taxtool

taxtool is a tool that can help you file your crypto currency taxes. It's NOT an all-encompassing tool that will accompany throught your annual tax life cycle. Instead, its aim is to provide tools that do a single job well to help you and your accountant to file your taxes in time.

Data Acquisition

taxtool won't help you collect your data from exchanges. I had to go through that pain myself and I don't think I'm in a position to automate that yet. However, most exchanges allow you to download some sort of CSV file. Take that CSV file and try to map it onto the data format specified in the next section and your tax accountant will thank you.

Why Use taxtool?

There's many "better" tools on the internet. They allow you to create connections to exchanges and they do "all the hard work" to make filling taxes for crypto less complex. However, they all had problems that lead me to create this small set of tools. Some problems I encountered in other tools:

• They did not respect my privacy by e.g. uploading my tax data into a cloud.
• They did impose an opinionated approach towards calculating my tax return.
• They were so huge/complex/properietary that it was impossible for me or my tax accountant to verify that their calculations were correct.

That's why I ended building taxtool myself. My goal is to build a tool that supports an offline-first workflow. It doesn't impose opinion or juristicional-specific logic on the data. taxtools purpose is to deliver clean and factual data to financial authorities such that when they decided how they want to tax crypto, they can do so with my data. I want to build taxtool such that it remains a small and well-tested code base.

Data Format

taxtool works with .csv files. It mandates a canonical header structure:

type,location,asset,amount,exchanged_amount,exchanged_asset,datetime
buy,coinbase,ETH,1.5,1.5,EUR,2021-03-17T11:32:48.468Z
buy,coinbase,ETH,1.5,1.5,EUR,2021-03-17T11:32:48.468Z

taxtool uses this data structure as my accountant and I found this structure useful.

Properties

• type is either {"sell", "buy", "receive", "send"}.
• location is an arbitrary string referring to the exchange of the trade.
• asset is the ticker value of the asset, e.g. Ethereum is "ETH".
• amount is the amount of asset.
• exchanged_amount is the amount of exchanged_asset.
• exchanged_asset is the counter asset ticket of asset, e.g. Euro is "EUR".
• datetime is the ISO 8601 time the action executed. Note that ISO 8601 assumes UTC as its default time zone.

For type == "receive" or type == "send", exchanged_amount and exchanged_asset have to be empty.

Notes

• taxtool uses moneysafe to ensure precision for financial calculations.

Installation

$ npm i -g taxtool

Alternatively, you can clone this repo and use npx taxtool --help to run commands.

Usage

--help

$ taxtool --help

Using --parse, -p

The purpose of the --parse option is help you format your .csv file into the canonical taxtool format layed out a few sections above. Successfully parsing your .csv file will allow you to use further functionality of taxtool.

$ taxtool trades.csv --parse > parsed.csv
$ cat parsed.csv
> type,location,asset,amount,exchanged_amount,exchanged_asset,datetime
> buy,coinbase,ETH,1.5,1.5,EUR,2021-03-17T11:32:48.468Z
> ...

Using --formatdatetime, -f

Assuming you have a date of the format 28/05/2017 13:18:12 Z, then you can use the format string dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm:ss X according to date-fns's parse. Please don't forget including timezone information in your date strings as otherwise the data may be incorrectly shifted in relation to UTC.

trades.csv

> type,location,asset,amount,exchanged_amount,exchanged_asset,datetime
> buy,coinbase,ETH,1.5,1.5,EUR,17/03/2021 11:32:48

$ taxtool trades.csv --parse -f "dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm:ss"
> type,location,asset,amount,exchanged_amount,exchanged_asset,datetime
> buy,coinbase,ETH,1.5,1.5,EUR,2021-03-17T11:32:48.468Z
> ...

Please note that taxtool assumes all datetimes in your computer's time zone. It will, however, output ISO 8601 in the "UTC" timezone indicated by the "Z" suffix.

Using --checkduplicates, -d

There could be cases where your file includes two times the exact same trade. However, you want to make sure to remove all duplicates. By using -d, all trades of a file will be comparred with each other and in case of a duplicate an error will be thrown.

Using --order, -o

Trades can be sorted ascendingly by date using the --order parameter.

Using --calcbalance, -b

To check a document's plausibility or to see a year's revenue, --calcbalance can be used. As an string input it takes an asset name e.g. "ETH" and will then extend the output by adding five new colums:

1. {assetName}_BOUGHT: The number of assets bought until that date.
2. {assetName}_SOLD: The number of assets sold until that date.
3. {assetName}_RECEIVED: The number of assets received until that date (e.g. through a donation).
4. {assetName}_SENT: The number of assets sent until that date (e.g. to rent a server).
5. {assetName}_BALANCE: The balance of that asset after the transaction.

Upfront, all trades are sorted by their date time in an ascending order. --calcbalance can process multiple assets at once by separating them with a comma: --calcbalance "ETH,EUR"

trades.csv

type,location,asset,amount,exchanged_amount,exchanged_asset,datetime
buy,coinbase,ETH,1,1,EUR,2021-03-17T11:32:48.468Z
sell,coinbase,ETH,1,1,EUR,2021-03-17T12:32:48.468Z
sell,coinbase,EUR,1,1,ETH,2021-03-17T13:32:48.468Z
buy,coinbase,EUR,1,1,ETH,2021-03-17T14:32:48.468Z
receive,friend,ETH,1,,,2015-05-26T10:21:15.000Z
send,friend,ETH,1,,,2021-05-26T10:21:15.000Z

$ taxtool ./test/fixtures/testfile_balance.csv -p --calcbalance "ETH,EUR"
type,location,asset,amount,exchanged_amount,exchanged_asset,datetime,ETH_BOUGHT,ETH_SOLD,ETH_RECEIVED,ETH_SENT,ETH_BALANCE,EUR_BOUGHT,EUR_SOLD,EUR_RECEIVED,EUR_SENT,EUR_BALANCE
receive,friend,ETH,1.000000000000000000,,,2015-05-26T10:21:15.000Z,0.000000000000000000,0.000000000000000000,1.000000000000000000,0.000000000000000000,1.000000000000000000,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00,0.00
buy,coinbase,ETH,1.000000000000000000,1.00,EUR,2021-03-17T11:32:48.468Z,1.000000000000000000,0.000000000000000000,1.000000000000000000,0.000000000000000000,2.000000000000000000,0.00,1.00,0.00,0.00,-1.00
sell,coinbase,ETH,1.000000000000000000,1.00,EUR,2021-03-17T12:32:48.468Z,1.000000000000000000,1.000000000000000000,1.000000000000000000,0.000000000000000000,1.000000000000000000,1.00,1.00,0.00,0.00,0.00
sell,coinbase,EUR,1.00,1.000000000000000000,ETH,2021-03-17T13:32:48.468Z,2.000000000000000000,1.000000000000000000,1.000000000000000000,0.000000000000000000,2.000000000000000000,1.00,2.00,0.00,0.00,-1.00
buy,coinbase,EUR,1.00,1.000000000000000000,ETH,2021-03-17T14:32:48.468Z,2.000000000000000000,2.000000000000000000,1.000000000000000000,0.000000000000000000,1.000000000000000000,2.00,2.00,0.00,0.00,0.00
send,friend,ETH,1.000000000000000000,,,2021-05-26T10:21:15.000Z,2.000000000000000000,2.000000000000000000,1.000000000000000000,1.000000000000000000,0.000000000000000000,2.00,2.00,0.00,0.00,0.00

This allows us to conclude that on 2021-05-26T10:21:15.000Z (last action) the user:

• bought 2 ETH;
• sold 2 ETH;
• received 1 ETH
• sent 1 ETH

And that their balance is 0 ETH and 0 EUR.

Other Options

• --silence, -s supresses the standard outputs.
• --delimiter, -l can be used to define a preferred delimiter in the output file, e.g. taxtools -l ";" ...

Usage with Microsoft Excel

The output of taxtool is supposed to be compatible with tools like Microsoft Excel. However, note that these tools carry assumptions about a user's cultural environment. For example, in Germany the usage of . and , are swapped when comparred to e.g. English accounting. taxtools will always output numbers with high precision through the use of moneysafe.

To use an up-to-date version of Excel, however, it may be required to label some columns in the text-import wizard as "Text" and not "General". Additionally, the --delimiter, -l function can help.

Changelog

0.3.0

• (Breaking change) --calcbalance now adds ${NAME}_RECEIVED, ${NAME}_SENT and ${NAME}_BALANCE.
• (Breaking change) Two new values ("receive" and "send") in the data format were added for type.

0.2.0

• --calcbalance can now ingest multiple assets separated by a comma ,
• A new parameter boolean --order is introduced that sorts all trades in ascending order. --calcbalance now automatically orders before too.
• Balances with --calcbalance have been incorrect with reverse buys and sells being accounted to the type of action. It is now correct and explicitly tested.

0.1.0

• Add --silence, -s option
• Add --checkduplicate, -d option
• Add --delimiter, -l option
• Add --calcbalance, -b option

0.0.1

• Initial release

License

See LICENSE

Further reading

• https://plaintextaccounting.org/