Using Crypto Trader to File With Tax Act

Getting Started

It’s that time of year to file taxes. If you participated in crypto transactions last year you will need to be sure to file your tax activity accurately. Let’s take a look at how to do that in Tax Act. Reporting Crypto Trades on Your Taxes is easy with CryptoTrader.tax. It’s a great service for processing your transactions to generate the statements you need for filing your taxes accurately. You will need a Premier+ account in order to access the investment features and report capital gains and losses.

The IRS allows the taxpayer to enter summary amounts when providing a form 8949 or similar statement. Cryptotrader will allow you to download a form 8949 with this summary filled into the form and a csv file with the detailed transactions.  You will need to provide these summaries and detailed transactions with your return for one or more of 6 categories. Below we will go step by step through the process.

• From within your TaxAct return (Online or Desktop), click Federal . On smaller devices, click the menu icon in the upper left-hand corner, then select Federal.

• Click Investment Income in the Federal Quick Q&A Topics menu to expand the category and then click Gain or loss on the sale of investments
• Select Enter totals from a statement of transactions you will attach to your return

• Choose New Copy of Form 8949 Attachment (Desktop users click Add) to create a new copy of the attached statement or click Review to review a copy already created
• On the following screen, check the box, then click Continue

• Enter the name of the brokerage firm (e.g. TD Ameritrade, E*Trade) or software vendor (e.g. GainsKeeper, TradeLog, Form8949.com) who supplied you with the attachment and click Continue

You will now enter the summary totals based upon each reporting category:

• For each reporting category you need to report, click New Copy of Form 8949 Attachment (Desktop users click Add).
• To review previously entered Summary Total amounts, click Review.

• Select the reporting category for the totals you are entering and click Continue.
• Enter the summary totals for the reporting category previously select and click Continue
• The next screen will show how the information will be reported on Form 8949.  Click Continue to add another reporting category, click Continue twice more to instead add another Form 8949 Attachment Information Summary form.  If you have more than six brokerage statements, you would want to enter the six containing the most transactions by this method and then enter the transactions on the other statements via another method.

Once you have followed these steps to report your crypto gains and losses and completed the remaining parts of your return you will need to attach your detailed transactions. Cryptotrader provides these as a csv file.

I found that TaxAct requires that this attachment come in the form of a PDF. In order to provide this you can use either Microsoft Office or Google Sheets (File > Download as > PDF) to convert this csv file into a PDF file.