Yes, yes, yes!!! You need to pay your taxes or the government will come and get you, put you in jail and throw away the key! – Just kidding (I think). But in all seriousness, when I approached this for the first time, my head nearly exploded. So much so that I started to put it on the back burner hoping it would go away……. I can tell you, it doesn’t!
The thought of working out the profit on 100,000’s of the sub penny trades where I’d been using bots to scalp 0.75% on 5x leverage gave me nightmares. In addition to that, I became a little bit obsessed with yield farming, buying early launch coins on Binance Smart Chain, creating LP’s, splitting LPs, staking, unstaking and all of the rest that comes with Defi & Play-to-Earn. My latest obsession is IoT mining with projects like SCPrime, PlanetWatch, MXC, Helium (I know, I know, I’m a little late! Blame it on Nebra!) and a bunch of other projects that are starting to emerge.
I decided to do something about the tax situation and I took a look at a number of different tools that promise to offer to simplify the whole process, but at what cost?
I tested Koinly, CryptoTax Calculator, CoinTracker and Coin Tracking
In summary, Coin Tracking won for me! (there’s a 10% discount for you if you sign up here). Why?
- It gave me everything I needed at the right price point.
- It covers pretty much every single exchange, wallet and blockchain either by entering your public address, connecting to your exchange with an API or CSV uploads.
- It has far superior information when it comes to newly launched coins and their prices.
- The search functionality and the ability to bulk edit transactions of a certain type cut down on the hours it could take to manually review each transaction
- The tax report functionality is amazing. It covers every country and reporting method and you have options to export to third party products (TurboTax etc).
- I wasn’t limited to expensive custom plans for having more than 100,000 transactions.
Their plans range from Free to Unlimited and the Unlimited plan doesn’t cap you at a number of transactions. This works out far cheaper if you have more transactions than Koinly where their top tier covers 10,000 transactions and every additional 1000 transaction costs an extra $10. This can get extremely pricey extremely quickly
The downside?
Well, first of all the Binance API doesn’t support “convert dust to BNB”. This means you have the pull the years data from Binance and upload by .csv. All the instructions are on the site to walk you through that process.
Disclaimer - Be prepared though! Before you import the dust .csv, it imports the pre-dust amount in to the dashboard. This adds insult to injury as I came to realise that the 20 AXS I swapped for less that $20 in BNB is now worth $1200!!
Secondly, the interface isn’t very intuitive. It’s not as pleasant on the eye as some of the others but if you can get past that and really understand the value the platform provides, then this is a really small downside!
You can sign up for free plans or trials with all of these providers to get an idea which one suits you best and I’ve provided the links to each platform below.
- Cointracking.info – 10% off using this link
- Koinly - $20 off any plan using this link
- CryptoTaxCalculator – no referral so no bonus for you!
- Cointracker.io - $10 off any plan using this link
I plan to review each of these tools in more depth in the coming weeks and I’ll publish additional Medium articles for each tool but If you have any suggestions on alternative tools for me to review, please leave a comment and I’ll take a look.
DISCLAIMER
This is not financial advice, I’m not a financial advisor or accountant or tax professional. This is my experience of software tools that have helped me get my tax calculations in order with (relatively) minimal effort.
I do use referral links in this guide. Using these supports future articles so if you found this article useful and you want to check out the tools I’ve covered, please use them. I’ll also call out where you get a discount – win-win right?
Affiliate Links
All of the below AND more benefits for you can also be found here: https://linktr.ee/RealisticCrypto
Trading Platforms
Mudrex - $25 for you to spend on Mudrex at signup
TradingView - $30 off a paid plan
3Commas - 10% discount on your first subscription
Cryptohopper – no discounts on this one!
Crypto Tax Software
Cointracking.info – 10% off using this link
Koinly - $20 off any plan using this link
CryptoTaxCalculator – no referral so no bonus for you!
Cointracker.io - $10 off any plan using this link
UK Specific
Top Cashback - Free cashback on purchases - £10 sign up bonus
Quidco – Free cashback on purchases - additional £5 on your first confirmed cashback
Freetrade – Free share worth between £3 & £200 when you fund your account
