If Gold Silver Ledger has told you you've reached your transaction cap, it means the number of BUY and SELL entries recorded against your account has hit the limit for your current plan.
The cap is real — new transactions won't save 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 entries that don't represent real activity.
This article walks through what counts as a transaction, what each plan allows, and the two practical ways out.
What counts as a transaction
A transaction in Gold Silver Ledger is a single act of buying or selling, regardless of quantity or how many products it involved. The count cares about the event, not the units inside it.
A few clarifications:
One BUY of 100 Gold Eagles is one transaction. It creates 100 inventory items, but it counts as a single transaction.
One BUY of a hundred different products is also one transaction. A multi-line transaction (ten Eagles, fifteen Maples, twenty Silver Buffaloes, a Krugerrand, and a kilo bar all in one purchase) is one row in your transaction history and one count against the cap.
One SELL is one transaction, however many items are included in it.
Bulk Import rows each count as a separate transaction as they land. If a CSV imports fifty rows, that's fifty transactions added to the count. Bulk Import doesn't bundle them into a single transaction.
Deleted transactions don't count. Once a transaction is deleted, it's gone from the count along with everything else.
The Transactions page in the app is the canonical view of your count. Every row there is one entry against the cap.
The caps per plan
The headroom is different on each plan:
Starter: 10 transactions.
Pro: 250 transactions.
Premium: 2,000 transactions.
For background on how this fits alongside the other limits, see The three plans compared.
What that means in practice depends on your transaction pace. Ten transactions on Starter is enough for someone who buys a few times a year.
Two hundred and fifty on Pro suits most active stackers — that's the better part of a decade of monthly purchases. Two thousand on Premium is built to accommodate consolidating long histories from spreadsheets or stackers with high-frequency dealer relationships.
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 a twenty-fivefold increase in transaction allowance, Pro to Premium is another eightfold — 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 transaction headroom:
Pro unlocks Advanced Analytics, raises portfolios to 3, and raises inventory items to 1,000.
Premium unlocks Bulk CSV Upload and the Tax-ready Annual Report, raises portfolios to 10, and raises inventory items to 10,000.
If you've been close to the cap for a while and your stacking shows no sign of slowing, upgrading is usually the right call. The Bulk Import unlock at Premium is especially relevant if you're trying to bring in a year or more of older purchases at once — without it, you'd be entering each one through the in-app form anyway.
Option 2: Bring the count down
If you'd rather stay on your current plan, the count can be reduced by deleting transactions that don't represent real activity. The same constraint as elsewhere in the app applies: deletion is permanent, not an archive.
Deleted transactions can't be brought back, so this only makes sense for entries that genuinely shouldn't be in your records.
Important note on deletion side effects:
Deleting a BUY transaction also deletes the inventory items it created. That removes the BUY from your transaction count and the inventory items from your held-item count, but it also removes those items from your records permanently. Don't delete BUYs that represent metal you currently hold.
Deleting a SELL transaction restores its items to held status. The SELL itself comes off the transaction count, but the affected items return to your inventory. That's the opposite of what you usually want when you're trying to reduce counts.
For more on the deletion mechanics, see Deleting a buy transaction, Deleting a sell transaction, and I deleted a transaction by mistake — can I recover it? before doing anything irreversible.
For users on a real, active stacking history, reducing the count rarely makes sense — the records are the value of the app. Upgrading is almost always the cleaner path.
Reducing the count makes sense mainly when the cap was hit because of test data, duplicates, or imports that genuinely shouldn't have happened.
What happens at the cap
While your account is at the transaction cap:
You can't save new BUY or SELL transactions. The Add Purchase and Add Sale forms will tell you the cap has been reached and offer the upgrade or removal paths.
Existing transactions and inventory remain fully functional. Holdings, totals, analytics, and reports all continue to work normally.
You can still edit existing transactions as long as the edits don't require new transaction records.
You can still delete transactions, which is one of the paths to clear space.
You can still use everything else in the app — the cap affects new transactions only.
The cap is a soft wall against new activity entries, 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 transactions stay exactly where they were.
Nothing is hidden or archived. All entries remain visible.
Your reports continue to work. Annual Report (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 transactions from being added until you decide what to do.
There's no time pressure on the decision — the cap doesn't escalate into anything worse if you sit at it.
A note on Bulk Import and the cap
If you're a Premium user and were planning to bulk-import a long historical CSV, it's worth checking your headroom before the import.
The full read on how this interacts is in Bulk upload and your transaction limit — the short version is that the import respects the cap, so a CSV that would push you over only imports up to the cap and leaves the rest for later.
If you're hitting the cap because of a bulk import, the most useful next step is to either upgrade (Premium's 2,000 cap accommodates most historical imports comfortably) or split the import across batches and the year-over-year clearance that comes from any sales you record in the meantime.
If a downgrade got you here
If you recently moved from Premium to Pro or from Pro to Starter, and the new tier's cap is below your current transaction count, you're in a slightly different state:
All of your existing transactions remain in your account — downgrading doesn't delete anything you'd already recorded.
You won't be able to add new transactions until your count is below the new tier's cap, either by removing entries 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: What changes when you move down a tier.
Bulk upload and your transaction limit: How Bulk Import interacts with the cap.
Deleting a buy transaction: What happens when you delete a BUY — inventory removed with it.
Deleting a sell transaction: What happens when you delete a SELL — items restored to held.
I deleted a transaction by mistake — can I recover it?: Read before any deletion if you're not sure.
I've hit my inventory item limit: The sibling article for the inventory cap.