What a storage location is

A storage location records where a specific piece of metal is physically held — a depository account, an IRA custodian, a safe deposit box, or a safe at home. You set them up once in Settings, then assign items to them at purchase, during bulk import, or from the Holdings page later.

Locations are item-level. A single purchase can spawn ten coins, and you can leave half of them at the depository and put the other half in your safe deposit box. The app tracks them independently from the moment you assign them.

If everything you own lives in one place, you can still create a single location and assign everything to it — but the feature really earns its keep when items are split across multiple custodians. The Custody Statement, the Tax Report's IRA handling, and two of the Dashboard widgets all depend on locations to do anything useful.

Each location has a type, and the type isn't cosmetic. It tells the app how to treat the items inside, especially when you generate a Tax Report.

For items you hold personally — a home safe, a fireproof box, whatever your arrangement is. Treated as taxable like any non-IRA holding.

A non-bank precious-metals depository — Brink's, Loomis, Delaware Depository, IDS, and the like. Items here are still yours; they're just under professional custody. Treated as taxable.

A self-directed IRA holding physical metals at a custodian. This is the one type that changes the math: items in an IRA Account are excluded from your taxable totals on the Tax Report.

They're tax-deferred, so they don't belong in your short- or long-term capital gains figures. They surface separately in the Tax Report's IRA Activity section so you can still see how the account is performing.

A bank safe deposit box. Held under your name, not in any custodial sense. Treated as taxable.

Anything that doesn't fit the four above — a foreign vault, a co-owned arrangement, something you'd rather not characterize. Treated as taxable.

The only type that changes how the Tax Report calculates is IRA. The other four are organizational, but they're still worth setting accurately so the Custody Statement and the Dashboard widgets reflect reality.

Once you've created at least one location and assigned items to it, locations propagate through the app:

If no items have a location yet, the Dashboard widgets stay hidden, and the Custody Statement rolls everything under Unassigned. Nothing breaks; the feature just isn't doing any work for you until you start assigning.

This trips people up, so it's worth being explicit.

A portfolio is a logical container — "Personal," "Family Trust," "SEP-IRA" — used to keep separate sets of holdings from contaminating each other's totals.

A storage location is a physical answer to "where is this coin right now?" — a depository, an IRA custodian, a safe deposit box, a home safe.

They're independent. A single portfolio can hold items across multiple locations, and a single location can hold items from multiple portfolios. Most users end up using both: a Trust portfolio whose items live at a depository, a Personal portfolio split between a home safe and a safe deposit box, an IRA portfolio entirely at one custodian.

For most users, three or four locations cover everything:

You can edit locations later — name, institution, reference, notes — without affecting which items are assigned to them. You can also move items between locations from the Holdings page at any time.