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Deleting a portfolio

How to delete a portfolio in Gold Silver Ledger from Settings → Portfolios. Covers what happens to its contents (they move to your default), why the default itself can't be deleted, and how to delete it by promoting another portfolio first.

Deleting a portfolio is permanent for the portfolio itself, but everything that lived inside it — every transaction, every inventory item — moves to your default portfolio rather than disappearing. So the data survives, just under a different roof.

This article covers the delete action, what happens to the contents, and the small detour required to delete the portfolio currently flagged as default.

Deleting a portfolio

Deletions happen on the Portfolios tab in Settings. Go to Settings → Portfolios, find the portfolio you want to remove in the Your Portfolios list, and click the trash icon at the right of its row.

The app asks you to confirm before anything is removed, since the portfolio itself can't be brought back once it's gone.

Confirm, and the portfolio disappears from the list immediately. Its contents are transferred to your default portfolio in the same step.

What happens to the transactions and items inside

This is the part to understand before you click. When a portfolio is deleted, two things happen to the data it contained:

  • Transactions recorded against the deleted portfolio are reassigned to your default portfolio. They keep every detail — date, dealer, line items, premium, notes — the only field that changes is which portfolio they belong to.

  • Inventory items created by those transactions follow them across. They keep their purchase price, their locked-in spot, their labels (nickname, reference, date annotation), and their held-or-sold status.

The numbers on your default portfolio update accordingly: total value goes up, item count goes up, Analytics recalculates against the combined data. From the app's perspective the deletion is essentially a merge — the deleted portfolio's contents fold into the default.

A few practical consequences:

  • Nothing is lost. Sold items remain sold, held items remain held, and your Annual Report continues to reflect every disposal you've recorded — they just answer to the default portfolio from now on.

  • You can't undo it after the fact. The portfolio is gone, and there's no "restore" command that puts everything back where it was. If you want to recreate the split, you'd need to make a new portfolio and re-record the transactions you wanted in it.

  • This is the only way items cross portfolios. There's no direct "move transaction" command anywhere else in the app. Deletion is the one operation that relocates existing data, and it always lands in the default.

If you're deleting a portfolio specifically because you want its contents merged into your default, that's the supported workflow — exactly the same flow, by design.

The default can't be deleted

The portfolio currently flagged as Default is the one exception. The default has to exist, because that's where deleted-portfolio contents land — if there were no default, the merge target would be undefined.

So the delete option simply doesn't apply to whichever portfolio carries the badge.

To delete what is currently your default portfolio, the path is:

  1. Go to Settings → Portfolios.

  2. Click Set Default on the portfolio you want to promote — typically another portfolio you already use, or a brand-new empty one created just to receive the transfer.

  3. The Default badge moves over to the promoted portfolio. The previously-default portfolio is now an ordinary portfolio.

  4. Click the trash icon on the previously-default portfolio and confirm.

Its contents transfer to the new default in the same step. See Renaming a portfolio for more on the Set Default action — they share the same Settings tab.

After deletion: the selector and your records

Two small things happen elsewhere in the app the moment a portfolio is deleted:

  • The portfolio selector at the top of the app drops the deleted portfolio from its list. If you happened to have it selected at the time, the selector falls back to your default portfolio — see Switching between portfolios for how the selection behaves.

  • The Transactions page still shows every transaction that used to belong to the deleted portfolio, now labelled with the default portfolio's name. From a record-keeping standpoint nothing is missing; the only change is the portfolio column on those rows.

CSV exports of holdings and transactions reflect the post-deletion state: the deleted portfolio's data appears in the rows attributed to your default. If you want a snapshot of how things looked before you delete, export first.

Where to go next

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