Most of what you record into Gold Silver Ledger comes from the built-in catalog, a curated list of widely-recognized bullion products, each pre-loaded with its weight, purity, mint, and product photo.
Picking from the catalog instead of typing free-text means your purchases line up consistently across the app, your Holdings page shows real product imagery, and the melt-value math is set up correctly from the first entry.
This article is the field-by-field tour of the Product dropdown on the Record Purchase form, plus how to recognize the right entry when a coin comes in multiple sizes. For the full Record Purchase walkthrough, start at How to record a purchase.
Opening the dropdown
On the Record Purchase form, click the Product field on any line of the Items Purchased section. The dropdown opens immediately, with every catalog entry sorted by metal and then by popularity. You can scroll the full list, or type into the search field at the top to filter.
The catalog dropdown is the same regardless of whether you reached the form from the left nav (Transactions → Add Purchase) or the Record Purchase button on the History page. There's no difference in what you can pick from either path.
Clicking a row collapses the dropdown and populates the line with that product's weight and metal. The spot price field auto-fills with current live spot for the selected metal; quantity defaults to 1.
Searching and filtering
The search field at the top of the dropdown matches against the product name, metal, and the mint. A few examples:
Type "Eagle" to narrow the list to every variant of the American Eagle across gold and silver.
Type "Maple" to see all Royal Canadian Mint Maple Leaf products.
Type "10 oz" to filter to ten-ounce products across every metal.
Type "Valcambi" or "PAMP" to filter by mint.
The search is forgiving — it doesn't care about case, and partial matches work. If you remember anything about the product, typing the most distinctive word usually gets you to a short enough list to scroll.
What the standard catalog covers
The built-in catalog ships with 170+ entries across all four metals, biased toward the products most users in the US and Commonwealth markets actually buy. Concretely:
Gold coins: American Gold Eagles, American Gold Buffalos, Canadian Gold Maple Leafs, South African Krugerrands, Austrian Philharmonics, British Gold Britannias, Australian Gold Kangaroos, and a few others. Each major coin appears in its standard sizes (1 oz, 1/2 oz, 1/4 oz, 1/10 oz where applicable).
Gold bars: PAMP Suisse, Valcambi, Credit Suisse, and other recognized refiners, in the most common weights (1 oz, 10 oz, 1 kg, and smaller fractional bars).
Silver coins: American Silver Eagles, Canadian Silver Maple Leafs, Austrian Silver Philharmonics, British Silver Britannias, Australian Silver Kangaroos, and other globally-distributed government-mint silver coins.
Silver bars and rounds: Major refiner 1 oz, 10 oz, 100 oz, and kilo bars, plus generic silver rounds.
Junk silver: Pre-1965 US dime, quarter, half dollar, Morgan dollar, Peace dollar, and 1965–1970 Kennedy half. These use a face-value-and-multiplier calculation instead of the standard weight-times-purity math. See Pre-1965 junk silver explained.
Platinum: American Platinum Eagles, Canadian Platinum Maples, Australian Platinum Platypus, and a 1 oz platinum bar.
Palladium: Canadian Palladium Maple Leafs and a handful of palladium bars.
If you primarily buy from US dealers, well over 90% of your purchases are likely to map directly to a standard catalog entry without needing a custom product.
A note on naming: The catalog lists products as product name first, weight last, "American Gold Eagle 1 oz" rather than the industry-conventional "1 oz American Gold Eagle." It reads slightly less natural, but it keeps every variant of the same coin grouped together when the list is sorted alphabetically, which is almost always what you want when you're hunting for a specific item.
Picking the right variant
Most government-mint coins come in multiple fractional sizes, and the catalog lists each size as its own entry. The American Gold Eagle, for example, has four:
American Gold Eagle 1 oz
American Gold Eagle 1/2 oz
American Gold Eagle 1/4 oz
American Gold Eagle 1/10 oz
Pick the entry that matches the weight you actually bought, not the most common one. The fastest check is the weight field for the line item after selecting the product. If it doesn't match the per-coin weight on your dealer invoice, you've got the wrong variant.
A similar story applies to bars, where the same refiner (PAMP, Valcambi, Credit Suisse, etc.) typically appears with multiple weights. The product name includes the weight, so reading the name and confirming the weight column is enough.
If your product isn't in the catalog
The catalog is opinionated and covers what's popular, not what's possible — bespoke regional coins, novelty mints, in-house dealer bars, and one-off commemoratives often won't be there. You have two paths:
Add a custom product from the dropdown, on the fly. Pro and Premium users can scroll to the bottom of the catalog dropdown and choose to create a new custom product without leaving the form. You'll be prompted for name, metal, weight, and purity, and the new entry is saved to your private custom catalog for next time. This is not available on the Starter tier — see The three plans compared for the upgrade path.
Define the custom product from the Catalog page first. If you'd rather take the time to set the product up with every option available (calculation method, junk-silver multiplier, notes, and so on), head to the Catalog page in the left nav, click + New Custom Item, and then come back to the Record Purchase form. The longer version of this flow lives at Creating a custom product.
For the broader question of when custom is the right call versus when you should keep looking in the standard catalog, see When to use a custom product instead of the catalog.
Browsing the catalog separately from the form
You don't have to be in the middle of recording a purchase to look at the catalog. Click Catalog in the left nav under ACCOUNT to open the Bullion Catalog page, which shows two tabs:
Standard Catalog: The full built-in list, filterable by metal and form. Useful as a pre-shopping reference if you're trying to figure out which sizes or mints we already support.
My Custom Items: Any custom products you've defined for your account, with edit and delete controls. (Standard catalog entries can't be edited or deleted by users — they're maintained centrally so they stay consistent across everyone's accounts.)
The Catalog page is also the easiest place to browse by metal, by form (coin, bar, round, junk), or by mint without having to open the Record Purchase form first. See [The built-in catalog: what's included] for the longer tour.
Where to go next
How to record a purchase: The full Record Purchase form walkthrough.
Using one of your custom products in a transaction: When you're using a custom entry instead of a standard one.
Creating a custom product: The longer how-to for adding new entries.
When to use a custom product instead of the catalog: Deciding between custom and standard.
The built-in catalog: what's included: Browsing the catalog as a standalone page.