Saturday, November 24, 2018

Looking for crypto-tax assistance

I bought my first bitcoin in 2013 and have been trading since. I've asked my CPAs in previous years about reporting requirements and was told not to worry about it unless I'd seen sizeable gains. I hadn't...until 2017. I was out of the country so I have until Dec 15th to complete my 2017 US annual returns and over the last week I've realized how big this task actually is. My accountants have advised me that I need to provide a cost-basis for every trade (even crypto-to-crypto!). This obviously means that I need to start calculating everything back in 2013 and track everything up until today. They don't have experience with this work and since I use an international accounting firm, I don't want to subsidize their education by paying their hourly rate to figure this out. So I've decided to do my best to determine if I could figure out the cost-basis and capital gains myself. (and yes, I'm irritated with the firm - this feels like something I should be able to have them do for me, but that's another issue)

I've used coinbase for most (maybe all?) of my crypto-to-fiat and fiat-to-crypto transactions, and I use various (7-8?) crypto-to-crypto exchanges.

I started researching software to assist with this process and settled on cointracking.info (open to alternative suggestions if people have them). I've spent about 4 hours so far trying to input my trades, just for this single exchange, and can't seem to get the final result/balance to match what i currently have on coinbase.

My questions are as follows:

  1. While I'm going to try and figure this out the best I can over the next couple of weeks, are there services out there where (in the event i can't figure it out in time) I can submit CSV files to somebody to have them calculate all of this for me?
  2. Are there services where I can hire somebody to teach me how to use the software myself and walk me through this process?
  3. Does anyone have any general advice on how to tackle this seemingly gigantic problem (that many crypto traders must also be facing)?

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