I bought 10 of something but only see 9 in my inventory

If a count on your Holdings page comes up short — you bought ten of something, you're confident of that, but the app is only showing nine — there's nothing dramatic happening behind the scenes.

Inventory in Gold Silver Ledger is item-level: every coin or bar is its own record, every record came from a specific BUY transaction line, and the count on the Holdings page is simply how many of those records are currently in HELD status for the product you're looking at.

So if a count is off by one, exactly one of three things is true: an item is being filtered out of view, the original BUY didn't actually create ten records, or one of the records is sitting in SOLD status rather than HELD.

This article walks through those possibilities in the order they account for these reports. Most cases resolve in the first two or three steps.

The Holdings page defaults to held items — sold ones don't appear there. So if one of the ten you bought has been sold, the page will, correctly, show nine.

A quick check:

If a SELL exists, that's your missing item. The maths is correct: ten bought minus one sold equals nine held. The sale might be intentional (you sold one a while back and forgot) or unintentional (a SELL was recorded that shouldn't have been).

If the SELL is wrong, you can delete it and the item returns to held — see Deleting a sell transaction. The deeper read on how sold items live in inventory is in What happens to sold items in your inventory.

If no SELL transaction exists, move on to the next step.

The Holdings page has more than one way of displaying the same items, and one of them can produce a count that looks lower than it really is if you're not familiar with it.

The grouped view consolidates identical items into a single row showing the total quantity — so a row that says "10" represents ten individual records collapsed together. The item and card views show one entry per physical item — so the same ten items take ten rows or ten cards.

If you're glancing at a number on a row and treating it as "what's there," confirm which view you're in:

The numbers should always agree between the views. If grouped view says 9 and item view also shows 9 rows, those nine are all that's actually held. See The Holdings page: grouped, item, and card views for the broader read.

The global portfolio selector and the Holdings page's own filters can both hide items from view without removing them from inventory.

If broadening the scope reveals the missing item in a different portfolio, the BUY may have been recorded against the wrong portfolio. The fix is to edit the transaction and move it.

The next thing to check is the BUY transaction itself. If the transaction was recorded with quantity 9 instead of 10, then nine inventory records is exactly what should exist.

To verify:

People sometimes split a single purchase across multiple BUY transactions — say, recorded six and meant to add a second BUY for the remaining four, but only added three. In that case the total recorded would be nine across two transactions, even though the real-world purchase was ten.

If the recorded quantity is wrong, the cleanest fix is to edit the BUY transaction to the correct quantity. Editing a BUY to a higher quantity creates the additional inventory records; editing to a lower quantity removes them (oldest first). The transaction history retains the audit trail in either case.

If the BUY originally created ten records but later got edited to nine, that would also produce the symptom — even though no SELL ever happened, the count would be reduced.

To check:

If a quantity edit happened by mistake, raise the number back to ten and the missing inventory record will be re-created. See Editing a transaction after the fact.

This is rare — quantity edits are an explicit action with a confirmation step — but worth ruling out before deciding the count is mysteriously wrong.

If the original purchase was recorded through Bulk Import rather than the in-app form, a row that failed validation wouldn't have created any inventory records.

If you imported what was supposed to be ten items across multiple CSV rows and one row was rejected at the preview step, you'd end up with nine in inventory.

For background on what the import preview shows and how to fix flagged rows, see Uploading and reviewing your CSV and Fixing common CSV errors.

A few reflexes worth heading off:

If you've worked through every step — no SELL, view mode confirmed, scope and filters cleared, BUY quantity verified, no rogue edit, no missing CSV row — and your inventory genuinely shows nine when ten were bought, that's worth flagging.

A note to [Contact support] with the BUY transaction's date and the product involved is enough to start. We can look at the underlying records and find where the tenth one went.

This is rare. Almost every "I'm missing one" report turns out to be a SELL the user had forgotten about, or a BUY recorded at the wrong quantity. But if you're confident the records should be there, we want to look.