Gold Silver Ledger stores every weight internally in troy ounces and converts to your chosen display unit on the fly. By default, that display unit is troy ounces — the standard unit of measure for the bullion market.
If you prefer grams or kilograms, change it once from Settings and every weight figure across the app — Holdings, Dashboard, Analytics, and exports — re-renders in your chosen unit.
This article shows where the setting lives, the supported units, and what changing it does (and doesn't) do to your underlying data.
Where to find it
The weight unit selector lives on the Profile tab of your Settings page, directly below the Display Currency card.
From the left nav, click Settings.
The page opens on the Profile tab by default. If you've navigated away, click it.
Look for the Weight Unit card, lower-left of the Profile tab.
Click the dropdown labeled Weight unit and pick the one you want.
Click Save changes at the bottom-right of the page.
Once saved, the change is instant — visit any page that shows a weight and it's now in your chosen unit.
The supported units
You can pick from any of the following:
Troy ounces (oz): the global standard for bullion. One troy ounce ≈ 31.1035 grams. This is the default for new accounts because it's the unit dealers, mints, and the spot market all quote in.
Grams (g): the metric equivalent, useful if you prefer thinking in SI units or you primarily own smaller-denomination bars where gram weights read more naturally (e.g. a "20 g gold bar" rather than "0.6430 oz").
Kilograms (kg): practical when your stack is large enough that ounces start adding up to four or five digits. A kilo bar of silver, for example, reads more naturally as 1 kg than as 32.1507 oz.
Spot prices themselves are always quoted in USD per troy ounce globally, regardless of which display unit you pick. The unit setting changes how your holdings and transaction weights are displayed; it doesn't change how spot is quoted.
What changing the unit actually does
The model is the same as for display currency — store once, convert on display.
Everything is stored in troy ounces. Every product in the catalog, every inventory item, every transaction line — the underlying weight in the database is always in troy ounces. This is true regardless of who entered the data or what unit they were looking at when they entered it.
The display unit is applied at render time. When you load Holdings, Dashboard, Analytics, or any other page that shows a weight, the app converts each troy-ounce figure to your chosen unit on the fly. Nothing is rewritten in the database.
Conversions are exact. Troy-ounce-to-gram conversion uses the standard 31.1034768 g/oz factor; gram-to-kilogram is straightforward decimal. There's no rounding loss in storage — only in how many decimal places we choose to render.
The card on the Settings page spells this out in a banner: "Changing your weight unit does not affect stored transaction data or historical records — only how weights are shown in the app." That's the rule in one sentence.
A practical consequence: if you record a 1 oz American Gold Eagle while your display unit is set to troy ounces, then switch to grams, the underlying record still says 1 troy oz.
The Holdings page will show it as 31.1035 g. Switch back to ounces and it reads 1 oz again. The weight hasn't moved — the conversion has.
Saving the change
The Save changes button at the bottom-right of the Settings page stays greyed out until you actually change something. Pick a new unit from the dropdown and it activates. Click it, and the change is saved to your profile and applied immediately to your session.
If you change your mind before saving, navigate away from the Settings page and your selection is discarded. Only saved changes take effect.
What about weights you entered before you switched?
They re-render in the new unit with no loss of information. Because the stored figures are always in troy ounces, every historical purchase, sale, and inventory item is just re-converted on the next page load.
There's no migration step, no separate "before" and "after" view, and switching back and forth is harmless.
This is also why the Add Purchase form doesn't ask you to pick a unit when you enter a product. Each catalog product has its own per-unit weight already defined (1 oz, 100 g, 10 oz, 1 kg, and so on); the form just records how many of those units you bought.
Your display preference doesn't change which catalog products are available — it only changes how their weights are labelled across the app.
Where to go next
Setting your display currency: The matching display preference for money, which works on the same store-and-convert-at-display model.
How holdings work in Gold Silver Ledger: How each individual coin or bar is tracked as its own record, regardless of which unit you display weights in.
Understanding melt value: The formula behind every "current value" figure in the app, expressed in your chosen unit.
Recording your first transaction: If you haven't entered a purchase yet, this is the next step.