If Gold Silver Ledger has told you that you've reached your inventory item cap, it means the number of physical items recorded against your account has hit the limit for your current plan.
The cap is real — new BUYs won't add inventory until something changes — but everything you've already recorded is safe, and the path forward is either to lift the cap with an upgrade or to bring the count down by removing items you no longer want tracked.
This article walks through what counts as an item, what each plan allows, and the two practical ways out.
What counts as an item
Inventory in Gold Silver Ledger is item-level: every single coin, bar, round, or junk-silver unit you've recorded is one inventory item. If a BUY transaction adds ten Gold Eagles, that's ten inventory items, not one.
Each physical unit gets its own record so that nicknames, references, date annotations, and specific-identification sales can attach to the right one.
A few clarifications:
Quantity matters, not transaction count. A single BUY transaction for 100 Eagles uses 100 of your inventory item allowance, even though it's one transaction. (Transactions have their own separate cap.
Currently held items are what count toward "what you can still add." Items you've already sold don't tie up headroom for new purchases. So if you sell some items, the space they were using becomes available for new BUYs.
Different products are still individual items. Ten 1 oz Gold Eagles, ten 1 oz Silver Eagles, and ten Pre-1965 quarters together count as thirty items, regardless of how many different products are represented.
If you're not sure where your count currently sits, the Holdings page is the place — the totals there reflect the items in your account.
The caps per plan
The headroom is different on each plan:
Starter: 30 inventory items.
Pro: 1,000 inventory items.
Premium: 10,000 inventory items.
For background on how this fits alongside the other limits, see The three plans compared.
What that means in practice depends on what you're tracking. Thirty items on Starter is fine for a small personal stack of individually meaningful coins.
A thousand on Pro is enough for most steady stackers who accumulate over years. Ten thousand on Premium is built to accommodate large junk-silver holdings or the kind of collection where unit counts genuinely run into the thousands.
Option 1: Upgrade to lift the cap
The most common path is to move up a tier. Each tier is a substantial jump — Starter to Pro is more than a thirtyfold increase in item allowance, Pro to Premium is another tenfold, so it's rare to hit the next tier's cap shortly after upgrading.
To do it:
From the left nav, click Settings.
Open the Subscription tab.
Choose Pro or Premium, monthly or annual.
Complete the Stripe Checkout.
The full walk-through is in Upgrading your subscription. The cap lifts as soon as the upgrade lands.
What you also get with the upgrade, beyond more inventory headroom:
Pro unlocks Advanced Analytics, raises portfolios to 3, and raises transactions to 250.
Premium unlocks Bulk CSV Upload and the Tax-ready Annual Report, raises portfolios to 10, and raises transactions to 2,000.
If you've been close to your existing cap for a while, upgrading is usually the right call — the time spent managing the limit costs more than the price difference between tiers.
Option 2: Bring the count down
If you'd rather stay on your current plan, the count can be reduced by removing items you no longer need to track. The catch is that removal is deletion, not archive — there's no soft-delete that hides items while preserving their records.
So this option works for situations where the data really isn't needed anymore, not for situations where you might want it back later.
Practical ways to reduce the count:
Selling items moves them out of held status, and held items are what count against your headroom for new purchases. If you've genuinely disposed of metal but never recorded the sale, recording the SELL now both updates your books and creates space for new buys. See How to record a sale.
Deleting BUY transactions removes the inventory items they created, along with the underlying transaction. This is appropriate for transactions that were recorded by mistake — duplicates, test entries, items that turned out to be returned. See Deleting a buy transaction. It's not appropriate for genuine purchases you'd want in your tax-time records, because deletion is permanent and the inventory items go with the transaction.
Consolidation is limited. Because each unit is its own record, you can't merge ten Eagle items into one "Eagle x10" entry. That's by design — the per-item granularity is what lets nicknames, references, and specific-ID sales work. So "consolidate to fit" usually ends up being "delete some, sell some, or upgrade."
For most users who've hit the cap on a real stack, upgrading is the cleaner path. Reducing the count makes sense mainly when the cap was hit because of test data or misplaced records that don't belong in inventory.
What happens at the cap
While your account is at the inventory cap:
You can't record new BUY transactions that would push you over. The Add Purchase form will tell you the cap has been reached and offer the upgrade or removal paths.
Existing inventory items remain fully functional. All your holdings, totals, analytics, and reports continue to work normally.
You can still record SELL transactions. Selling reduces the held-item count, which can free up space for future buys.
You can still edit existing transactions (without increasing total quantities into the cap).
You can still use everything else in the app — the cap affects new inventory only.
The cap is a soft wall against adding new physical items, not a freeze on the rest of the app.
What doesn't happen at the cap
A few reassurances about what hitting the limit does not do:
Nothing is deleted automatically. Your inventory stays exactly where it was.
Nothing is hidden or archived. All items remain visible and counted in your totals.
Your reports continue to work. Annual Report (if you're on Premium), CSV exports, and analytics all run against your existing data unchanged.
You're not charged anything extra. Hitting the cap doesn't trigger a price change; it just stops new items from being added until you decide what to do.
In other words, you don't have to act immediately. The cap is a gentle stop, not a panic.
If a downgrade is what got you here
If you recently downgraded from Pro or Premium to a lower tier with a smaller item cap and your current item count exceeds the new tier's limit, you're in a slightly different state:
All of your existing inventory remains in your account — downgrading doesn't delete anything you'd already recorded.
You won't be able to add new items until your count is below the new tier's cap, either by removing items or by upgrading back up.
Where to go next
The three plans compared: The full side-by-side comparison of Starter, Pro, and Premium.
Upgrading your subscription: The walk-through for moving up a tier.
Downgrading your subscription: The walk-through for moving down a tier.
Deleting a buy transaction: What happens when you delete a BUY — items removed with it.
How to record a sale: Recording a SELL moves items to sold status and frees up the headroom they were using.
I've hit my transaction limit: The sibling article for the transaction cap.