Seeking beta-testers/devs for crypto tax tools

[Eric Altendorf]

I recently filed my 2022 tax return using Magicbeans to do detailed lot tracking and capital gains/losses reporting for my crypto assets.  Magicbeans is a set of tools (importers and report generation tools) built around Beancount.  I wrote it because I was not satisfied with the accuracy or transparency of existing commercial services for crypto tax reporting.

Although I was confident enough in the numbers to file my return, I am equally confident there's a lot of latent issues in the software.  I am looking for folks who (1) are interested in better tools for crypto transaction tracking, (2) are willing to beta-test and debug some rough software, and (3) are skilled enough devs (Python) to also contribute fixes.

Hope to hear from someone out there... :)

--eric

[Chary Chary]

I know this is an offtopic, but I am just wondering: if it takes that much efforts plus python programming skills to file a tax return, then:

• How do other people (mortals) do it?
• How on the earth someone is able to verify it? One can't imagine a tax officer debugging a Python code?

[Eric Altendorf]

No worries.  I suspect that a lot of crypto traders/investors fall into these categories:

- Casual users who make minimal trades on one or two exchanges.  These are probably adequately served by existing commercial offerings like cointracker.io etc.

- Professional traders who already have some other professional commercial trade recording/reporting software.

For people in between, who are doing something more complex (multiple exchanges, offline wallets, mining income, large numbers of transactions or lots) but are not professional traders, I suspect that probably most tax returns are full of errors that neither the filers nor the IRS are readily able to untangle.  If the amounts are low, then it's not worth either of their time.  If the amounts are large, I am not sure.  I talked to a tax preparer, asking how one would verify the numbers, and he said that probably you'd have to engage a mid-to-large accounting firm and hand them your raw data -- not sure how they would analyze it.  He also said that with the IRS it would probably be a bit hit and miss how an auditor would handle or analyze it -- they probably wouldn't be reading one's Python code, no :)

My goal with Magicbeans was to generate PDF reports which lay out the lots in both inventories and transactions such that one could actually manually match everything up, even if it would be tedious.  The goal was to be able to walk into an IRS office with that report and be able to justify the cap gains/losses of any sale someone questions.

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[Chary Chary]

Ok,

thanks for clarification

[Eric Altendorf]

It's 2024, so, time to dust off Magicbeans and prepare 2023 taxes -- hope folks don't mind me bumping this thread.  If anyone else is interested in using Beancount to track crypto transactions, take a look below and if you're willing to beta-test and help develop, feel free to reach out to me.

best,

eric

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[CDT]

I'm relatively new to Python scripting and have been hand entering things while I'm learning, but this looks very interesting considering the volume of transactions that can occur with cryptos when the bull market heats up.

How do I install this?  (I'm using Windows 11 but I can use pip on command line)

[Eric Altendorf]

If you're new to both Beancount and Python, it could be ambitious to get deep into this experimental package :)  But no harm in giving it a try!

I will write some installation/getting-started docs on github and then get back to you.  Thanks for the interest!

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[CD]

Thank you.  I think I have the CoinbaseImporter set up properly but it is saying it can't import beangulp.  

[Eric Altendorf]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 10:19 AM CD <doc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you.  I think I have the CoinbaseImporter set up properly but it is saying it can't import beangulp.  

python package management is, IMHO, a complete disaster.  also IMHO beancount has lingering out of date documentation files, as well as multiple simultaneous versions, that make it a bit challenging to get a working setup.

that said, magicbeans is probably even more finicky and harder to get running :-D

if you feel like trying it out, I have a draft of some install and configuration instructions here:

https://github.com/ericaltendorf/magicbeans/pull/1/commits/b81deb54f66d39ddd3f1b975ae0b08241c30e413

 

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[Martin Blais]

+1 to that.

I don't do package management much.

I just git clone, build locally and mangle my PYTHONPATH.

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[Eric Altendorf]

well, even when you build locally you are still dealing with packages (ie dependencies), right?

my brother does a lot of python dev, and one thing i learned from him is to never try to install or run anything without a virtual env, preferably one that's got an install/setup configuration so that whenever things get mucked up, you can easily wipe it and reinstall everything.  i probably would have had an easier time with beancount etc. had I known that at the time.

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