Fee transactions not added to cost basis or subtracted from profit/loss?

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1

I’m trying to use PP’s “Trades” export for my tax reporting. It works great, with one exception: I’m having difficulty with standalone “Fees” transactions.

When I include some fees as part of a Buy transaction, in the Trades export, they get added to the “Entry Value” (aka “Cost Basis”) - exactly as expected. When I include fees in a Sell transaction, they get subtracted from the “Exit Value” (aka Net Proceeds), also as expected.

However, consider the following:

  • Buy a security. i.e. 100 shares at a price of $100 each (Entry Value = $10,000)
  • Add a “Fees” transaction for that same security. Let’s say $1000 worth of fees.
  • Sell that same security, i.e. 100 shares at a price of $200 each (Exit Value = $20,000)
  • Do a Trades export

Since the “Fees” have been attributed to that security, I would’ve expected PP to account for them either in the Entry Value ($11000) or Exit value ($19000) - but they seem to just disappear. In the export, the Entry Value (Cost Basis) is still $10,000, and the Exit Value (Net Proceeds) is still $20,000.

So I guess my questions are: is this a bug? Why does a “Fees” transaction have no effect in the Trades export (as fees do when directly in the buy/sell)?

Why this is needed: I’m trying to account for crypto gas fees. Often you’ll do some transaction for CryptoX, but pay for the fees in Ether. For example, sending CryptoX between wallets, or maybe to stake/unstake. Tax-wise, this needs to be handled like:

  1. Sale of Ethereum (realizing cap gains), then
  2. Fees get attributed to CryptoX (by adding to cost basis or subtracting from net proceeds).

It seems pretty clear that the way to do this in PP would be “Sell” followed by “Fees” - but as mentioned, the “Fees” transaction doesn’t seem to actually get attributed to CryptoX…?

Thanks very much in advance

2

It does – check in the “Securities” report. However, there is no way to attribute it to a specific position/trade. The fee transaction doesn’t even specify to which account it applies, nor a number of shares.

3

Hi,

Thanks for the quick reply.

It does – check in the “Securities” report.

Aha, I see :slight_smile:

However, there is no way to attribute it to a specific position/trade. The fee transaction doesn’t even specify to which account it applies, nor a number of shares.

Hmm, so then is there any possible way to achieve what I’m trying to do? Broadly speaking, some way to account for fees that occur not as part of a buy or sell, but that do get honored when calculating gains/losses in the Trades report?

4

As another idea, I tried to use an Outbound Delivery of 0 shares, just so I could have a way to attribute some Fees to the security. But it seems I couldn’t do that either, so I’m a bit out of ideas for how I can input these fees.

5

If anyone else has any ideas, I’d be extremely grateful. My tax guy is otherwise 100% done, & the sole thing holding up filing is that I haven’t provided my crypto accounting - as I simply cannot seem to figure out how to get PP to correctly account for the fees :confused:

Have spent an embarrassing amount of time trying every workaround I could possibly think of, & using Google Translate on the German part of the forums, but nothing seems to yield the correct result. Getting a tad desperate as tax deadline is approaching, so any help would be very very much appreciated. I’m sure there MUST be a way to account for fees properly, I must just be missing it.

Thanks again!

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