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magicbeans

Cryptocurrency tax tracking and reporting tools for the Beancount platform.

An example generated report: data/magicbeans_example.pdf

Overview

Goals:

  • Accurate importing of crypto transactions from exchanges or wallet software
  • Accurate and traceable capital gains/loss tracking and computation
  • Handle mining/staking/farming income
  • Handle taxable asset exchanges (e.g., USDT for BTC)
  • Tax optimization options beyond HIFO/FIFO
  • Flexibility between automatic and manual lot selection
  • Scale to hundreds or thousands of transactions and cost-basis lots
  • Generation of reports suitable for preparing (US) taxes

Magicbeans is not standalone software, it consists of modules, extensions, and tools that operate on the Beancount platform. For more information see: https://github.com/beancount .

No warranty is expressed or implied; in fact I can almost guarantee you that Magicbeans behaves incorrectly in many situations.

Status

Magicbeans currently can:

  • Import crypto activity data from a few sources (Coinbase csvs, CoinbasePro csvs, Gate.IO csvs, and the Chia default wallet) into Beancount format (and transaction semantics)
  • Run standard Beancount functionality, including balancing transactions, flagging discrepencies, cost-basis lot tracking, computing capital gains
  • Generate PDF reports containing high-level summaries of capital gains (similar to IRS 8949) and income, as well as very detailed reports tracking individual lots from acquisition through inventory through disposition, to enable auditing

However, Magicbeans is underexercised and undertested. It is badly in need of more beta-testers/developers who are willing to try to use it with their data, debug where it breaks, and contribute fixes.

Installation and Usage

Reminder: This package is underdeveloped and undertested. Please download and use only if you're ready to do a developer's install (i.e., you're familiar with git, python virtual environments, pip, etc.), and to tweak a bunch of stuff, check the output carefully, and assist at least by filing issues for problems found.

The following are installation instructions for Linux/Ubuntu. For other platforms, you may need to adjust some commands and paths. Also, if you plan to contribute back to Magicbeans, you should first fork the git repo, and then clone your own fork instead.

Find a nice empty working directory:

  mkdir crypto-taxes
  cd crypto-taxes

Clone magicbeans (note: if you plan to contribute, you'll want to first fork it and then clone your fork with ssh):

  git clone https://github.com/ericaltendorf/magicbeans.git

Create and enter a venv, and install (in -e "editable" mode, so you can tweak):

  python3 -m venv venv-magicbeans
  source venv-magicbeans/bin/activate
  venv-magicbeans/bin/pip install -e magicbeans

Install system utilities/libraries:

  sudo apt install latexmk texlive texlive-latex-extra

Create directories for your input files (e.g. csv files of transactions) and a working directory for Magicbeans to write output (and temporary) files:

  mkdir downloads build
  # put stuff in downloads

Next you need to configure your workflow (your accounts, importers, transformations, hooks, etc.). This is done with Python code which implements the Magicbeans Config class. An example is provided in config_example.py. Since your config may end up including personal account information, you should copy the example script to a private repo to version-control it privately.

Now you should be ready to run Magicbeans. To see the command line options:

  python3 -m magicbeans -h

You will need to specify arguments to point Magicbeans to your config python code, your input and output directories, etc.

TODO

Enable collaborators & alpha testers

  • Document how to run report generator (see also cleanup task below)
  • Write some more detailed documentation with tips, tricks, gotchas, examples, and war stories of real-life data

Necessary and missing functionality

  • Verify that price and acquisition date tracking transfers is working (background)
  • Write tax-minimizing booking algo Ref: minimizegains and match_trades
  • Figure out plan for saving booking decisions and applying in the future

Cleanup

  • Integrate runner.py and run_report.py into one script
  • Existing price fetcher isn't ideal, see if we can get higher-resolution historical data, and corroborate across multiple sources
  • Set up continuous integration w/ typechecking and unit tests
  • Use @dataclass where appropriate
  • Make a clear decision on the use of terms "Buy", "Sell", and "Swap"
  • Create a canonical way to automatically apply registered fix-ups on imported data
  • Address TODOs throughout code
  • Get zerosum plugin working, report these and other errors somewhere in the build pipeline
  • Use filter_txns() throughout rather than filter() with isinstance()