Every page of the Annual Report — on screen, in the PDF, at the bottom of the CSV — ends with the same line: this report is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or tax advice. Consult a qualified tax professional regarding the treatment of precious metals disposals before filing.
This article is that sentence, unpacked.
Not a tax-advice article (the irony would be hard to ignore), but a description of what the report can confidently tell you, what it deliberately leaves alone, and why the gap between those two is what a tax advisor is there to fill.
Tier access
The Annual Report is Premium-only, but the substance of this article — the gap between a tracked gain and a filed return — applies to anyone in the US who sells physical bullion at a gain or a loss, on any plan.
What the disclaimer actually says
Stripped of the formal language, the report's standing footer is making three small claims and one large one.
Small claim 1: The numbers in this report are an accurate record of what you bought, what you sold, and the difference between the two.
Small claim 2: Those numbers are useful inputs into a tax calculation.
Small claim 3: They are not, by themselves, a tax calculation.
Large claim: Bridging from "an accurate record of your sales" to "a correctly filed return" requires information and judgement that live outside the app.
This article is mostly an explanation of that fourth claim.
What the report sees
The data inside the report is real and tightly scoped. For the selected year and portfolio, Gold Silver Ledger knows:
Every sale you recorded: Item by item, with sale dates, sale prices, and proceeds.
The original buy for each sold item: Locked in at the time you saved the purchase, including the spot price you paid against, your premium, and any allocated shipping.
The holding period for each sale: Calculated cleanly from buy date to sell date.
The short-term and long-term split: Derived from those holding periods.
Your selected display currency: And the FX rate in effect at export time.
That's plenty for the report to be useful, and within those bounds the numbers are not approximations.
What the report can't see
Outside that boundary is everything else that goes into a tax bill — and "everything else" is a lot.
Your filing status and marginal rate: The 28% collectibles rate is a cap; whether it actually binds depends on your bracket, which depends on your filing status and total income. See A note on the collectibles tax rate (28%).
Your state and any moves during the year: Most US states tax capital gains; some tax them as ordinary income; a handful don't tax them at all. Multi-state filers add another layer.
Other capital gains and losses: Sales of stocks, real estate, crypto, or other collectibles in the same year all interact with your bullion sales for offset purposes.
Losses carried forward from prior years: A loss you weren't able to fully use last year may be sitting on your return waiting to be applied this year.
NIIT exposure: Higher-income filers may owe an additional 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax on top.
Whether anything you sold qualifies for special treatment: Inherited items, items in a trust, items held in a self-directed IRA, gifted items, and a number of other scenarios change the calculation in ways the report doesn't try to detect.
Whether some of your bullion was held through a vehicle that isn't taxed as a collectible: Most physical bullion is; a few edge cases aren't.
The report doesn't see any of that because the report only sees your purchases and sales. Each of those bullets is in the advisor's domain.
What a tax advisor adds on top
A tax advisor takes the report's per-item record and slots it into the rest of your tax picture. In practice, that usually means:
Bracket math: Working out whether the 28% collectibles cap actually applies to your long-term gains this year, or whether your marginal rate sits below it.
Offsetting: Pairing losses against gains to reduce the net taxable amount, including reaching into prior-year carryforwards.
State treatment: Adding any state-level capital-gains tax onto the federal figure.
NIIT and AMT checks: Catching the secondary calculations that kick in at certain income levels.
Form selection: Picking the right schedule(s) — typically Schedule D and Form 8949 in the US — and making sure the collectibles classification is applied correctly in the tax software (some packages default to the lower 15% / 20% long-term rate unless explicitly told the asset is a collectible).
Filing strategy: Identifying whether a single sale could have been timed or split differently — useful context for the following year, since this year's already in the books by the time the report is generated.
None of these are things the app can do in a useful, defensible way. All of them are routine for a tax advisor who's worked with capital-gains filers.
When the gap matters more than usual
For some users, the report's numbers really are most of the picture, and an advisor's involvement is light. For others, the picture gets complicated quickly. A few situations where consultation tends to be especially worth it:
Your first year selling bullion: You haven't run the collectibles-rate machinery through your return before. One pass with an advisor will make every following year more confident.
A meaningful gain or loss for the year: Large dollar figures attract scrutiny and reward strategy.
A mix of short-term and long-term sales in the same year: The two buckets are taxed differently, and the right ordering of which items to sell isn't always obvious in advance.
Multi-state situation: Moved during the year, or earned income in more than one state.
Anything held in a trust, IRA, or after inheritance: The basis and the holding period can be set by rules the app doesn't model.
Heavy gains alongside high ordinary income: NIIT and AMT exposure become real considerations.
If you read that list and recognised your own year, the report is best treated as supporting evidence, not as the headline.
Treating the report as a starting point
The cleanest way to use the Annual Report at filing time is roughly this:
Generate the report for the year, with the right portfolio scope. See Generating your Annual Report.
Export the PDF for the advisor's file and the CSV for any data they'll want to import. See Exporting your Annual Report as PDF and Exporting your Annual Report as CSV.
Hand both to a qualified tax advisor along with the rest of your year's tax documents.
Let them slot the numbers into the broader return, apply the collectibles treatment, work out the offsets, and produce the actual figure that goes to the IRS.
The report's value is that step 1 and step 2 are essentially zero-effort — the per-item record is already there, accurate, and ready to hand off. The work that remains is the work that always required judgement.
Where to go next
A note on the collectibles tax rate (28%): The federal rate that most often anchors a long-term bullion sale.
Short-term vs. long-term gains explained: Why the report splits gains the way it does.
How cost basis is determined: Where the Cost Basis column comes from.
Generating your Annual Report: Walkthrough of the page itself.
Annual Reports for non-US users: Where UK and Canada support stand.