Koinly Review 2023 — The Best Crypto Tax Software?

Satoshi
7 min readOct 6, 2022

Koinly is a software app that can handle your cryptocurrency tax reports used by crypto investors or their accountants. For those with large portfolios, it can process multiple data and manage across several cryptocurrency exchanges.

This review will tell you what Koinly features can match your needs regarding cryptocurrency transactions, such as creating tax reports, tracking your portfolio, and exchanging cryptos. Before we get started, here’s a useful review video for those that are completely new to this tax software;

About Koinly

Koinly was founded in 2018. It provides simple navigation for complex tax reporting and crypto portfolio tracking calculations. Generally, these generated tax reports can be exported to supported tax filings software such as TurboTax Online and TaxACT.

The app lets you choose from the multiple cost basis methods and then generate several tax reports:

  • Average Cost Basis (ACB)
  • First In First Out (FIFO)
  • Last In First Out (LIFO)
  • Highest In First Out (HIFO)
  • Average Cost
  • Share Pooling
  • Spec ID

With the huge expansion of the usage of cryptocurrency, apps are built to sustain and be able to make transactions. Koinly contributes to making cryptocurrency easy to use and accessible. The app’s crypto portfolio tracker would be able to:

1. Automatically track cryptocurrency across exchange accounts like Coinbase, Binance, and more.

2. Identify transferred funds as a single transaction within your exchange account or wallet.

3. Switch between investment mode and tax mode:

  • Investment mode — you can keep track of your original acquisitions when exchanging cryptos (e.g., BTC to ETH) where it wouldn’t be considered as gains
  • Tax mode — gains would be calculated when cryptos are exchanged for another

Koinly Cryptocurrency Tax Software Overview

Through Koinly’s features, other than tax reports, you can sync your wallet transactions in your app’s dashboard. As a result, your cryptocurrency exchanges and other transactions are consolidated, which makes it easy to prepare your tax reports and forms.

Tax-Loss Harvesting

Tax-loss harvesting involves offsetting your capital gains to save money when filing taxes. For example, you can sell securities and consider them lost assets, which you can apply against your capital gains.

Yet, you can get back these lost assets by purchasing similar assets, and Koinly records your capital gains and losses per asset. You’ll be able to track which coins you sold and the losses.

However, the app doesn’t have a standalone tool of a tax-loss harvesting calculator. It only offers its feature of putting your unrealized gains and losses on your dashboard.

Crypto Tax Reports

Koinly has a tax report tab where you can see the overview of your cryptocurrency activities, such as your capital gains and profit losses. Other tax reports can also be generated depending on the country and the applied tax laws.

Income Reports

Create income reports from sources such as Airdrops, Forks, Staking Rewards, DeFi, and other crypto savings accounts or income transactions.

Capital Gains and Margin Trading Summary

You can see your unrealized capital gains, margin trades, options, and futures. The app will provide a breakdown of long or short-term gains, assets you’ve sold, and the original cost.

Koinly can also detect margin and futures trading such as BitMEX and income transactions from lending or staking platforms such as Celsius, Compound, or Nexo.

Form 8949 And Schedule D

US taxpayers fill out Form 8949 for the Sales and Dispositions of Capital Assets needed for filing crypto taxes. Generally, Form Schedule D includes net capital gains and losses.

Other international tax reports are available and supported in over 20 countries, including:

  • Australia
  • Brazil
  • Canada
  • Denmark
  • Finland
  • France
  • Germany
  • Japan
  • Norway
  • South Korea
  • Spain
  • Sweden
  • United States

This involves changing currency figures or other additional tax reports asked or required from the following countries:

  • Form 8949 and Schedule D (USA)
  • HMRC Capital gains summary (UK)
  • K4 report (Sweden)
  • RF1159 (Norway)
  • Valuation Report (Switzerland)
  • Lomake 9 (Finland)
  • Schedule 3 (Canada)
  • ATO summary (Australia)
  • Formulaire 2086 (France)

End-of-Year Holdings

The app can provide end-of-year holdings, giving you outlines of your cryptocurrency holdings for every year.

Gifts, Donations, and Lost Assets

Outgoing transactions like gifts, donations, lost assets, and even stolen crypto can be tagged as capital loss and be generated into a formatted report.

Cryptocurrency Exchanges and Wallets

Koinly can support the following:

  • Over 350 cryptocurrency exchanges
  • Over 6000+ coins, more than 50 wallets
  • 10 other crypto services

These are synced automatically. Some of the popular exchanges are:

  • Binance
  • Coinbase
  • Crypto.com
  • FTX
  • Gate.io
  • Gemini
  • Kraken
  • KuCoin

Among the 50+ wallets supported by Koinly are the following:

  • BlockFi
  • Celsius
  • Exodus
  • Ledger
  • Nexo
  • Trezor
  • Trust Wallet
  • Yoroi

Import Crypto Wallet Data

You can connect your wallets through API keys to the app. While for BTC wallets, you can connect using x/y/zpub keys and your ETH tokens with a public address.

The app can also import NFTs from most EVM-based blockchains like the following:

  • ETH
  • BSC
  • FTM
  • AVAX
  • Poly
  • Cronos

However, there are NFTs that Koinly doesn’t support, so you must add them manually.

Once you have a new wallet on your Koinly account, the app can import all your trades and liquidities from the following platforms:

  • Uniswap
  • Sushiswap
  • Cream
  • Value
  • Balancer
  • PancakeSwap
  • DeFi

Cryptocurrency Tax Accountant

Even with the ease of using the tax software app, you may still be looking for an accountant. Koinly can provide a certified cryptocurrency tax accountant to deal with tax reports and requirements during the filing season.

Currently, Koinly has 2 CPAs from the US and 8 from Ireland. The onboarding process of a more certified accountant is still ongoing.

Portfolio Tracking

In your dashboard, you get an overview of your portfolio and total holding, which you can monitor the growth over time.

The app’s minimalist look lets you spot discrepancies and familiarize yourself based on the assigned colors, charts, and designs. Your actual ROI and invested fiat also appear here, and the breakdown of all your assets is on a pie chart.

For your income overview, you can get an overview of your mining, staking, lending, and other crypto income sources.

So, you can keep track of your portfolio in a universal pool shared across your wallets or monitor them individually.

Error Reconciliation

Generating tax reports in Koinly will help you look for errors and make the calculations accurate:

1. Spot missing transactions with the highlighted errors that make your balances result below zero.

2. With its double ledger system, the changes in the asset balances are backed by an entry for easy debugging.

3. Your API ensures that the data are correctly imported.

4. Skips duplicate transactions from API or the imported CSV files, so there’s no need to keep track of the imported files and the new ones.

Setting Up Your Koinly Account

To get started on importing your wallets on your Koinly account, follow these steps:

1. Sign Up

Sign up or sign in using Coinbase or Google account. But you can also sign up using your email, name, and password.

2. Connect Crypto Wallets

Once signed up, you can connect your crypto wallets, exchange accounts, and DeFi services. You’ll be able to have a free account within a few minutes since the app doesn’t use KYC requirements.

On adding a new wallet, look for their Wallets page and tap “Add Wallet.”

You can look for your wallet on the Exchange, Blockchains, Wallet, and Service. Generally, you can look for your wallet in the search box on the right side, along with the tabs.

3. Select On Importing Methods

After you find your wallet, importing methods will appear. Most of the cryptocurrency exchanges on Koinly have in them a Setup auto-sync option with their API keys that does the following:

  • Downloads transaction history
  • Automatically syncs imported data

You may also upload by clicking “Upload CSV files” if the setup auto-sync option is unavailable for that wallet or if you prefer importing such files.

4. Calculate Capital Gains

If the importing process is complete, which takes 15–20 minutes, Koinly will get down to the following:

  • Calculate your capital gains
  • Get the market prices
  • Match transfers across your wallets

These calculations may vary from country to country, and choose from multiple cost basis methods accordingly.

5. Export Tax Reports

After the calculations, start refreshing your page. Then you can go to tax reports to see your capital gains and income overview.

Then you can choose from several tax reports, such as the following:

  • Complete Tax Report
  • Transaction Report
  • Capital gains Report
  • Income Report
  • Expenses Report
  • Gifts, Donations & Lost Assets
  • End of Year Holdings Report
  • Turbotax Report
  • Localized Tax Reports

You can then export these reports in different formats such as CSV, excel, and pdf files.

Plans and Pricing

Koinly has plans and pricing available according to the features you want to use. The plans are paid per tax year.

The free account lets you have the essential features, such as:

  • 10,000 transactions
  • Unlimited wallet and exchange accounts
  • Portfolio tracking
  • Capital gains preview
  • DeFi, Margin trades, Futures
  • FIFO, LIFO, Average Cost, and more
  • Wallet-based cost tracking (Spec ID)
  • Avalanche Trades

Newbie

For $49, Newbie accounts would also get the essential features but for only 100 transactions, plus the following tax reports:

  • Form 8949, Schedule D
  • International tax reports
  • Comprehensive audit report
  • Export to TurboTax, TaxACT

HODLer

For $99, HODLer accounts would have the essential features plus the tax reports for 1000 transactions.

Trader

For $179, Trader accounts would have the essential features plus the tax reports for 3000 transactions.

Safety And Security

Aside from importing and automatically syncing your wallets using API keys, it also secures your transactions. The app encrypts the imported data and won’t store any of your payment details.

Customer Support

You can contact Koinly’s customer support via:

  • Live chat
  • Email (hello@koinly.io)
  • Email support from experts (for Trader account only)

In fact, Koinly has a 4.6 rating for reviews on Trustpilot, where complaints are mostly errors from import transactions. That’s an impressive score for software such as this!

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