Sharesight removes CGT report from it's free version, effective now! Which alternative software/site to use for Shares?

Daniel Plainview on 13/04/2023 - 12:13

Hi All,

I've been a longtime fan of Sharesight for tracking and basic reporting come tax time on a small number of ASX listed shares. However, in a pretty lame move which was effective on the SAME DAY they announced it, Sharesight removed one of the very few reports their free version ran - the CGT report. Meaning to access this you need to pay minimum $19/mth.

I've no issue with them wanting to make a $$$ but some type of a heads up, advanced warning might have been nice - and think that tax deductable aside $240/yr for running a very basic report a few times a year is a gross overpay.

So just wondering if there's any software or spreadsheets that folks can recommend for specifically keeping track of personal income tax preparation for Australian equities?

Don't mind if it's pay versions - depending on what it costs and the features etc.

Thanks in advance for a heads up on what you're using. :-)

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Comments

  • Kongzi on 13/04/2023 - 12:28

    FML… for real?

    • Daniel Plainview on 13/04/2023 - 12:42
      +2

      Yup, they've said nothing on their website but they sent an email out yesterday outlining the change & made it effective immediately.

      Is a bummer as the free version was very usable for basic investors - with the income report & CGT report you had your tax returns and portfolio planning pretty much covered. But without the CGT report I don't see much value in them at all.

      They clearly know the % of registered users who are on the free version and they're trying to move them over by knobbling the free version to even less than it was - migrating away will be a PITA as will have to reput in all one's trades etc - heck they could have ATLEAST waited until the end of the financial year to do this - so I think it's a shitty move especially as no warning at all given for this change.

      This attachment was sent with the email:

      https://sharesight-4658cdb15450.intercom-attachments-1.com/i…

  • legend30836 on 13/04/2023 - 13:18
    -6

    I recommend Topshare (https://topshare.com.au).
    This costs $299 (including 12 months end-of-day ASX data), and then $99/year for data after that.

    Topshare has a Taxation report, including full CGT analysis.
    Also includes CryptoCurrency support, if you're into that.

    Disclosure: I am the owner of this software, so feel free to take my recommendation with a grain of salt.

  • brendanm on 13/04/2023 - 13:19
    -4

    Imagine wanting to get paid for putting in work, the absolute gall.

    • salmon123 on 13/04/2023 - 13:25

      Lots of cloud software companies monetize their product by selling your data instead of charging a subscription. I don't know what's better.

      … or maybe they do both

    • Daniel Plainview on 13/04/2023 - 14:19
      +3

      Predictable daft reply - as addressed in OP I've zero issue with them being 'paid' - the issue is with removing whats essentially a critical feature with ZERO advance notice in the middle of a financial year.

      It's not quite a 'bait & switch' but it's not far off.

      • brendanm on 13/04/2023 - 16:09
        -6

        Lol bait and switch for something free. You are a "customer" paying $0, they don't owe you squat.

  • bazingaa on 13/04/2023 - 13:21
    +2

    I use Microsoft Excel

    • Mokr on 13/04/2023 - 14:38
      +1

      Make a YouTube video. Of it please.

  • Crow K on 13/04/2023 - 13:25

    Any spreadsheet software package [even Google Sheets for free] will handle this for you easily.

    One tab per investment, list date, quantity and price of each transaction. Maybe a brief description/reminder if something weird happened [return of capital].

  • salmon123 on 13/04/2023 - 13:27

    Could you get away with just paying $19 for the month that you want the report in? Say October after the FY ended.

    • salmon123 on 13/04/2023 - 13:30

      Scrap that - Just saw that all their plans are billed annually.

  • Look Up on 13/04/2023 - 13:42
    +1

    Good move

    If the product is free, you are the product

    If you are smart enough to manage a portfolio of shares that is too complex to manage in Excel AND you cannot afford $228/year, you are doing it wrong

    • Daniel Plainview on 13/04/2023 - 14:24
      +5

      It's not that it's 'too complex' to manage in Excel - as that is how I did it for many years - it's just that Sharesight was simpler.

      Likewise as a value proposition - it's more how much use do you get from it - as $228/yr is IMHO over the top if you just need a few reports a year and little else.

      Anyway with all due respect I'm not here to debate if $19/mth is a good price for Sharesight - rather if there's anything else folks recommend . :-)

      • salmon123 on 13/04/2023 - 14:52
        +1

        Anyway with all due respect I'm not here to debate if $19/mth is a good price for Sharesight

        It's terrible value. I never liked sharesights' pricing model - limit on number of securities/portfolios/views.

      • Look Up on 13/04/2023 - 21:08
        -4

        Simplicity and time saving now has a price

        4 months free / 33% discount for upgrading accounts is a nice sweetner as well

        Your rant about removing a "critical feature" is laughable

        If they gave you a notice period, you would have just run the CGT report immediately so there would be no incentive to upgrade

        The fact that the removal of the CGT report has forced you into a decision is a win/win for Sharesight

        If you leave, they save on the compute, storage and bandwidth costs to maintain your free account

        If you stay, they make some subscription revenue from you

        They are obviously not running a Google-style surveillance captalism model which is fantastic for everyone using the service

        As of this post, no one has recommend a better alternative than Excel which makes sense because Sharesight was designed to replace spreadsheet management of holdings

        Good luck with your search

  • JIMB0 on 13/04/2023 - 13:45

    I just let the accountant handle it.

    • Daniel Plainview on 13/04/2023 - 14:49
      +1

      Funny thing is yes, for $228 or so , you'd be well on the way to completely paying for your accountants entire charge - not just a basic CGT report for the year.

      Hence I think that while SS's charge is likely 'little' for day traders, if you're essentially executing a buy and hold strategy, with a little portfolio rebalancing - paying $228 for a simple report is a tad much.

  • deme on 13/04/2023 - 14:42
    +1

    Holy shit OP is correct:

    Hi Deme,
    Effectively immediately, the capital gains tax (CGT) report will now be exclusively available to all our Sharesight paid plans. This is part of our ongoing efforts to review our plans in keeping the product sustainable and allow us to continue to offer high-quality tools and reports to our customers.
    Want to experience a Sharesight paid plan? Save 4 months on any of the paid plans by upgrading to a yearly subscription.
    Save 4 months on a yearly paid plan
    For any questions, kindly reply to this message.

    Happy Investing!
    The Sharesight Team

  • Donaldhump on 13/04/2023 - 14:49

    excel spreadsheet, isn't that difficult.

    buy on one side, sell on the other, p/l columns, numbers of days between buy and sale, cgt exempt Y/N (if sale-buy date>365 then Y else N), to give new p/l column, cgt year (date of sale)
    total the p/l column for a given year, to give you overall gain or loss for a year.

    split a buy into multiple rows if only sell a portion of it.
    split a sell into multiple rows, if spans more than one buy.

    • Kongzi on 13/04/2023 - 15:56
      +1

      Sounds complex

    • deme on 13/04/2023 - 16:11
      +1

      What about dividend reinvestment?

      • Crow K on 13/04/2023 - 17:02
        +1

        What about dividend reinvestment, or in other words, using dividends to "buy" more shares? would this spreadsheet cover "buy"ing shares?

        yes.

        • deme on 13/04/2023 - 18:10

          would this spreadsheet

          Where did you get that from?

      • Donaldhump on 14/04/2023 - 10:04

        what about them?

        create a new order for the shares the dividends bought, how difficult is that.

        its pretty simple shit to create a spreadsheet

        • deme on 14/04/2023 - 10:15
          +1

          create a new order for the shares the dividends bought, how difficult is that.

          k, now you want to automate that part like Sharesight did

          • Donaldhump on 14/04/2023 - 11:27
            +1

            @deme: you want to pay me, like sharesight requires.

            if you can't type shit into a spreadsheet for 15 minutes at most 4 times a year, id hate to be your employer

            • deme on 14/04/2023 - 12:40
              +1

              @Donaldhump: I'd ask myself, why am I wasting time doing stuff that could easily be automated.

              • Donaldhump on 14/04/2023 - 13:59

                @deme: if its easy to automate it for free, why have you not done it?

                off the shelf package not customization, so eventually you hit limits.

                you are going around in a loop

                • deme on 14/04/2023 - 14:25

                  @Donaldhump:

                  if its easy to automate it for free, why have you not done it?

                  You said:

                  excel spreadsheet, isn't that difficult.

                  I said:

                  What about dividend reinvestment?

                  • Donaldhump on 14/04/2023 - 15:33

                    @deme: ok my excel spreadsheet requires manual entries of buy and sells, takes sfa all to enter new buys / sells

                    works out my tax cgt for me

                    requires manual trial and error to minimise cgt {fifo,lifo, set pairings}

                    so my response

                    "it isn't difficult to create a spreadsheet and manually enter data. If you do not have the skill to do so, pair for selfwealth, or get an accountant"

        • martinw4567 on 19/04/2023 - 20:21
          +1

          One issue with using spreadsheet relates to annual AMIT adjustments for ETFs. After a few years of annual adjustments and some intermingled buys and sells and it becomes difficult in a spreadsheet. Its Ok for ordinary share holdings without too many splits/mergers/buybacks etc…but ETF AMIT adjustments happen every year. I really depend on a solution like sharesight…don't know how a spreadsheet can handle it. I would love to find out !

          • Donaldhump on 20/04/2023 - 09:06

            @martinw4567: I have ETFS (mv*, vd*), but have never dealt with "AMITS" dont even know what they are

            end of the day aren't they just new buys?

            • Daniel Plainview on 20/04/2023 - 09:37

              @Donaldhump: You're not alone on this - I have struggled to find a good article that explains them. I think it's to do with the CGT within the ETF's themselves but everything online about them is either at too high a level or not explanatory.

              Sharesight is terrific but that they charge so much for their service - compared to equally complex software in other areas makes me think it's clearly a case of "You have enough money to buy shares, so we are going to charge a premium to match this."

              Reminds me of if you went to have your Toyota washed and it was $20 but if a guy in his BMW showed up it was $100. Sharesight is great software, they should be well paid for it - but with ETFs and share trading in general being very average Mum & Dad accessable - it's being charged at levels that don't reflect their ACTUAL usage of it i.e a few trades a year and then end of year tax reports.

              Different for day traders etc - where I think it's fair value - shame they don't have a 'user pays' model - where if you needed to use their services more, you paid more and vice versa.

              • Donaldhump on 20/04/2023 - 14:33

                @Daniel Plainview: i know the vanguard and ven eck etfs I own, even if I did not touch them have their own internal CGT as they sell assets in the fund. If this is what you mean.

                At that level I just hand to my accountant, as its convoluted as all f…

                I'd be surprised at the level of accuracy in peoples tax returns, I doubt any single tax return is 100%.

                my spreadsheet is at the level of me buying / selling. I pair them up and aggregate.

                • Daniel Plainview on 20/04/2023 - 15:27

                  @Donaldhump: Is funny as handing off to your accountant, is as established likely near the same price of having to pay to do it through even the cheapest Sharesight plan - plus the accountant does the rest of your return.

                  FWIW this chap does some good and well explained vids that explain the tax aspects and details of ETFs very well:
                  https://www.youtube.com/@MoneywithDan/videos

          • Crow K on 20/04/2023 - 15:57
            +1

            @martinw4567:

            1. Create a column called AMIT and each year type in the positive or negative figure for that year [AMITs can go either way, but the tax statement will tell you what it is].
            2. When you sell the ETFs, take up the AMIT total as a costbase adjustment on the CGT calc. If you're not selling an entire holding, apportion the AMIT (will require making an extra column, "AMIT per unit" I guess? 5 extra seconds work).
          • Daniel Plainview on 20/04/2023 - 16:08
            +1

            @martinw4567: There is a relatively obscure offering that is free and seems to have all the functionality within it - albeit it you need to mess around a tad more as it's put together by a single chap.

            https://stockprofit.au/

            I'm pretty surprised it doesn't have more of a following - that said i gave it a try and had to toss it in as couldn't get it working properly for me but I am sure the issue was with myself rather than the sheet.

      • Bystander on 19/04/2023 - 17:20

        In my spreadsheet each DRP event has a seperate row. There is still a "purchase" price as that is the foregone dividend payment.

        • deme on 19/04/2023 - 17:48

          Cool, did you automate it?

          • Bystander on 20/04/2023 - 19:55

            @deme: Sort of.
            When I enter in buy and sell dates it calculates how many days it was held for and what the CGT is.

  • Elppa8 on 14/04/2023 - 00:25
    +1

    I bought MarketEye before it became a subscription model, now about $130/yr. It works for Australian stocks. I mainly used it because I could download old Quicken files at the time when they changed their file format.

  • Will146 on 14/04/2023 - 09:26
    +1

    This is a real pain. I have noticed that they are offering a free 7 day trial now on there premium plans up to 20th April. I have just signed up for the free trial to generate a capital gains report & then cancel again. Not planning on buying / selling any more shares before end of tax year so will just keep the report for my accountant.

  • Donaldhump on 14/04/2023 - 11:50

    for what its worth sharesight has massive bugs (or had when i tried it 2 years ago or so)

    if you buy and sell shares a lot of the same shares day trading, it cant adjust the avg purchase price of shares you havent sold because it doesn't know how you intend to pair the buy and sells.

    another reason to just make a spreadsheet

  • deme on 14/04/2023 - 14:34

    What Share trading platform does every one use?

    • moar bargains on 14/04/2023 - 16:20

      Make a new thread.

      I mostly use SelfWealth these days, but have previously used the platforms of all of the Big 4 banks.

    • MrMarket on 19/04/2023 - 20:34

      Serious Traders: Interactive Brokers (This has everything, futures contracts, options, currencies, bonds, full international equity markets etc…)
      Retails: Stake probably offer the best value

      • deme on 19/04/2023 - 20:34

        If you are using IB then you are retail.

        • MrMarket on 19/04/2023 - 20:38

          By retails I mean people who just dabble in a bit of shares and ETFs here and there and nothing else
          Other more serious traders and investors they are also into future markets, options etc…

  • Daniel Plainview on 20/04/2023 - 15:51
    +1

    Any Navexa users here at all?

    Seems it's a direct Australian competitor to Sharesight, but significantly cheaper for essentially the same 'features' for each of their pricing tiers (cheapest paid tier is $96yr for 'Basic' vs SS 'Starter' $202). Can pay by the month as well if you wanted to go that route for a tad more.
    https://www.navexa.io/pricing

    I know there's some US ones but Aussie ones will be much easier to get the appropriate tax reporting etc - which could be impossible or tricky to get from non-Australian services.

    As mentioned by some, yes very basic CGT can be done via a spreadsheet (how I used to do in bad old days) but once you start having to apply the annual AMIT adjustments to the cost bases it can become an absolute nightmare (which I am certain is affecting more people that are even aware of what these are as so many Mums and Dads bought up ETFs big during the pandemic) - there is no way they're properly accounting on these with a home spreadsheet.

    • Daniel Plainview on 21/04/2023 - 16:47

      Well I've tried Navexa over the last 24hrs and I have to say it's sensational. There's a very small learnign curve as it's near identical to SS, I wonder if it was set up by a disgruntled ex-employee etc as its near identical in it's workings but just make to look better and with extra features.

      It comes with a generous 14 day trial (SS only allows 7 day trial) but I have no doubt I will pay up for atleast a basic membership after this lapses. You could get by with the 'free' membership and simply pay a month by month rate if/when you want to do annual reports for taxes etc BUT I really think they've priced it incredibly well (it's under half SS's price for equal tier accounts) and it'd be nice to support a much smaller Australian service thats taking on SS who has a near market monopoly on this.

      There's a very thorough walkthrough of it by the owner - which is time stamped for easy access - worth watching - worth noting he's an Australian, which is always handy as it's specifically for our market only: https://youtu.be/Uacz8i-JSuI

      I've just entered my annual AMIT statements for the past 2 yrs - that was super easy. I exported from SS into Navexa, that was super easy as well. No headaches or issues at all. It really is a very nice product and even if you are a SS customer (as I was) I'd encourage you to try a trial and export your data in and see what you think.

      Sounds silly but it has a refined, modern feel to SS's being a tad more basic and traditional - but in the very best of ways as I'm generally far more into the latter feel for such services myself.

      • virhlpool on 08/01/2024 - 01:58

        Does it work for US stocks report (by converting USD to AUD)?

  • tim9800 on 29/04/2023 - 10:11

    I was resigned to paying one month's worth of subscription per year, when I need to do my taxes. But I noticed that they now offer a 7-day free trial after you "purchase" any of their plans (if you cancel during the trial period, you don't pay the subscription). So once EOFY rolls around I'll use ss for 7 more days to generate the CGT report - finding another service is next year's problem

  • peterk on 13/05/2023 - 11:18

    Is a good video how to generate a CGT Report via google sheets.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDRxOD4AWQ4

  • inertia8 on 15/01/2024 - 09:55

    Does anyone know if this also applies to the CMC free version (10 holdings) via their agreement with Sharesight? I'm with CMC and have been manually tracking via my own spreadsheet thus far.

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