# Adding a manual asset

> Anything that cannot be connected goes in by hand: property, metals, a business stake, a loan. How valuations work, when Gylder prices something for you, and when it deliberately does not.

Not everything can be connected. Manual entries cover the rest: property, precious metals,
commodities, a stake in a business, cash held outside a bank, and debts including mortgages,
personal loans and DUO student loans.

You give an entry a value. Gylder tracks it from there, and updates it automatically only in the
specific cases described below.

## Adding one

Choose the type first, because it decides what else you are asked for. A property asks for a
current estimated market value. Precious metals additionally accept a weight. A business stake asks
for an estimated value, and is labelled as an estimate throughout, because that is what it is.

Everything is held in euro.

## Valuations are a history, not a single number

This is the part that changes how the rest of the app behaves, and it is worth understanding early.

When you update an entry's value, you are not overwriting the old one. You are adding a **dated
valuation** to a list. The entry keeps every valuation you have ever given it, each attached to the
date it applied.

That is what lets your net worth chart be truthful about the past. A house you valued at €400,000
in 2024 and €450,000 today shows as €400,000 on the 2024 part of your chart, not €450,000
backdated. Overwriting would silently rewrite your history to look like you were always richer.

You can view and edit the full valuation history from the entry, add a valuation for a past date,
and correct one you entered wrongly.

## When Gylder prices something for you

Some manual entries can be priced automatically, and some cannot. The distinction is whether Gylder
can convert what you hold onto a unit it has a market price for.

**Give a metal a weight and a unit** (grams or troy ounces) and it is priced daily from the market,
so it moves without you touching it.

**Leave the unit off and Gylder uses your own valuation instead.** This is deliberate, and it
matters. "35 gold bars" is not 35 troy ounces, and a bar can be any size. Rather than guess a
conversion and produce a confident wrong number, Gylder falls back to the value you entered. If you
want a metal holding to track the market, give it a weight in a real unit.

There is also a **Use market price** action when entering a valuation, which fills in the central
price for the date you have chosen. Useful for backfilling a past valuation without looking the
price up yourself.

Property, business stakes and anything else with no market price stay exactly where you put them
until you change them.

## Gylder does not guess, and does not project

An entry you have not updated in a while keeps its last value and is flagged as **not updated in N
days**. It is not quietly grown by an assumed rate.

Where a projection needs an assumption, such as expected growth on a property, the field starts at
zero and stays there unless you fill it in. Gylder does not suggest a rate. A default of 3% would
be a forecast presented as a setting, and the flat line a zero produces is an honest statement that
nothing is being predicted.

## What manual entries do not do

A manual entry has no transaction history, only the valuations you typed. That has one visible
consequence: entries valued this way are left out of the contribution-based return and risk
figures on the investments dashboard, rather than being given invented cashflows.

So a portfolio with many manual holdings will show risk measures covering less than all of it. The
alternative would be inventing a purchase you never made, which would make
[cost basis](/concepts/cost-basis) and every return figure meaningless.

Metals and anything else Gylder prices centrally are the exception: they have a genuine daily price
series, so they behave like a priced holding for anything that only needs a value over time.

## Debts

Debts work the same way, entered as what you owe. Repayments reduce the balance over time, so your
net worth follows your real position rather than the amount you originally borrowed.

Mortgages have their own flow rather than being a simple manual entry, because a Dutch mortgage is
usually several parts with different rates, terms and tax treatment. Start from
[the property](/guides/adding-a-property) and
[attach the mortgage to it](/guides/tracking-a-mortgage).