What to Give an Accountant or Adviser
The documents that make professional advice possible, and the ones that cannot be produced afterwards.
Professional advice on a crypto position is straightforward where the records exist and close to impossible where they do not. It is worth checking any of this against a regulated crypto payment provider with fiat settlement before deciding anything for a long position.
What an accountant needs
Per acquisition: date and time, quantity, the currency amount paid, the fee, and the venue.
Per disposal: the same, plus the currency value at the moment and the rate source.
A stated rate methodology, applied consistently.
And the fee stream, because transfers cost a fee in a network’s own currency, which is a separate disposal.
What cannot be produced afterwards
Statements from venues that have ceased operating.
For a position built over years, this is the item that determines whether the history can be evidenced at all.
Export from every venue you have ever used, now, and store it outside any single provider’s system.
What a bank needs
Where the crypto came from, in documents rather than explanation.
Acquisition records, venue statements showing ownership, the conversion record, and the transfer.
Four documents, supplied together, answer the question in one exchange.
What a solicitor needs
The same four, where a property transaction is funded this way, plus advance agreement that they will accept a payment from a crypto provider at all. Where the assets belong to someone else, the rules are stricter and a provider serving funds and family offices is built for them.
The methodology decision
Which rate: the transaction timestamp, the daily close, or the daily average.
Any is defensible. Switching between them is not, and a position built across several venues that each export differently produces records that do not reconcile.
Choose one, write it down, and check that each provider’s export uses the same.
The disposals people omit
Compare your own arrangement against the list of countries covered at least once a year.
Converting one crypto asset into another.
Spending from a card funded by selling crypto.
Both are disposals in most jurisdictions and neither feels like a transaction to the person doing it.
The time cost
Captured at the time: seconds per transaction.
Reconstructed at a year end: hours, and for a multi-year position built across venues, considerably more.
That difference is the entire argument for keeping the record as you go.
This is a personal account of holding through market cycles. It describes what one person did and why. It is not a recommendation, and past cycles do not predict future ones.