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There are fundamental things most of know we have to do with our investments and crypto currency is no different. We should know how our assets are performing and understand our profit/losses. This guide demonstrates how to track cryptocurrency in my favorite stock market Android app (I know there are many out there). The process shouldn't be very different in your own favorite market tracking app but you may find cryptocurrency pair lookups might not work the same.
Overview
I'm going to give an example of how you might have tracked purchasing Bitcoin in Feb '21 and sold it in May '21 using My Stocks Portfolio on Android.
Disclaimer: This is NOT a sponsored article, I am not being reimbursed or benefiting from the developer of this app for writing this article. I take no responsibility for how you decide to use the information in this guide. Handling taxes involving Crypto is a complicated, evolving process, and there's a reason specialized software exists. I'm not promising an alternative solution here.
Considerations
Before getting started please take these items into consideration and decide if it's worth it for you to jump in:
- This is a tedious/time-consuming process if you do a LOT of trading and haven't documented any of it. If you get Staking rewards that will add to the time invested in keeping this accurate (I track those as DRIPs in the app, Dividend + Re-investment)
- Many Exchanges provide an export of your transactions and/or API that I imagine other portfolio apps can use to import transactions.
- This is really more for focusing on gains/losses and is likely insufficient on its own for tax documentation purposes.
Some things you should look for in a good portfolio app if you choose your own:
- Backup - can the app export (and import) a backup of some sort so that if your phone crashes you'll be able to restore?
- Portability - does the app export your data to a format another app could use? Is it a CSV file (good) or a proprietary ".db" file (bad)?
- Auditability - does the app provide a report or CSV export that you could potentially use for auditing purposes?
- Alerts - does the app provide a feature that alerts you to large market swings? My Stocks Portfolio limits you to 5 stocks/coins by default, requiring an upgrade to go unlimited.
Create a Portfolio
You'll use a portfolio to store your shares of cryptocurrency coins and cash. The thing to consider is: do you need multiple portfolios? I decided to separate my own by what is being held on my hardware wallet and what is stored on Exchange. Note that this setup is a little more complicated and I won't be covering that here.
Deposit Funds
At some point you had to deposit cash into an Exchange. If you're concerned about taxes you should be specific about when this happened.
For our sample portfolio I'm going to give an example of depositing an initial $500, click the "+" then select the "CASH" tab.
Here I've updated the amount and date then finished adding.
Track Your Transactions
Now we'll document our Bitcoin transaction from February. This time we'll click Add again but choose the "CRYPTO" tab. In My Stocks Portfolio this simply narrows down the query to Crypto pairs, which are usually (CoinTicker)-(Fiat), so "BTC-USD" for Bitcoin to US Dollar:
Clicking the pair you want will show you market price. Go ahead with "TRACK A TRANSACTION" and enter the details. For our example we're going to enter a purchase from Feb 28th, 2021 when BTC was around 43.5k. You'll find the app calculates the Total Cost ($457.017) and we'll enter a 5% fee of $21.762).
Now your portfolio shows your assets from today (May 12th, 2021 in this example), showing a 20% growth.
Now let's track a Sell. From the screen above click the BTC-USD asset then click the "+" to add a transaction. Let's sell half of our BTC (before Elon declares Tesla won't accept BTC any longer). We'll now show some Realized gains ($45.62) for our BTC, potential gains ($46.164), and current P/L ($91.784).
This process is certainly cumbersome, especially for tracking your past actions until you're 'current'. In the next section we'll briefly cover how to backup all of your work and hopefully create an artifact you could use to assist with completing taxes or at least covering some gaps unfilled by your exchanges.
Backup / Export for Auditing
Under Settings we'll find several options for dealing with importing/exporting portfolios. If your exchange supports it you should look into downloading their transaction logs, typically in CSV (comma separated values) format. I know COINBASE provides a function for it. I won't get into the details of you'd do that here but it would involve matching fields that the app can read to import.
The other option you'll see above is to Export CSV to External Storage, which should provide an option to save a generated CSV off to your phone's storage. If you can then (securely) send that document to your desktop it'll import to Excel or OpenOffice Calc looking similar to below:
Summary
This process of monitoring your portolio can be done in ANY app that supports lookups for Crypto pairs. This is just a framework for how you might do it in one example. The main point to drive home is having a centralized area to monitor all of assets can be extremely helpful. I have multiple exchanges added to different portfolios, including a separate portfolio that contains my holdings on wallets. This helps me better identify what my long term holds are doing versus my short term that I might want to sell off.
Sound off in the comments about your favorite app for tracking your assets!
