Ok so I have decided to post this long piece that I wrote up a while back and never posted. I wrote it to crystallize my thoughts and also in the hope that it would help someone in the future that was going through what I was experiencing.
Please note that this is my personal experience and yours may be different so do not take this as the absolute gospel. Do your own research but hopefully this might assist some so here goes
Cointracking my experience with this software.
Guys I have decided to post this here and elsewhere in an effort to assist others who may travel along the same tortuous path as I have been on trying to get the Cointracking.info software to perform accurately and reliably.
Cointracking.info is potentially an absolutely superb program for the crypto investor BUT it has a host of annoying bugs and sometimes inexplicable and ultra annoying problems with how it handles some of the computations. I have learnt the long hard drawn out way that the Cointracking backup support is unbelievably poor, painfully slow and overall not at all very helpful. This sadly lets the Cointracking.info organisation down severely. The one person that I have been dealing with either does not care about servicing the customer who has paid to use the Cointracking program or he does not have a clue about the finer points of the program and its computations. When he does deem it prudent to reply to one of the many Tickets that I have been forced to raise he just keeps cutting and pasting canned answers that do not really address the particular problem that I have requested assistance on. This is despite the screenshots and supporting files that I have included in the Ticket. I feel that he immediately adopts the attitude that the Cointracking program is infallible and that anyone questioning it does not know what they are talking about. This is the 180* wrong approach right from the start and is destined to end in failure with frustrated people on both sides.
Having said that the most important part of the process is to make sure the data that is loaded into the web based program is 100% correct. You will need to check and double triple check and compare the various results of the individual reports against each other plus any other records that you may have such as notes and or the actual raw data from the exchanges that you may have downloaded. This is so critical to achieving accurate end results in the reports and I cannot stress this enough. The current situation is that Cointracking.info is very time consuming and demands a lot of manual tweaking and checking to ever hope to get accurate results. Hopefully this will improve with time as the many bugs are sorted and rectified, hopefully.
The easiest way to import is by API but Coinspot does not have a working API at the moment so the .csv import has to be used which is nowhere as good or as detailed in the information contained as when using an API.
I describe what I did personally to try and get accurate end results using .csv imports from Coinspot and API imports from Cryptopia. I also had to add in manual transactions to and from offline wallets etc. This is my experience and your experience may differ so please keep this in mind.
So the process goes like this.
Download your OrderHistory.csv from Coinspot and then load it up into the online converter ‘Coinspot to Cointracking converter’.
https://cr.ypto.co/cs2ct/ This nifty little tool will save you a lot of heartbreak if you are using Coinspot and converts the raw Coinspot data into a suitable template that Cointracking can recognise and import. (Thanks go to the developer of this tool and the provision of it’s use for others)
(Be sure to follow the instructions on the converter webpage).
Next attempt to import the resultant report into your Cointracking account and you may have a whole lot of problems and warning messages that the transaction dates cannot be recognised and therefore this record will not be fully imported. You will just have to persevere with it as it is too involved to try and fully explain everything I tried to get it to work. Best advice is to keep trying different date formats and tweaking some of the existing standard date formulas including the English (US) date formats. Try and make these date format changes in the raw data .csv from Coinspot and or in the saved report from the Converter process. If you are unfamiliar with Excel or Libre Calc then let Google be your best friend as there is help available but you have to find it. The very short description of how to try this is to highlight the column that you can see has the date information in by clicking on the Column letter at the top then right click and select Date then you may have to try different date formats until you find one that Cointracking will accept. Sometimes the problem can be that some or all of the date strings have been imported / converted with
an apostrophe ‘ preceding the date string and these strings will not convert to an acceptable date format for Cointracking to accept when importing. So after a lot of trial and error and angst I discovered that the way to remove these apostrophes ‘ from the first character of the date string is to do the following. Click on the Column header letter usually A that obviously contains the string of numbers that looks like a date format and once the column is highlighted go to the Toolbar above and click on ‘Data’ in Libre Office Calc then select ‘Text to Column’ in the dropdown. This will then present you with some choices so then select ‘Separated By’ and ‘Other’ then insert ‘ into the little white box to the right. Next hit the OK button and just like magic the apostrophes ‘ will disappear and your date strings will then be able to be easily converted into any date format you desire. Once this is done Cointracking should accept the Import by .csv or Excel import if that is your file type. Good luck but do keep trying. This process is a little different if you are using Excel but essentially it is to add a new column to the right of the date column then select all the dates in the other original column then Copy and Paste into the first cell of the newly created blank column by selecting 123 from the Paste Options and this will remove the apostrophes ‘ for you as above and the selection of any Date format will then be possible.
Once the data import has finally been accepted into Cointracking and it shows without any error flags you will need to Recalculate.
When you see the red box to Recalculate being offered, click this box to commence the recalculation. If the Recalculate box is not presented then you can click on Enter Coins then select Overview and Manual Import in the dropdown box and this will cause the Recalcute box to appear provided that recalculation is required.
At this point your basic raw data is visible in the Cointracking software and that is where the real work starts.
Next have a look around the data and various reports and see if it makes sense. Then open the Enter Coins page select Edit for any coin then the Edit Transaction box will open. Select Edit Asset within the Trade Value box if it is offered otherwise the two ‘Value’ boxes will already have been opened and will be visible. Then check that the AUD value of the trade is the same on both sides of the trade ie; Purchase Value and Sale Value. My experience shows that the correct AUD amount will have populated to the Sale Value side only and there will be another incorrect AUD amount showing in the Purchase Value side that has been inserted by Cointracking? The Sale Value amount should be correct as it appears to be drawn from the supplied Coinspot OrderHistory.csv records of the transaction. Next copy the correct AUD amount over from the Sale Value box and paste it over the incorrect amount showing in the Purchase Value side so that both boxes are identical then click Update.
Unfortunately this will have to be done for each and every Trade entry that is loaded. Leave the Recalculate red box until you have fixed a batch lot of coin entries and this will then recalculate all your changes in one go.
The OrderHistory.csv import only loads the Trades and not the Deposits, Withdrawals, Sends or Receives and generally speaking does not include airdropped bonus or forked coins(unless the exchange has supported the fork or airdrop).
All of these Trades, Deposits, Withdrawals, Sends or Receives have to be manually added into the Cointracking software. You can download .csv reports from Coinspot of the AUD Deposits that were made into your Coinspot account through your bank or finance institution. These will have to be manually entered for the time being until the API is fixed and usable. Coinspot seem to have been sitting on this API repair for more than 6 months for whatever reason so don’t hold your breath.
The only way to find the other information is unfortunately to open every individual coin Wallet in your Coinspot account that you remember or suspect that there have been some transactions during the year such as Send or Receive including bonus forked airdropped coins if applicable. This is very much a hit or miss scenario and could lead to non discovery and or non declaration of what could be a substantial transaction so be diligent.
An important point to remember is that all airdropped bonus coins from a fork or bonus scheme need to be designated as a Gift/Tip when inputting the information on the Enter Coins page in Cointracking. In my case I have chosen to assign a nil value at the point of receiving them as in a lot of cases there is no immediate ready market for these fledgling coins to arrive at an honest and realistic value. I will ultimately report them in the Tax Report and then pay Capital Gains tax on the increase above my cost base of zero.(Check your local country requirements as tax laws differ vastly around the world and I am awaiting confirmation from my accountant and the ATO in Australia that this is the correct approach).
At anytime after data input and after having updated via the red box that pops up offering to Recalculate you can check the status of each entry by opening the Trade Prices report and viewing the ‘Spread ‘ column. This ‘Spread’ column will show 0.00% when both sides of each of the individual trades are equal. (Caution that they could both be equal but also that they could both be wrong yet still equal if the wrong information is input).
If there are any numbers at all showing in the ‘Spread’ column as a percentage then that means that both sides of the trade (Sale and Purchase Values) are not the same and should be investigated by going back to the Enter Coins page and selecting the particular trade as identified in the ‘Spread’ column of the Trade Prices report. Then to correct this you will have to go through the same editing as discussed above.
Recheck back in this Trade Prices Report to see that your progress of eliminating all the non equal values is proceeding to completion. What you want to achieve is that the percentage is showing 0.00% against all entries then you will know that both Value amounts are equal which is how you want it to be.
AUD or fiat purchases of crypto are way less problematic than crypto to crypto trades but they still need a lot of work to achieve accurate results in the various reports.
With crypto to crypto trades such as those that are imported via an active API from Cryptopia there are even more steps in the process to achieve results that are accurate enough that you could submit to the ATO for taxation purposes.
When the import from Cryptopia and probably many other similar exchanges are done these exchanges do not convert or show the crypto trades with a fiat AUD equivalent alongside.
So Cointracking generates it’s own conversion in AUD or chosen fiat currency and populates the Sale and Purchase Value boxes previously talked about with their own Cointracking amounts apparently based on historical sales data. These are invariably very wrong and are always different on both sides of the trade which is just weird to my thinking. So after the import from Cryptopia run the Recalucate red box process and reopen the Trade Prices Report looking at the ‘Spread’ column again and you will see which entries are showing as not equal by the entry showing the % with a number in front which is the percentage of differentiation between the two uneven cost basis Values of Sale and Purchase as discussed earlier. These are the entries that one must now concentrate on and individually edit these incorrect value that are showing. But be aware that there is an extra step to be added into the crypto to crypto trades that have no exchange generated fiat value included in the API import.
So the next step then is to open the ‘Cointracking Coin Price Calculator’ in another window and the Enter Coins page in the other window. Select the particular trade in the Enter Coins page that has Cointracking supplied fiat values is wrongly inserted. Then copy the figure showing in ‘Amount’ and then paste this figure into the Coin Price Calculator in the ‘Amount’ box then select your crypto currency that you are converting so say ETH then the fiat type you are converting to so in this case AUD and finally the transaction date for the value on that day.
Then hit enter to see the result of the conversion on the right hand side of the Coin Price Calculator window. Next step is to copy this resultant AUD figure and go back to the Enter Coins page in which the Edit box should still be open and paste this figure into both sides of the trade ie Sale Value and Purchase Value then hit ‘Update’. Doing it this way one has to accept the accuracy of this Cointracking Coin Price Calculator conversion data as being right but the alternative way of achieving this result is not worth contemplating especially if you have a lot of trades to edit.
This will have to be done for each and every entry that you have imported. This can be a very long and arduous task unfortunately but it has to be done in an effort to achieve accurate results.
The API imports generally include within the transaction values the deposit and withdrawal transactions unlike the earlier .csv reports downloaded from Coinspot which don’t include this data and then have to be input as a separate process. Also if airdropped coins have been supported by the particular exchange and have been received into your account due to holding the qualifying coin on the particular exchange then unlike the .csv imports of Coinspot and other similar exchanges these should be shown in the Deposit part of the transactions imported. Withdrawals such as sending to your offline wallet for safety are also generally included in the API import as well. Note that you will have to create a manual corresponding Deposit entry for each of the withdrawal transactions from the exchange into your chosen wallets that match your exchange withdrawals. If you are able to use the Cointracking Wallet import interface then you will not have to do this manually.
Good luck to alll
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