How to Calculate and File your Cryptocurrency Taxes using TurboTax

For those who have traded cryptocurrency in the past year, you would have to report them in your tax filing. Here’s how you can consolidate trades, calculate your gains and file it using TurboTax

It’s tax time and everyone will be busy consolidating their tax documents and filing taxes for the year 2018. Apart from consulting CPAs for complicated situations, almost everyone in the USA uses TurboTax. It has simplified accounting and tax returns so much that it’s almost a household for many Americans.

TL;DR: Export your itemized capital gains or losses information in CSV format and import it on your TurboTax Online. This works perfectly with TurboTax Online platform even if you have more than 250 taxable transactions.

On the other hand, trading of cryptocurrencies is a taxable transaction and one should report the gains or losses in their tax filing. Consolidating trades from various exchanges manually and reporting them as capital gains or losses on your TurboTax would be a tedious task.

Calculating Capital Gains or Losses

To alleviate this, most of this part has been automated by cryptocurrency tax software like BearTax. You can connect to most of the popular exchanges via their API or File Upload. If the exchange is not supported, their staff can get your transactions processed if you can email them on [email protected].

BearTax - Cryptocurrency Tax Software for Traders & Accounting Firms_BearTax is an automated and easy to use cryptocurrency tax software which works well for individual traders and professional CPAs in calculating gains…_bear.tax

Once the transactions from various exchanges are imported to BearTax, calculation of tax liability aka capital gains or losses will be triggered. This could take a couple of minutes and then provides you with a gain-loss summary as shown below.

Everything until this step is FREE of cost and you won’t have to pay a penny to view your gain-loss summary information. However, if you would like to get your tax documents — you can pay for the recommended plan starting $0.99 (depending on the number of transactions) and get your tax documents.

“Download TurboTax” button third row will take your gain-loss information i.e. Form 8949 data to a CSV (*.csv) file which will allow you to import into TurboTax® Online software. You can also download an aggregated file if you have more than 250 transactions.

Exporting Capital Gains/Losses Data to TurboTax

To download CSV and upload on TurboTax® online, follow these steps:

1. After your gain-loss summary is generated in BearTax, click on “5. Download Tax Forms” tab under Calculate Gain/Loss

2. This screen provides options to export or download your capital gains document in various formats. Use the button “Download TurboTax Online CSV” to download a CSV file .

3. Head over to TurboTax to file your taxes online. Signup with your email id and select one of the plans that supports cryptocurrency tax filing. This would be either premier or self-employed.

Here’s a screen where you will start your tax filing by filling in basic details.

Getting Started screen on TurboTax online

Since TurboTax is a tax filing for all possible scenarios — it will ask you to select various scenarios which would apply for you. Please make sure to select “I sold or trader Cryptocurrency” as shown in the image below.

The Cryptocurrency Section

Once you have filled out the initial prompts, you are able to jump to the crypto section by typing in “crypto” within the search bar and then selecting “jump to crypto”.

Within the cryptocurrency section, you will be able to select the Crypto Tax platform that you used to prepare your crypto data.

Irrespective of the option you select below, the file format of all the providers is same which is exactly the one you’ve downloaded from BearTax above.

Now, choose any one of those buttons (not Coinbase) and upload the CSV file downloaded from BearTax. TurboTax will process the file and list all your trades in there

From here, TurboTax will list the taxable transactions and ask you to proceed with marking them as needed. Once the crypto transactions are all imported, you can go ahead and fill other parts of your tax filing and proceed.

BearTax - Cryptocurrency Tax Software for Traders & Accounting Firms_Signup now for the inexpensive and the best cryptocurrency tax software to calculate your liability and export it to various formats including your favorite tax tool TurboTax…_bear.tax

Signup now for the inexpensive and the best software to calculate your cryptocurrency tax liability and export it to file using your favorite tax tool TurboTax®_!_