The short, honest answer: there's no undo button. Once you've confirmed a transaction deletion, the transaction itself is gone from your account and there's no in-app path to bring it back.
But "no undo" doesn't mean "no recovery" — recovery just means re-recording the transaction from whatever source of truth you have for it, which is usually faster than it sounds.
This article walks through what actually disappears when you delete each type of transaction, how to put the data back together, and a couple of habits worth picking up so the next accidental delete is a non-event.
What got deleted, exactly
Deleting a BUY transaction and deleting a SELL transaction don't have the same effect, so the first useful step is figuring out which one you removed.
If you deleted a BUY transaction, the BUY itself is gone and so are the inventory items it created. Ten Gold Eagles that came from a BUY transaction will have vanished from your held inventory at the moment the BUY was deleted. The longer explainer is in Deleting a buy transaction.
If you deleted a SELL transaction, the SELL itself is gone but the inventory items it had marked SOLD have been restored to held. Your inventory looks fuller, not emptier, after a SELL deletion. The longer explainer is in Deleting a sell transaction.
This matters for recovery because:
Re-creating a deleted BUY means re-recording the purchase exactly as it happened — date, dealer, items, prices, the lot — and the inventory items will be re-created as a side-effect.
Re-creating a deleted SELL means recording a fresh SELL against the items currently sitting in held inventory (the same ones that just came back). The items themselves are already there waiting.
If you're not sure which type you deleted, the giveaway is the inventory side. If items vanished, it was a BUY. If items reappeared, it was a SELL.
Recovery from a deleted BUY transaction
The work is to reconstruct the original BUY from whatever records you still have. The pieces you need are the same ones you'd enter on a fresh Add Purchase form:
The date of the purchase.
The dealer (free-text — useful to match against receipts later).
The products and how many of each.
The price per unit you paid.
The spot price at the time of purchase, if you want to lock in an accurate cost basis. The form auto-fills with current spot, but you'll want to edit that to the historical spot for the original date.
The shipping or handling cost, if any.
Any notes you'd had on the original.
Sources you might pull these from:
Dealer receipts and invoices. These usually carry everything: product, quantity, price per unit, date, dealer name. The most authoritative source.
Bank or card statements. Useful for confirming dates and amounts when receipts are missing.
Email confirmations from the dealer. Often contain everything a receipt does.
A CSV export from Gold Silver Ledger you'd taken earlier. If you had exported your transactions before the deletion, that file is effectively a backup. See Exporting your transactions as CSV.
A prior Annual Report PDF or CSV. If the deleted BUY was from a closed tax year and you'd already generated the report, the report carries the cost-basis-side details. See Exporting your annual report as PDF and Exporting your annual report as CSV.
Your own records. Spreadsheets, notes, photos of receipts in a folder somewhere. Whatever you used before Gold Silver Ledger usually still applies.
Once you have the details, walk through How to record a purchase to re-enter the transaction. The new BUY will create fresh inventory items in held status.
If any of those items had been previously sold, you'll need to re-record the SELL too, against the new items — see the SELL section below.
Recovery from a deleted SELL transaction
This one is usually simpler, because the items the SELL had marked SOLD are now back in held inventory. You don't need to reconstruct the items; they're sitting there.
The work is to record a fresh SELL transaction against them. The details to gather:
The date of the sale.
The dealer or buyer (free-text).
Which specific items went out the door — same as the original SELL, you tick the affected items in the SELL flow.
The price per unit you sold at.
The spot price at the time of sale, if you want it locked in accurately. The form auto-fills with current spot; edit it for historical accuracy.
Any notes from the original.
Sources are similar to a BUY: dealer receipts, bank statements, email confirmations, prior CSV exports, prior Annual Report PDFs (if the SELL was in a closed tax year).
Walk through How to record a sale to re-enter. The items will move back to SOLD status as the new SELL saves.
When the deletion cascade got messy
Most deletes are clean. But if you deleted a BUY that had previously been partially or fully sold, the side effects can take a moment to reason about:
The BUY's inventory items are gone.
Any SELL transactions that had referenced those items are now in an awkward state, because their underlying items don't exist anymore.
If you find yourself in that situation:
Re-record the BUY first. That brings back fresh inventory items in held status.
Then re-record any affected SELL transactions against the newly re-created items. Pick the same date, dealer, and quantities the originals had.
It's a little fiddly but mechanically the same as recording any other transaction. The end result is an inventory that matches what you actually own and a transaction history that matches what actually happened.
A few habits worth picking up
Since "no undo" is the operative constraint, the most useful habits aren't recovery-side — they're prevention-side.
Read the confirmation dialog before clicking through it. Delete confirmations name the transaction and warn that the action can't be undone. The clearest moment to catch a wrong-transaction selection is the half-second between the dialog appearing and you clicking the button.
Periodically export your transactions to CSV. A monthly or quarterly export, saved somewhere outside Gold Silver Ledger (cloud drive, local folder, wherever you keep your other records), gives you a snapshot you can re-import or re-enter from if anything ever goes sideways. The CSV is plain text and trivially small even for large portfolios.
Use the Annual Report as a year-end backup. Generating and saving the PDF or CSV at the end of each tax year creates a permanent record of every disposal for that year, independent of the live app state.
Be deliberate about cleanup sessions. If you're going through and deleting old or duplicate transactions, do it slowly and one at a time rather than batch-style. Most accidental deletes happen in the middle of a sweep.
These don't undo a deletion that already happened, but they make the next deletion either impossible or trivial to recover from.
When to contact support
If you've deleted something critical, have no external records to re-create it from, and the loss matters for your tax position or your books, [Contact support] is the right next step.
Provide what you do know — the approximate date, the product, the dealer if you remember it — and we'll see what we can do.
A note on expectations: we don't have a magic restore button either. There are limits to what's recoverable from our side, and the further back the deletion was, the less likely a recovery is possible.
The most useful thing in any "I have no records and no idea" situation is to reach out promptly, while any traces are most likely to still exist on our side. Sooner is better than later.
But in practice, almost everyone has some record of an important transaction — a receipt, an email, a statement — and re-recording from that record is the path that works in every case. Recovery doesn't have to come from inside the app to bring your ledger back to where it was.
Where to go next
Deleting a buy transaction: What a BUY deletion actually does, including the inventory-side cascade.
Deleting a sell transaction: What a SELL deletion does, including the restore-to-held side effect.
How to record a purchase: The form to walk through when re-recording a deleted BUY.
How to record a sale: The form to walk through when re-recording a deleted SELL.
Editing a transaction after the fact: If the issue turns out to be a wrong-detail edit rather than a deletion.
Exporting your transactions as CSV: A backup you can take ahead of time.
Exporting your annual report as PDF: A year-end backup of disposals.
Undoing a mistake: The broader article on recovering from unintended changes.