Undoing a mistake

Every entry mistake in Gold Silver Ledger is recoverable. The other three articles in this collection cover the mechanics — what the edit form does, what a buy delete does, what a sale delete does.

This one is the decision aid: a scenario list mapped to the right tool, so you can match what went wrong to the right next click without re-reading every detail.

Two principles underneath everything below:

The single most common entry mistake. Open the transaction with the pencil icon, change the Premium / Unit value in the Items Purchased section, and Save. The totals strip at the bottom of the form updates as you type, so you can sanity-check before you commit.

A worked example: you bought 10 Silver Eagles, paid $89 each, and typed $89 into the Premium / Unit field by accident with spot at ~$80.

The fix is to change that field to $9 — the per-unit dollar amount over spot, not the per-unit total price. See Entering the premium you paid for the framing.

Same shape, opposite form. Open the sale with the pencil, edit the Sale Price field on the affected line, Save. The percentage-over-spot indicator underneath the field updates live; an unrealistic number jumps out immediately.

This catches a lot of users who backdate a purchase without realizing the spot field doesn't auto-roll to match. Open the buy, edit Spot at Purchase to the actual historical spot for the date, and Save.

Your dealer's invoice usually has the spot from that day printed on it; if not, a public chart for the metal and date will get you within a couple of dollars.

The edit recalculates the recorded premium percentage and the cost basis for every unit on that line. It does not change the current value of the items — current value is always recalculated against live spot, no matter what you record in this field.

See Recorded spot vs. live spot: what each one does for the longer explanation.

Edit. Change Purchase Date or Sale Date to the real date, Save. Use the actual transaction date, not the date you noticed the error.

If the date moves the transaction across a tax year, the change flows into the Annual Report for the correct year the next time you generate it.

Open each transaction in turn and edit the Dealer / Source field to the canonical spelling. The dropdown is searchable, so picking the same existing entry across multiple transactions takes a second per row.

A small note from the buy form: dealers are case-sensitive and exact-match, so "APMEX" and "Apmex" are two separate entries. Pick one, edit the other transactions onto it, and stop typing the second one going forward.

Edit cannot fix this one. The product field is locked once a transaction is saved.

Delete the transaction, then record a fresh one with the correct product. Keep the original purchase date and the original spot price when you re-enter — the corrected record should reflect what really happened, not what time it is when you fix it. See Deleting a buy transaction.

Also locked. If you bought 6 Silver Eagles but recorded 5, you can't add a sixth to the existing transaction; you can't remove the fifth from a transaction where you actually got 4, either. Delete and re-record at the correct quantity.

There's one tempting shortcut to avoid: don't fix a quantity-off-by-one error by adding a second transaction for the missing unit. That works mathematically but leaves your ledger with two transactions where there should be one, which makes the dealer-receipt audit trail harder to follow later. Delete and re-record cleanly.

The Edit Sale form's warning makes this explicit: items included in a sale can't be changed. Delete the sale (which restores all the items to held), then record a fresh sale with the correct selection. See Deleting a sell transaction.

This is the scenario the sale delete was designed for, and the most common reason to use it.

The portfolio is set at submission and isn't editable afterward. Delete the transaction, switch to the correct portfolio at the top of the app, and re-record there.

If the wrong-portfolio transaction was a sale, follow the sale-delete order: deleting the sale restores the items to held in the wrong portfolio, where they originated. If those items also need to be in a different portfolio, that's a separate move — see [Switching between portfolios] for the broader picture.

Delete the duplicate. Keep the original or pick whichever copy has the cleaner data (the right dealer spelling, the right notes), then remove the other.

If both copies have partial information you want to keep, edit the survivor first to merge the useful bits, then delete the duplicate.

Delete the sale. The items return to held with their original cost basis intact, so if you sell those same items again later, the cost basis side is automatic and only the new sale-side fields need fresh entry.

Delete the test entries one at a time from the Transactions page. Each delete frees a slot against your transaction and inventory item caps, so this also opens up headroom for real entries.

If you have a lot of test data to clear and you're on Premium, it can be faster to delete everything and start fresh from a clean ledger rather than weed through it one row at a time. There's no bulk-delete button, but the rows are easy to spot if your dealer field for test entries is something like "test" or "—".

Not really an undo, but it comes up alongside the others. Record it now with the real historical date and the real historical spot. The form accepts backdated entries without complaint, and the resulting transaction behaves identically to one you recorded on the day.

See How to record a purchase for the field-by-field walkthrough.