This article focuses on how to use Koinly when filing taxes in Australia. For more information on general crypto tax rules in Australia, what's the difference between an investor and trader, etc. see:
Filing as an investor
🎛️ Default settings
Cost basis calculation method: FIFO
Koinly uses FIFO as the default cost basis method but ATO also allows investors to also use HIFO or LIFO instead.
Realize gains on crypto → crypto trades: ON
Realize gains on liquidity transactions: ON
Treat other gains as capital gains: OFF
If you want to report your futures as income when filing, leave this toggle as OFF and add the "Other gains" total to the income calculated by Koinly
You can also set it to ON if you want other gains to be included in your capital gains totals instead. If you do, "other gains" are already included in capital gains totals (you don't have to add them)
Treat airdrops as income: OFF
Use the "Airdrop" tag only for tokens that should be treated as "received for free". If the particular token offering does not fall under ATO's guideline, tag as "Reward" instead to treat it as income
Treat forks as income: OFF
Treat mining as income: ON
Treat rewards as income: ON
ATO has not released any specific guideline regarding the settings listed below. While we do our best for the default settings to line with common practices across australian accountants, please confirm them with your tax advisor, if in doubt:
Wallet-based cost tracking: OFF
Realize gains on transfer fees: ON
Treat transfer fees as deductible costs: OFF
Treat cashbacks and fee refunds as zero-cost deposits: OFF
🗓️ Long-term gains
Koinly will categorize your disposals as short- or long-term depending on how long you held the asset before selling.
The threshold is 365 days
CGT discount is not deducted from your gains/losses on the Transactions page or on the "Cost Analysis" tab
CGT discount will appear on the "ATO Report" you can generate
👛 Personal use assets
If you believe some of your crypto disposals (withdrawals) fall under personal use and should be tax-exempt, you can tag them as "Lost" - this tag will remove any gain (or loss) calculation from such disposal.
For more information on tags, see
📊 Most useful Reports
The reports below are what our Australian users that file as investors most often generate.
📄 ATO Report (myTax)
This report provides a breakdown of your capital gains and other gains (from futures trades)
The totals are for the particular tax year only and do not account for any carryover losses from previous years. These will be deducted automatically on myTax platform (if you reported losses in previous years)
Capital gains account for the CGT discount from long-term gains
"Net capital gains after CGT" figure will be listed in the report only if you're eligible for the CGT discount (ie. you have net long-term gains)
Depending on your "Treat other gains as capital gains" setting, Other gains are either included in the capital gains or not. They are always listed separately at the bottom as well
📄 Complete tax report
Get your total income (from staking rewards, lending interest, etc.)
Useful to keep for personal records
This report does not account for long-term CGT discount
Filing as a trader
If you are classified as a trader, your crypto activity:
Spot crypto trading
Derivatives trading (futures)
Rewards from staking & lending
Is all treated as business income rather than capital gains.
🎛️ Default settings
Same as for investors.
🏬 Treat crypto as stock
When filing as a trader, you calculate gains from trading spot using stock trade rule instead of standard FIFO. This means that the outcome of your spot trading is calculated based on the value of your inventory at the beginning and end of year, and on the acquisitions and disposals that happened.
📊 Most useful Reports
The reports below are what our Australian users who file as traders most often generate:
📄 Trading stock report
Used if you treat crypto as trading stock
This report offers a completely different way of calculating your capital gains
Gains in this report will not match the ATO report or the Complete report
With this report, your crypto is treated like stock inventory, not assets
FIFO is not used to calculate gains here - Instead, the gain/loss is calculated using initial worth of your stock, total purchases and sales, and the final worth at end of year
Outcome of your derivates trading (other gains) is not included in this report
📄 Complete tax report
Get your total income (from staking rewards, lending interest, etc.)
Get the other gains (derivatives) total
Useful to keep for personal records
Filing as a business
Companies follow the same rules as traders - see the previous section:
Filing for your SMSF
If you run a superannuation fund like SMSF and need to report your crypto gains/losses to ATO, you can't add this data to Koinly together with your individual (or business) transaction history. You'll need a separate Koinly account for this:
Open a second Koinly account
You can't use the same email for the second account, but you can use an alias e.g. using gmail's plus notation - if your main account is
[email protected], you can sign up using[email protected]
Import all your SMSF-related transaction history there
For ease of access to both accounts, invite your "main" account to the other one - the same way you'd invite an accountant:
Purchasing a Koinly plan
Be sure to select the correct plan, for the tax year you want to generate reports. You can change the tax year on the Plans page:
If you bought the plan for the wrong year - don't worry. If you didn't generate reports yet, you can change the year of the plan yourself: