Sharesight — Making tax time easy

If you are anything like me you are probably still waiting to do your CGT calculations for tax time.

I use Commsec as my main broker and while they offer some level of EOFY reporting I generally have no choice but to kill a couple of weeknights sifting over my trade confirmations, an Excel workbook, and a few bottles of red before I have something I can give to my accountant.

Compounding this frustration is the difficulty in working out what parcel to sell to minimise CGT. This means I also have to manually track which parcels (or half-parcels) I have sold to ensure I don’t make errors in reporting in subsequent years. Sure, I could use FIFO, but could often cost thousands in additional tax if I get it wrong.

With all this in mind I decided to find a better solution this year, and I could not be happy with the results. My discovery is a perfect portfolio management tool named Sharesight.

Sharesight provides a central, online repository for all your portfolio data, keeping it backed-up and secure. You can access your portfolio data from anywhere and grant shared access to others. It’s the perfect solution for portfolios of all types: buy & hold investors, frequent traders, and SMSF trustees.

For my CGT report issues, this is how easy the process was:

1. Signed up for Sharesight.
2. Provided my Commsec login details allowing the platform to download ALL of my trade history from account inception (this was super cool!).
3. I had a few holdings I had inspecied from Etrade and a few parcels received via SPPs. Sharesight is smart enough to work out that my transaction history did not match my holdings and asked me to manually enter parcel details to make up the difference.
4. My holdings have been now been captured so I have a full view of my portfolio. From here I can run a CGT report for the last tax year, or and unrealised CGT report to provide an overview of my current position.
5. Now for the cool stuff: Sharesight has the awesome feature which allows you to nominate how you want to calculate CGT. You select from a list of options and once you generate reporting Sharesight remembers which parcels you have redeemed for future years. I was blown away by this!

1. Finally, you can generate your reporting as either a PDF or Excel workbook and then you are ready to hand it over to your accountant:

1. Sharesight will even deduct losses from short (<12 month) gains before applying the 50% CGT discount to longer term gains. JOB DONE.

This is only one of a number of excellent reports Sharesight produces for you. You also get access to the following:

In addition, they also provide other great functionality including:

• Automatic updates for share splits, dividend reinvestments and other corporate actions.
• Weekly updates of the performance of your account.
• Price alerts when a holding moves significantly.
• Ability to share your portfolio with whoever you want — great for sharing with your accountant or planner.
• Connection to Xero for seamless integration with your other financial accounts.
• Performance reportings to understand how you entire portfolio is tracking.

And it’s all cloud-based and secure!

I was honestly blown away by this tool when I first signed-up for it last week. I’ve never converted from a trial account to full service quicker. If you manage your holdings in a similar fashion as I do this will allow you to pretty much throw away all of your spreadsheets.

Pricing is competitive too:

For $25 p/m I was given back about 15 hours of my life usually devoted to manually calculating CGT, and as I delved into the feature set further I was amazed at what else I could do with the tool.

I think many investors on ASX Small Caps will find this as useful as I do, so I got in touch with Sharesights GM and told him I was going to give them a write-up. I also asked if he would be interested in providing us a discount for new sign-ups. He came back with a fantastic offer of 50% off the first year’s annual subscription.

I recommend that anyone who is interested in checking Sharesight out sign up for a free trial and if you like what you see you can upgrade to investor or expert plan using the following discount coupon:

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Right, so you’re probably asking, “what’s Steve getting out of this”. The answer is absolutely nothing. This is the sort of software I build in my day job and I know how hard it is to get functionality like this right; and they have got it very right. I truly am so impressed by the quality of this that I think everyone deserve to benefit from it.

You can find out more about Sharesight and start your trial here