EquityStat and Taxes

It’s that dreaded time of year – tax time. EquityStat’s portfolio manager has several tools to help investors with their taxes.

If you sold any shares last year, you can use EquityStat to generate IRS Form 8949.  IRS Form 8949 is a form that shows your short-term  and long-term capital gains on any investment sale.  EquityStat will automatically calculate these capital gains.  It will then generate a PDF of Form 8949 with all needed information that the IRS requires.  You can then give this form to your tax preparer when you are preparing your taxes.  To generate IRS Form 8949, click the Tools menu and then choose the Generate Form 8949 menuitem.

Use EquityStat To Print IRS Form 8949
IRS Form 8949 Example

Another tool to help you with your taxes is the ability to export your investment’s transactions to a spreadsheet. To export your transactions, click the Tools menu and then choose the Export Transactions menuitem. When you export your transactions, you will get a spreadsheet showing each transaction for the investment including the type of transaction it is (e.g. Buy, Sell, Dividend, etc). With this information, your tax preparer can calculate your taxable capital-gains and taxable dividends for all of your investments.

Ditch the Stock Spreadsheet

Many investors keep their stock portfolios in a spreadsheet. With a spreadsheet they can keep track of their investments and also calculate some performance metrics. This is a quick and easy way to track their investment portfolio’s net-worth without having to go to the websites where their stocks or mutual funds are held. In addition a stock spreadsheet is secure where only the owner of the computer has access to the stock spreadsheet.

In spite of the convenience, there are several drawbacks to using a spreadsheet to track your investments. One drawback is how do you update the prices for each investment in your portfolio? If you manually enter the prices, this could be a daily chore that is time consuming. You could use a stock service to provide real-time stock quotes. However, implementing this in a spreadsheet is not trivial. Also, what do you do if the stock service changes their user interface or the stock service goes down?

Another drawback to stock portfolio spreadsheets is you can only view your portfolio on the computer where the spreadsheet is located. If you have the spreadsheet on a home computer, you can’t view your portfolio at work. In addition if you have multiple computers and tablets at home you can only view your spreadsheet on one computer.

EquityStat’s portfolio manager was created to alleviate the problems of a spreadsheet. With our portfolio manager you can instantly see the real-time value of your investment portfolio. There is no need to enter the daily prices and you can let us worry about interfacing with the stock quote service.

Also, with EquityStat you can view your investment portfolio on any computer or device that supports a web browser. You can view your portfolio from home or work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition you can view your portfolio on a Windows or Apple computer as well as any tablets like iPads.

EquityStat’s portfolio manager also provides many performance metrics such as annualized return, year-to-date return, quarterly return and average price per share.

You can learn more about EquityStat’s features here.