An item I sold is still showing as held

If you've sold a coin or bar in real life and noticed it's still sitting in your held inventory inside Gold Silver Ledger, the disconnect is almost always one of a few things: the sale was never actually recorded in the app, the SELL transaction picked a different item than you meant, or a portfolio filter is hiding what really happened.

This article walks through the possibilities in roughly the order they account for these reports. Work down the list — the resolution usually appears in the first two or three steps.

Before troubleshooting, a quick refresher on the model. Inventory in Gold Silver Ledger is item-level — each coin or bar you've bought is a distinct record.

When you sell, you don't sell "a 1 oz Gold Eagle" in the abstract; you select the specific Eagle (or set of Eagles) that left the house, and those exact items are marked SOLD. The ones you didn't tick are unaffected.

That makes the SELL flow precise — and it also makes it possible to tick the wrong specific item by mistake when you have several similar ones, which is the second-most-common cause of this article's symptom.

For background: How to record a sale and Selecting which specific items you sold.

The first thing to confirm is that a SELL transaction exists at all. If you sold the item in real life but never went into the app to record the sale, the held status will be entirely correct from the app's point of view — it doesn't know about anything that happens off-screen.

To check:

If there's no SELL transaction matching the sale, that's the answer — go to How to record a sale and record one now. The item will move to SOLD as soon as the SELL transaction is saved.

If a SELL transaction does exist on the right date, move to the next step.

When you have multiple physical copies of the same product — say, three 1 oz Gold Eagles bought across three different transactions — every one of them is a separate inventory record.

The SELL flow shows them all and asks you to tick the specific ones you sold. If you ticked the wrong one (or ticked one and meant to tick a different one), the SELL transaction did exactly what you told it to: it marked the item you ticked as SOLD, and the one you actually sold in real life is still sitting in held inventory looking innocent.

You can verify this by:

If the wrong items got ticked, the cleanest fix is:

The nicknames, reference labels, and date annotations you can attach to specific items make this easier on future sales — if a particular Eagle is the one you're planning to part with first, labelling it ahead of time prevents tick-the-wrong-one moments in the SELL screen.

See Adding a nickname to a specific item and Adding a user reference.

This isn't a bug, but it produces the same surface symptom — items showing as held when you expected them not to.

If you bought ten of something and sold five, the other five are still held. That's correct. The SELL transaction will be sitting in your Transactions list with quantity 5, and your held inventory will show 5 of that product remaining.

Worth checking explicitly:

If the recorded quantity matches the real-world sale, and there are still items held because you didn't sell the whole position, everything is working as designed. The longer walk-through is in Selling part of a position.

If the recorded quantity is less than what you actually sold in real life — say, you sold seven but the SELL transaction has five — you have two options: edit the existing SELL transaction to add the missing items, or record a second SELL transaction for the additional two. Either approach moves the right items to SOLD.

The global portfolio selector filters Holdings the same way it filters everything else. If your SELL transaction was recorded against one portfolio but you're viewing Holdings filtered to a different portfolio, you'll see a confusing mix — the SELL exists, but you're not seeing its effect because the affected items aren't visible in the current scope.

A quick check:

If the SELL is in one portfolio and the held items are in another, that's a sign one of the two was recorded against the wrong portfolio. The fix is to edit whichever is misfiled — see Editing a transaction after the fact — so they both live in the same portfolio.

Deleting a SELL transaction is the reverse of recording one: the items the SELL had marked SOLD come back to held inventory. If you (or someone with access to the account) deleted the SELL after recording it, the items would have returned to held automatically.

To check:

The fix is to record the SELL again. See How to record a sale for the flow. The deeper read on what deletion does is in Deleting a sell transaction and Undoing a mistake.

If the sale was recorded via Bulk Import rather than the in-app SELL form, a row that failed validation wouldn't have created a SELL transaction — and the affected items would still be in held inventory because no SELL ever touched them.

The wider read on what Bulk Import does and doesn't do is in Bulk import overview.

A few things people sometimes wonder about when an item won't leave held that aren't actually issues:

If you've worked through every step above — confirmed a SELL transaction exists for the right item against the right portfolio, with the right quantity, and the item is still showing as held — that's worth flagging.

A note to [Contact support] with the SELL transaction's date and ID (or the dealer / quantity if you don't have an ID), the product in question, and which inventory item should have moved is enough for us to investigate.

This is rare. The overwhelming majority of "still held" reports turn out to be a wrong-item-selected situation in step 2 or a missing SELL transaction in step 1. But if you're confident the SELL exists and points at the right item, we want to know.