Koinly Review: Good Option For International Crypto Tax Reports

When you invest in cryptocurrency, you have to report capital gains and additional income when filing taxes. But if you have a large portfolio with numerous holdings across several exchanges, doing this manually is easier said than done.

Thankfully, software like Koinly helps you automatically calculate your crypto taxes and generate tax reports. If you’re looking for comprehensive crypto tax software that can you save you time and headache, Koinly is certainly one of the top options out there.

However, it’s important to know what features Koinly offers and how it stacks up against other tax software. Our Koinly review is covering everything you need to know about this leading tax software to help you decide if it’s right for you.

What Is Koinly?

Koinly is a cryptocurrency tax software company that began in 2018. The company operates out of London, and according to its website, Koinly helps oversee tax reporting for over $250 million in funds.

Crypto tax software is still an emerging space and a lot of software out there still lacks the features serious investors need. However, Koinly was created by cryptocurrency investors and accountants and was built with their needs in mind. 

In 2023, Koinly was named our top pick for the best cryptocurrency and NFT tax liability calculator. See all our picks for best tax software here.

What Does It Offer?

Koinly lets you automatically import and track your cryptocurrency transactions. Once you create your account and sync your exchanges and wallets, you’re ready to prepare for tax season by using Koinly’s various features.

Extensive Wallet And Exchange Support

Koinly integrates with over 350 cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets and automatically syncs your transactions to your Koinly dashboard. This lets you consolidate all your investing activity in Koinly to begin preparing your tax forms.

Some popular exchanges Koinly supports include:

• Coinbase
• Crypto.com
• Binance
• FTX
• Gemini
• Kraken
• KuCoin
• Gate.io

Koinly also supports 50+ wallets and plenty of crypto savings accounts as well, including popular companies like:

• BlockFi
• Celsius
• Exodus
• Ledger
• Nexo
• Trezor
• Trust Wallet
• Yoroi

Connecting an account to Koinly provides read-only access so Koinly can import your transaction data.

What’s nice is that Koinly detects what type of income different transactions are. For example, it can detect margin and futures trading from exchanges like BitMEX and Binance.

It also can identify if transactions are income from staking or various lending platforms like Celsius. And, with its error reconciliation feature, Koinly uncover missing transaction data and duplicates to ensure you’re filing accurately.

The bottom line is that Koinly makes it easy to import all your crypto activity. Whether you mostly use API connections or upload CSV reports is up to you.

Automatic Crypto Tax Reports

Koinly’s Tax Reports tab provides an overview of your cryptocurrency activity for a given year. Off the bat, you get a snapshot of:

• Capital gains and profits or losses
• Other gains from sources like futures and derivatives
• Income from sources like airdrops, forks, and crypto savings accounts
• Cost and expenses not included in capital gains
• Gifts, donations, and lost coins

You can also adjust your account settings before generating tax reports. This lets you adjust your home country, currency, and if you consider certain sources like airdrops or mining as income.

Koinly supports four different cost basis methods: Average Cost Basis (ACB), First In First Out (FIFO), Last In First Out (LIFO), and Highest In First Out (HIFO)

Once you choose your cost basis method and import transactions, Koinly can create several tax reports automatically:

• Form 8949 and Schedule D: Form 8949 is for the Sales and Dispositions of Capital Assets and is critical for filing crypto taxes. You then include net capital gains and losses on Form Schedule D.
• Income Reports: Includes income from sources like airdrops, forks, mining, and staking.
• Capital Gains Report: A breakdown of your short- and long-term capital gains, including exactly when you sold specific assets, the original cost, and your proceeds.
• End Of Year Holdings: This report is useful in the event you’re audited since it outlines your cryptocurrency holdings at year's end.
• Gifts, Donations, And Lost Assets: Koinly outlines crypto you’ve given as gifts or donations, as well as crypto that has been lost or stolen since this could count as a capital loss.

Koinly lets you export these reports to popular tax software like TurboTax and TaxAct so you can finish filing.

Tax-Loss Harvesting

Tax-loss harvesting is a popular tactic to offset capital gains to save more money when filing taxes. In a nutshell, it involves selling securities to realize a loss which you can apply against some of your capital gains. After selling off assets, you purchase similar assets to keep a similar portfolio composition.

You can leverage tax-loss harvesting on crypto as well as stocks. And since Koinly tracks all of your capital gains and losses per asset, it’s easy to tell which coins you can sell off and how much you’ll realize in losses.

A small downside of Koinly is that it doesn’t have an independent tax-loss harvesting calculator at the moment. Other crypto tax software like ZenLedger has a standalone tool that breaks out tax-loss harvesting in a spreadsheet. In contrast, Koinly highlights your unrealized gains and losses on its dashboard.

This is essentially the same information, but it would be nice to have a dedicated calculator that spells everything out per asset.

Portfolio Tracking

Koinly’s dashboard provides a sleek overview of your portfolio value, holdings, performance by holding, and number of transactions. It shows you how much fiat you’re holding on exchanges and displays a pie chart breakdown of all your assets.

This dashboard is quite minimal, so it’s not equivalent to using a more robust portfolio tracker like Kubera However, having a dashboard is still useful since it could help you spot transaction discrepancies or if you’re missing certain transactions.

International Support

One advantage of Koinly over most crypto tax software is its international support. Currently, Koinly is available in over 20 countries, including:

• Australia
• Brazil
• Canada
• Denmark
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Japan
• Norway
• South Korea
• Spain
• Sweden
• United States

When you change your home country, Koinly prepares localized versions of tax reports, so it’s doing more than just changing some currency figures around. For example, if you select Sweden as your home country, Koinly suddenly has additional tax report options like a K4.

Are There Any Fees?

Koinly has a free plan, but if you want tax reports, you have to pay. However, Koinly has several plans that are both flexible and affordable:

The free plan is perfect for testing Koinly’s user interface to see if you like the software. For tax reporting purposes, transaction limits are likely the limiting factor you should consider when choosing a plan.

What’s nice about Koinly is you can add-on a dual nationality feature for any plan for $49. This feature adds tax report downloads for one additional country, which is potentially useful for digital nomads and expats.

You can also add an expert review to any plan for $799. This feature has a Koinly tax expert double-check your account to highlight any potential issues. If you have a large and complex portfolio, this review could be worth it.

How Does Koinly Compare?

Koinly is one of the most affordable crypto tax softwares on the market, and the free plan means you can test out its user interface before paying.

However, there are plenty of other tax options out there. Here’s how Koinly stacks up against ZenLedger and CryptoTrader.Tax, two other popular contenders.

Koinly is an excellent choice if you don’t trade too often and want cheap plans. It’s also an excellent option if you have a lot of DeFi and NFT transactions since you can add them manually. Finally, Koinly has better international support than ZenLedger and CryptoTrader.Tax.

ZenLeger has slightly better native DeFi support since it integrates with 20+ protocols, but this is a small advantage. Overall, Koinly and ZenLedger are two of our favorite crypto tax softwares options and having free plans also makes it easy to try out each platform.

How Do I Open An Account?

You sign up for Koinly with your Coinbase or Google account. You can also sign up with your name, email, and password.

You don’t need to enter your credit card to try out Koinly which is another plus. Once you sign up with a free account, you can connect unlimited wallets, exchanges, and DeFi services to start testing the software.

Koinly doesn’t follow KYC requirements either. Overall, you can set up a brand new account within a few minutes. Just note that importing transaction data from exchanges can take around 15 to 20 minutes.

Is It Safe And Secure?

Like other crypto tax software, Koinly uses read-only API connections to import transactions. This means Koinly can’t make changes to any of your crypto exchanges or wallets. In fact, Koinly doesn’t even require any private keys to do its job.

Furthermore, Koinly encrypts data in transit and doesn’t store your payment details. Overall, these practices make Koinly a safe and secure crypto tax software. You can read more about Koinly’s commitment to security on its website.

How Do I Contact Koinly?

There are several ways to contact Koinly customer support. The simplest method is to use its live chat feature to message a customer support agent. But you'll need to upgrade to the Trader tier to get email support from experts. You can also send general inquiries to hello@koinly.io.

Koinly currently has a 4.6 star rating on Trustpilot, and several users cite reliable customer service as a perk. Negative reviews mostly stem from transaction import errors, but customer support isn’t a complaint users typically have.

Is It Worth It?

As an active cryptocurrency investor, you definitely need some type of crypto tax software. Yes, you can file taxes on your own, but the amount of time and mistakes you save by using software is certainly worth the annual price.

As for Koinly, it’s one of the best crypto tax software on the market. The fact that it has DeFi support and also lets you add NFT transactions manually makes it rather robust. When you tack on international support, Koinly is a reliable choice for both U.S. and international crypto investors.

You should still do your own bookkeeping throughout the year and double-check Koinly’s tax reports. But if you need a helping hand with filing your taxes, Koinly could be for you.

Try Koinly here >>

Koinly Features