transaction when it computes cost basis — so a $25 shipping charge on a five-item order adds about $5 of cost basis to each item, weighted by the value of each line.

Leave it as $0 if you bought in person, or if shipping was already baked into the per-unit price your dealer quoted. The field is optional.

The lower half of the form is where you list what you actually bought. Each line is one product (one row of the catalog), with a quantity, a premium per unit, and a spot price. You can add as many lines as you need.

Click the Product field to open the catalog dropdown. Start typing a product name — "American Gold Eagle," "Silver Maple," "10oz Valcambi" — and the list filters as you type. Catalog entries show the product name, the metal, and the per-unit weight, so you know which size you're picking.

If the product you bought isn't in the built-in catalog, you have two options:

Note: There is a limit of 10 product types per transaction. If you purchased more than 10 types of coins, bars, or rounds at once, you'll need to enter them in separate transactions.

How many of this product you bought in this purchase. The form treats every coin or bar as its own inventory record, so a quantity of 10 creates 10 separate items in your holdings.

This is what makes specific-identification cost basis work later when you sell — see Selecting which specific items you sold.

You can add any quantity per item, provided the total item count fits within your plan limits.

The premium you paid above melt value, per unit, in dollars. This is the field that catches most new users off guard, because the form does NOT ask for the total price you paid. Instead, it asks for the premium, which is the dealer's markup over the spot value of the metal in the coin.

Why? Because melt value is a moving target (it depends on the spot price), but the premium is a fixed dollar amount your dealer charged you. Recording the premium separately means your cost basis stays accurate, and you can see at a glance how much you paid above melt on every purchase.

A quick example: you buy a 1 oz American Gold Eagle for $2,510 when spot is $2,400. The melt value is $2,400 (1 oz × spot), and the premium you paid is $110. That's the number that goes in this field — not $2,510.

If you only know the all-in price you paid, do the math first: premium = total price - (weight × spot). Then enter the premium here, and the form does the rest.

The spot price per ounce that applied at the moment of your purchase, in USD. The form auto-fills this with the current live spot when you select a product, which is what you want for a purchase you're recording today.

If you're recording an older purchase, edit this field to the historical spot that was in effect on the purchase date. You can find historical spot from your dealer's invoice (most include it on the receipt), from sites like kitco.com or BullionByPost, or from your own records.

This field is in USD per troy ounce regardless of your display currency.

If you bought multiple products from the same dealer in the same order — say, a 1 oz Eagle, a 10 oz silver bar, and a tube of Maples — click + Add Another Item below the first line to add another row. Each row gets its own product, quantity, premium, and spot price.

A few reasons this is worth doing instead of recording each line as a separate transaction:

The strip at the bottom of the form updates live as you fill in items. It shows four numbers:

Glance at this strip before you submit. The most common entry mistake is putting the total price into the Premium / Unit field instead of the actual premium — if you do that, Total Cost will look wildly wrong (e.g. $5,000 on a $2,500 purchase). That's the easiest signal that something needs a second look.

When the totals look right, click the black + Record Purchase button at the bottom-right of the page. The form submits, you're redirected to the Transactions History page, and your new entry is at the top of the list.

If you change your mind mid-entry, Cancel discards everything and takes you back to wherever you came from. Nothing is saved unless you click Record Purchase.

The form is built for today's purchases by default — that's why Purchase Date defaults to today and Spot Price auto-fills with current spot. To record a historical buy, change two fields:

Everything else works the same. Once submitted, the historical transaction is treated identically to a current one — it shows up in your Holdings with the right cost basis, and any future sale will compute short-term vs. long-term gain off that historical date.

If you have a stack of older purchases to backfill, doing them one at a time is fine for a handful. For dozens or hundreds, Bulk upload overview is the right tool.

The transaction is now in your ledger. Concretely:

If you spot a mistake after submitting, you can edit or delete the transaction from the History page — see Editing a transaction after the fact and Deleting a buy transaction.