Hi! I was trying to prepare my taxes using TaxCut software. I did that several years in row with different brokerage companies. they all provide consolidate statements where you can find 2 numbers-cost of basic and preceeds. you substract one from another and you get your PL for year(actually soft do it for you)))) this year i open acc in IB and make few thousands transactions during 2002. how do i calculate PL from their statements? i have no idea...entering each transaction will take forever.. on top of it they convert from stock and options to universal. now you got two statements. one for year for universal, but from old S you have to calculate month by month. right? they say you can download monthly statement into Excel... yeah right...and then what? it's all in A1 cell. how can i do a calculations? they say -you can download in MS Money. got error on their page all time. is anyone can tell me, how to get cost basics and preceeds from their monthly satements? Thank you!
OK This is ridiculous! I just found out that in the literally thousands of transactions on my 2002 tax statement I made a mistake. I am putting a $230 check to the Treasury in the mail as we speak. Unfortunately, I don't mark to market, and this year I will have ten times more transactions than last. Those of you who have any experience with this sort of thing: How much would a tax accountant charge me if I dumped IB statements containing say 10,000 transactions onto them and wanted to do nothing else except maybe sign my return? Or is there a computer program that can do it? I can't imagine I'm the only one in this situation.
there is some sort of excel macros,which can do this job. but -when i try it-it did not work properly. link to it somewhere on ET. i never report detailed list of tranactions-just write various-put total PL - comissions and that was it. i dont remember,how exactly i did calculate it last time,but it like i load all transactions in MS Access and by using SQL i sum it somehow...wait for me after this year-i usually do my taxes somewhere at begining of march and we will found a way to do it))))))))))))))) peace
I usually figure this out when I start at a new broker. Before I trade 2500 RT's! Just make it up based upon 1099 data and say "see attatched"? An accountant would charge you literally thousands to do the data entry. A $200 mistake is not the end of the world.
Look at these , maybe something you can use. http://americanware.netfirms.com/ http://www.twsautotrack.net/ http://www.armencomp.com/tradelog/tradelog.shtml
i've learned from my mistakes. i used to be a total mess with taxes. now i keep track of all my trades in excel spreadsheets.
Thanks for all the advice. By the way, I ran my numbers for 2002 again, and now it looks like I am paying about $40 too much, but I just can't find the mistake I made this time. However, at least I can look forward to an audit (if it should happen), because after all is said and done, I should get my $40 back. Plus, overpaying doesn't make me a felon, does it?