The record identifying the specific bars allocated to a counterparty by serial number, weight, fineness, producer and location. It is issued against metal that already exists and has already been set aside — which separates it from a contract, or from an invoice written on a nominal quantity. It evidences title to those bars, not a claim for their value. Every later event in the holding — release, partial delivery, transfer of title, buyback — is written back to it, so the record and the vault operator’s own register can be read against each other at any moment.
What the record carries, field by field
| Field | What it states | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|
| Serial number | The refiner’s unique number for the bar, stamped at production | The join key. Every other fact about the bar — origin, assay, weight, location — is retrieved through it |
| Producer | The refinery that cast or minted the bar, by its registered mark. Heraeus Precious Metals and Argor-Heraeus SA are refinery origin; the seller is not the refiner | Fixes origin and the applicable production standard, and identifies which refiner’s records the bar can be checked against |
| Gross weight | The weighed gross weight in troy ounces | The physical bar, not the format it was bought under |
| Assay / fineness | The measured fineness, to the precision the weight list uses | Fine content is the product of gross weight and assay; a fineness at the wrong precision makes fine weight unreproducible |
| Fine weight | Gross weight multiplied by assay, rounded by the market convention | The figure that governs value, buyback and any onward sale |
| Location | The vault where the bar physically sits — Brink’s Hong Kong or Brink’s Singapore | Placement is a fact about the metal, and it determines the jurisdiction the holding is exposed to |
| Counterparty | The named holder, and the dedicated client sub-account the bars sit in | An allocation with no named holder is inventory |
Weight is where records fail, and the market convention explains why. Under the LBMA Good Delivery rules a large gold bar contains between 350 and 430 fine troy ounces; gross weight is expressed in troy ounces in multiples of 0.025, rounded down, converted where necessary at the standard factor of 1 troy ounce = 0.0311034768 kg; minimum acceptable fineness is 995.0 parts per thousand, and the assay appears on the weight list to four significant figures. The rules also state which number wins: where the refiner’s weight differs from the weight determined at the vault, the vault’s figure is the one recorded. Nothing stamped on the bar overrides it — the LBMA in fact discourages weight stamps, because handling and sampling drive the marked weight and the weight-list weight apart over a bar’s life.
A 1 kg gold bar is produced to an exact nominal weight and its line is therefore simple. A Good Delivery large bar has no nominal. An allocation record that states 400 oz and 999.9 for such a bar has not recorded a bar at all; it has copied a catalogue entry, and the holder is left with a document that describes nothing in the vault.
Serial numbers are more structured than they look. For Good Delivery bars the number runs to no more than eleven digits or characters, uses Roman lettering only, and since January 2019 carries the month and year of production in MMYY form, either as a separate stamp or as the first four digits. Marks are pressure-stamped or dot-matrix punched — laser engraving is not permitted — at a minimum character height of 12 mm, so that the number on the record can be read off the metal by anyone standing in front of it.
Who produces the record, and at which point
- Instruction and price fixation. The counterparty issues a gold purchase instruction; the price is fixed against the seller’s executable quote for a defined window; a pro forma invoice for the advance payment follows. No bars are named at this stage, and no allocation record can exist.
- Advance received. The advance arrives against a single order reference, which binds quote, payment, allocation and every document that follows to one instruction. Without it an incoming payment cannot be posted against the order.
- Allocation. Whole bars are set aside from refinery-origin stock and removed from the seller’s own trading stock. Whole bars only: splitting a bar destroys the serial identity the record is built on.
- Vault placement. Brink’s takes possession and issues its receipt; the bars enter the dedicated client sub-account, segregated from the seller’s own stock and from other counterparties’ metal, not used and not pledged. The placement confirmation is the operator’s own statement that the metal is where the record says it is.
- Issue. The commercial invoice is raised on the actual allocated bars — the only document in the set that is an invoice in the strict sense — and the allocation record lists them. Both carry identical serials and identical weights, alongside the confirmation of title to the bars.
- Maintenance. Release, partial delivery, transfer of title to another verified counterparty, and buyback each produce a reissued record. The document moves when the metal moves, not on a reporting calendar.
The record is the same document whichever way the purchase was funded. Where funds originate in digital assets, a licensed platform converts them and the seller is settled in fiat against the order reference; the purchase funded from digital assets produces the identical allocation, and nothing about the funding route appears on the record.
What it proves, and what it does not
It evidences ownership of identified property. A holder of numbered, segregated bars owns those bars; a holder of a stated quantity owns a claim against whoever wrote the statement, and ranks with that party’s other creditors if the party fails. The record is the document that keeps a counterparty on the first side of that line, and its wording does that work as much as the metal does.
It does not make the seller a custodian. Custody sits with Brink’s under the storage contract; the seller coordinates placement, documents it, and operates the register. The counterparty is named in the vault register, and its bars sit in a dedicated client sub-account within the seller’s account at the operator — the counterparty holds no account of its own with the vault, and its metal is not part of the seller’s stock. The defined terms used here carry the meanings fixed in the glossary and the published terms and conditions.
It is not negotiable and not a bearer document. Rights attach to the named counterparty, not to whoever holds a copy; a lost file loses nothing. It is not a valuation, and it states no price.
How it is checked
Four surfaces must agree: the allocation record, the commercial invoice, the vault’s placement confirmation, and the operator’s own register. The test an auditor applies is short — take the serial numbers from the record and have them confirmed at the vault. Bar checking against the recorded serials and a holding certificate from the vault are available on request, and an inspection by an internal or external auditor is arranged on prior written notice.
That reconciliation is what converts the record from an assertion into evidence. A record that cannot be checked against an operator’s register is a statement by one party about its own conduct, which is the position a bullion-account holder is already in.
What changes it, and what that costs
The record itself is not separately priced; it is produced by the transaction. The events that alter it carry their own charges, and they are kept apart from each other on purpose. Storage is invoiced separately and is never taken out of an advance held against a purchase; unpaid storage is a receivable, and allocated bars are not sold to settle it. A transfer of title between two verified counterparties is a re-registration: the register is updated for a fixed administrative fee set by weight category, while settlement runs directly between the parties or through a licensed escrow. Release and onward delivery move whole bars, the remainder stays allocated, and a reissued record follows the release confirmation.
What goes wrong
- A nominal in place of a measurement. A catalogue weight and fineness on a variable-weight bar. The holder’s specification and the vault’s weight list describe different metal, and the discrepancy surfaces at buyback or audit, when it is expensive.
- Quantity without serials. A document stating an amount of gold held is not an allocation record. It is an unallocated position written in allocated language, and it converts an owner into a creditor.
- Drift after a partial release. The vault register updates, the holder’s copy does not, and the counterparty’s evidence contradicts the operator’s on the one point that matters.
- Issue before placement. A record produced before the bars are in the vault describes an intention. Until the placement confirmation exists there is nothing to reconcile it against.
- Precision mismatch. Fineness recorded to a different number of figures than the weight list uses, so fine weight cannot be reproduced from the record’s own numbers.
- No named holder. Bars identified but attributed to no one, or attributed only inside the seller’s system, are indistinguishable from stock.
Terms it is confused with
| Term | What it is | How it differs |
|---|---|---|
| Weight list | The market’s bar-level list accompanying a shipment into a vault: serial number, brand code, gross weight, assay, fine weight, month and year of manufacture, supplied as a machine-readable file | Describes the bars. Names no owner |
| Holdings statement | A periodic statement of what an account shows | Reports a figure at a date; an allocation record identifies property |
| Warehouse receipt | A document of title to goods held by a warehouseman, often transferable by delivery | Transfers with the paper; an allocation record does not |
| Proof of reserves | A published statement that an issuer holds assets against its obligations at a moment | Addresses an issuer’s aggregate position, not one holder’s bars |
| Attestation | An independent party’s report on what it observed at a point in time | Evidence about a process; narrower than an audit opinion, and not a record of title |
| Gold-backed token | A digital token whose holder has a contractual claim on the issuer | The claim ranks against the issuer; allocated bars sit outside the seller’s estate |
What the 2026 bar-tracking systems record, and what they leave to the allocation record
The infrastructure around the bar is being digitised on two sides at once, and neither side records ownership.
On the origin side, the LBMA’s Gold Bar Integrity database — built on distributed-ledger technology by aXedras — went live in January 2025, and from the start of 2026 every Good Delivery refiner uploads its data and assurance deliverables through it. Approved Assurance Providers began submitting into the platform in March 2026; voluntary cumulative country-of-origin reporting opened in April 2026 and becomes mandatory and monthly in 2027. Custodians are to be onboarded by December 2026 — reporting aggregated vault holdings, with bar-level custodian reporting stated only as an intent for 2027. Alongside it sits the accredited Security Feature, a bar passport applied at production and readable for the life of the bar, and a marking rule effective 1 January 2026 requiring stamps at least 10 mm from a bar’s edge on new bar designs. The Swiss refiners’ association launched its own transparency platform on 29 January 2026 on the same principle: it publishes where metal refined in Switzerland came from.
On the settlement side, Hong Kong’s central gold clearing and settlement system entered trial operation on 7 July 2026 under a government-owned clearing company, with a central ledger recording settlement activity, transfers and balances of participating banks. Its own published design is explicit: those balances are held and settled on an unallocated basis, commingled, with eligible settlement metal limited to bars of approximately 400 fine troy ounces. Commingling is what makes a clearing layer efficient, and it is the precise opposite of allocation.
So the direction of travel is that a bar’s identity, origin and assurance become independently checkable, while the question of who owns it stays documentary and bilateral. There is no central register of bullion ownership — no equivalent of a share register or a land registry — and nothing announced for 2027 creates one. The consequence for a counterparty’s file is the opposite of what the announcements suggest: as the surrounding data hardens, the allocation record carries more weight, not less, because it is the only document that binds a named holder to a numbered bar, and its serial numbers are the join key to everything else being built. A record without them, or with a catalogue nominal where a weighed figure belongs, reconciles against nothing — which is why the serials belong in the contract stage of a purchase, not in the paperwork that arrives after settlement.
Vault placement, the sub-account structure and the documents issued at each step are described on Allocated Gold Storage and Vault Placement.