Free GainsKeeper with Scottrade Account
Another nice feature of my Scottrade account [Review/Bonus] that I noticed recently is that they offer GainsKeeper free with every account. GainsKeeper is an add-on program available for all brokers that offers a lot of useful tax-related features such as:
- Track your cost basis and realized and unrealized gains/losses
- Tax lot accounting
- Generate your IRS Schedule D
- Export data into tax software, Excel or text file
- Tracks stock splits, mergers, and wash sales
You can do all this stuff manually pretty easily, but it’s definitely a nice time saver if you trade regularly. I plan on dollar-cost-averaging into ETFs and then harvesting tax losses, so keeping track of tax lots would probably get to be a pain in the butt after a while. Retail cost is $49/year (<100 trades).
May 6th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
It’s not all that easy to do if you’re an active trader (which you’ll probably not be) so this is actually a very nice feature.
May 6th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
Ooh, I’ll have to add that to my account. And I’m totally bummed that I forgot about the promotion thing!!! Argh! My bad.
May 6th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
It should already be there for all Scottrade account holders, under the ‘My Account’ Tab, on the left sidebar. I know, it’s a nice surprise.
May 7th, 2006 at 7:00 am
100 wasn’t nearly enough when I was “actively” trading. I had my husband write a PERL script that would parse through the transactions I could download for free in .csv format from the brokerage (Ameritrade). It took into account wash sales, selling split lots, etc. (great way to teach him about taxes, too). This was the best option for us with about 400 trades, we could still balance things down to the penny without having to do anything manually.
May 7th, 2006 at 5:51 pm
Actually, I don’t think there is a limit for the Scottrade Gainskeeper, I was just trying to approximate the value of this feature.
Gainskeeper as an add-on to other brokers can track more trades of course, retail for 1,000 trades is $150 a year.
May 9th, 2006 at 11:26 am
I’m not happy with Gainskeeper at all. It’s not tracking stock prices correctly for me.
Scottrade, Morningstar, and Yahoo all indicate my positions have gone up a total of about $100 since I started my account a couple of weeks ago, but Gainskeeper is saying I’ve lost $292.02!
May 13th, 2006 at 11:21 am
That’s a bummer, Dan. I’ve only made one trade so far, and it looks correct.
Gainskeeper seems to have it’s own customer service separate from Scottrade, have you tried contacting them directly?
May 17th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Sorry, re-reading that post I sounded like a whiner… (not my intention)
An update: the reason for the discrepancy on my account is that a stock I bought just recently had an “E” added to it’s ticker symbol to signify a late SEC filing.
Gainskeeper says they don’t track stocks during periods which they have such a temporary designation. (Still, I don’t see why they can’t follow the closing price when it’s readily available elsewhere!) But that’s the reason, probably not something that most people will encounter…
December 31st, 2008 at 7:36 am
I too am not pleased with GainsKeeper.
Despite the fact that stocks reset their NAV throughout the day GainsKeeper is always AT LEAST 1 day behind?!
Why do I have to grab a calculator when I need to track gains/losses? That is ridiculous!
I can understand when Vanguard or American Funds will update at about 6pm central because I have mutual funds with them, but seperate securities? That’s ridiculous!
My only complaint about Scottrade thus far.