Creating a custom product

A custom product is a personal catalog entry: a coin, bar, or round that lives only in your account and behaves identically to a built-in catalog product everywhere else in the app. Creating one is a short modal with fields for name, metal, form, weight, purity, and a save button.

This article walks through the form field-by-field for the Standard calculation method, plus a note on where the Junk Silver method picks up.

If you're not sure whether a custom product is the right call in the first place, start with When to use a custom product instead of the catalog.

There are two routes to the form, and both open the same modal:

The modal closes only when you cancel or save — if you click outside it, your in-progress entry stays put.

The Standard method covers everything that isn't junk silver: bullion coins, bars, rounds, and any product where the value scales with weight and a spot price. Six fields, only one of which is optional.

Free text. This is what shows up in the product picker when you record a transaction, in your Holdings page, and in any CSV export.

Names that age well follow the catalog convention: [Issuer/Refiner] [Metal] [Form] [Size]. A few examples:

You can rename a custom product later from the My Custom Items tab — see Editing or deactivating a custom product — so don't agonize over it.

Dropdown: Gold, Silver, Platinum, or Palladium. This determines which spot price the app uses when valuing the item. The choice is locked once you've created the product — you can't reclassify a custom product from one metal to another after the fact, because the spot price reference would shift mid-history.

Dropdown: Coin, Bar, Round, or Junk. This is the category your item lives in on Holdings filters and on the catalog row.

A toggle with two options: Standard and Junk Silver. Standard is the default and is what you'll use for any bullion product valued by weight. Junk Silver is for fractional silver coinage where the math runs off face value instead.

This article covers Standard. For the Junk Silver method's fields and worked examples, see [Custom junk-silver-style products].

The metal content of the piece in troy ounces. For most bullion this is the headline number printed on the product:

The reason to enter the metal content rather than the gross physical weight is that this is the figure the melt calculation uses. See [Setting purity, weight, and calculation method] for the full conceptual treatment.

The fineness of the metal, expressed as a decimal between 0 and 1.

Purity is display metadata — it shows up on the catalog row and the inventory item, but the melt calculation works off the weight you entered, not weight × purity.

Optional free-text field. Use it for anything you want to remember about the product that the other fields don't capture — the source, a serial range, a design year, why you set it up this way. The notes are private to your account and appear on the catalog row for the product.

If you switch the Calculation Method toggle to Junk Silver, the form swaps the Weight and Purity fields for Face Value / Unit ($) and Silver Multiplier. The Metal locks to Silver and the Form is set to Junk.

An info box appears with the formula and the common US multipliers (0.715 for 90% coinage, 0.295 for 40% Kennedy halves) for reference.

This setup is what you'd use for non-US fractional silver — Canadian pre-1967, British pre-1947, Australian pre-decimal, and so on.

Click + Add Item to save the custom product. The modal closes and the new entry appears on the My Custom Items tab immediately.

From that point forward, the product is available in the product picker whenever you record a transaction — it shows up in the same dropdown as catalog products, with no second-class indicator.

The melt math, the gain/loss calculation, the Holdings page treatment, the Analytics roll-up, and the Annual Report (Premium) all treat it identically to a built-in product.

If you change your mind, you can edit or remove a custom product from the My Custom Items tab. The rules around editing once items are recorded against the product are covered in Editing or deactivating a custom product.