Coin Tracking – The Best Way to Track Your Investments and Get Your Tax Right

When I bought my first coin, the first thing I wanted to do was see how I performed.  I wanted to measure my performance and I was assuming that exchanges have comprehensive reports similar to what stock brokers have and boy was I wrong!

Performance monitoring is much more difficult in the crypto space because of the different exchanges, multiple wallets and non-stop transactions.  To address the problem, I tried doing it manually on a spread sheet, just for me to have an overview of my investments.

It didn’t take long for me to realize how complex the process was and how it required a lot of work because you need to know the exact flat value at the time of the trade for you to be able to measure your performance.

This was how my tool-searching adventure began and luckily, I was able to find a couple of good ones:

• Altpocket
• Blockfolio
• Coin Stats
• CoinTracking

What I did was create an account for each of them and tried them out for a couple of weeks until I determined the best one among them.  After careful consideration, CoinTracking proved to be my top choice.

If you’re wondering why I chose CoinTracking, it was due to the following reasons:

• Ease of use
• A good reporting function
• Ability to back up your trades
• It has a web tool and mobile app
• One of its features is an automated import of your trades (and APIs for almost all important exchanges)
• It comes with a dashboard that provides portfolio and trades overview
• It also comes with an automated tax report
• Continued development and introduction of new features

The Cons

The tool comes in three types.  There’s the free, pro and unlimited version.  The pro version should be more than enough for the average user but if you really want to take advantage of the tool’s best features, you need to upgrade to the premium package which to tell you honestly, is a bit expensive.

Regardless of the price, the upgrade is worth every penny in my opinion because it lets you generate an automated tax report which saves you the money and trouble of hiring a tax consultant.

The free version is good until you reach your 200 th trade but I loved the tool so much that I upgraded from the free version eventually.

Premium Package Discount

You can get a 10% discount on all premium packages by using this link: Discount

Tips and Tricks

Though the tool comes with its own manual and is fairly easy to use, some of its functionalities can be a bit tricky so use these tips as a simple guide should you run into difficulties.

Streamlined structure

To understand how the tool works, documenting your steps is a good way to start.  Though the tool does everything almost automatically, making a couple of manual changes can help you get the most out of it.

One good example is adding the name of your wallet.  If you have LedgerNanoS or MyEtherWallet for example, the tool doesn’t allow you to automatically add them so for that to happen, you need to edit the added transaction atomically.

1. Go to Enter Coins → Overview & Manual Import
2. Then select Edit Transaction
3. Modify the “Exchange” field from “ETH Transaction” to the name of your wallet

Adding the right wallet name to transactions can be made much easier by labelling the automated import (Enter Coins → Wallet Imports).

The label will then be shown in the “Trade Group” field.  This step goes a long way because the “Exchange” field always shows “EHT Transaction” as its default value.  Having more than one EHT wallet could get confusing.

Using the “Balance by Exchange” report can then help you check of the balance for each wallet and exchange is accurate.

ICOs

Wiring ETH, BTC, or NEO to an ICO address is part of participating in ICOs.  The transaction is then imported to your CoinTracking account after. This transaction serves as good basis and modifying it can help you get the proper documentation.

1) Edit transaction (as described above after going to Coins → Overview & Manual Import

2) From “[OUT] General Withdrawal (Transfer)”, select “Trade (Exchange) instead

3) Add the amount and ICO currency.  It’s best to rename and add a comment after.  The ICO coin may not be recognized yet since it hasn’t been added in the database yet.  CoinTracking should show you its value after the coin has been added. This usually happens after hitting an exchange.