Investment Tax Worksheet and Tutorial - Beta
We designed this worksheet to be extremely simple. However, in this simplicity we believe lies the power. The Investment Tax Worksheet is a basic spreadsheet with formulas that help you do the grunt work. There is no protection of any kind on this spreadsheet (In good faith we ask you not to delete our name and the copyright information). We want you to personalize this worksheet so it’s easy for you to understand. If you are familiar with Excel formulas and would like to use our functions in your worksheet we encourage you to go right ahead. With this basic setup, using formulas will be a snap. However, if you don’t trust Microsoft and want to do the math yourself (maybe just for the practice…) you have that option too. Depending on your level of Excel expertise, you can make this worksheet as sophisticated or as straightforward as you wish. I also have created the spreadsheet as a template. This basically means that when you download the template, and add your own content, Microsoft saves the updated version as a new file leaving the template unchanged. Thus, if you make a mistake, you can always go back to the original template and no harm done (there is a more important reason also, which we’ll discuss below).
Ok, now for the actual worksheet. When you open the Excel file, the “Buy Worksheet” will immediately come up. The Investment Tax Worksheet has three different “Sheets,” for Buy, Sell, and Dividends. To get to these different worksheets just click the different tabs at the bottom of the screen:
When we created this spread sheet we added screen tips to aide you through the investment tax maze. When you see a little red tab on the top right of a cell, you know that cell contains a screen tip as seen below.
Different Years, Different Brokerage Firms:
The main reason we set up the Worksheet as a template (see the Beginning Notes section above), is so it’s very easy to save a different spreadsheet file for each brokerage firm each year. This may sound pretty annoying (and it is), but we set up the worksheet this way because the every brokerage firm sends out a different 1099 Form to the IRS every year. If your trading activities match the 1099, then you’ve found the Holy Grail and your life is golden. Hence, for every brokerage firm you need to have a different worksheet for every year. So, if you have one brokerage firm and three years of trading you will have three different excel workbooks saved on your computer. If you have five years of trading and used two different brokers all five years then you will have ten different Excel files saved on your computer. You should enter the name of your brokerage firm on all spreadsheets as well as the year and then save the file. You should save the file as “your brokerage firm.year” So for Ameritrade in 2002, I will save the file as “ameritrade.2002” This will save you a lot of confusion when you go back to dig up an old information. (It is also recommend that you create a new folder for these files, to help you keep them all together)