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The Trade Journal You Need for ITR

Published by the Drishti team · Reviewed 2026-11-07 · Researched and edited with AI assistance.

Module 3 · Chapter 7 of 8 · ~5 min read · Tax and law facts as of November 2026

The last chapter walked you through withdrawing sale proceeds to your bank account. This chapter builds one habit that saves hours later: a trade journal, a dated log of every coin you buy and sell.

• 9columns per row
• ₹1,700gain taxed in the example
• ₹400loss that brings no relief
• 31.2%tax rate on the gain

7.1 Why the exchange's report is not enough

Most exchanges offer a downloadable tax report that lists your trades for the year. It looks complete, but it usually covers only one exchange and one financial year.

Trade on a second exchange, or hold a coin across years, and the picture breaks apart. The report rarely separates your trading fee from the 1% TDS, tax deducted at source, withheld on every sale. Come July, your chartered accountant needs a clean Schedule VDA, the section of your ITR for crypto gains; a pile of unrelated PDFs will not do.

7.2 The nine columns of a trade journal

A trade journal needs just one row per sale, and nine plain columns.

• Date of the trade
• Coin, such as Bitcoin or Ether
• Exchange you used
• Quantity bought or sold
• Buy value in rupees, your cost of acquisition
• Sell value in rupees
• Fee paid on the trade, useful to track even though it is not deductible
• TDS deducted on the sale, 1% under Section 393
• Gain or loss: sell value minus buy value

Lay the same three trades out as journal rows, and the totals line becomes obvious.

Every row uses the same subtraction, sell value minus buy value. The totals row keeps only the positive numbers, since that is the figure the tax office counts.

It is tempting to net all three trades to ₹1,300 and stop there. The diagram below shows why that shortcut gives the wrong number.

7.3 Filling it from your exchange statement

Each month, export your trade history from the exchange, usually as a CSV file. Open it beside your own journal sheet, not inside it, so your formulas stay safe.

Copy the date, coin, quantity, and both buy and sell values across. Most exchanges print the fee on the same row, but the 1% TDS usually sits on a separate statement. Paste these numbers in instead of retyping them. Retyping from memory is how a comma slips, and a ₹10,000 trade can turn into ₹1,00,000. The whole chain runs in one direction, from statement to journal to tax form.

7.4 Moving between exchanges

Many traders use more than one exchange, moving coins to chase a better price or feature. When you move Bitcoin between exchanges, its cost of acquisition does not reset to zero. The second exchange only sees the day your coins arrived, not what you originally paid.

Your journal is the only place that remembers the original ₹10,000 you paid. Without that row, the second exchange's report may show the whole sale value as pure gain. Record the transfer itself as a journal row: date, coin, quantity, and which exchange it left and arrived at. Leave the gain column blank, since no sale has happened yet.

One wrinkle is unsettled. Say you bought the same coin on different days at different prices. FIFO, first-in-first-out, decides which buy a sale is matched against, and Indian tax practitioners still read this rule differently for crypto trades. Ask a chartered accountant how to apply it to your own trades.

7.5 Checking it against 26AS

Form 26AS is the government's running record of every TDS credit against your PAN, permanent account number. Each exchange reports the 1% TDS it deducted under your PAN, and the figure should appear within a few months of the trade.

Before you file, add up the TDS column in your journal and match it against the total shown in 26AS. The two should agree, trade for trade.

A gap usually means a trade is missing, or the exchange reported it under the wrong PAN. Catch it before you file, not after.

This chapter is educational only. It is not tax, legal or investment advice. Check current rules, and your own trades, with a chartered accountant.

Key takeaways

• Keep one journal row per sale: date, coin, exchange, quantity, buy value, sell value, fee, TDS and gain or loss.
• Losses on other trades do not reduce the gain that gets taxed.
• Reconcile your journal's TDS total against Form 26AS before you file.
• When you move coins between exchanges, log the transfer and carry the original buy value with it.
• Export and save each exchange's statement before you close or stop using the account.
• FIFO costing and exact statement formats are unsettled; confirm the detail with a chartered accountant.

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Educational & illustrative only — not investment advice. Drishti Pro publishes AI-generated trade ideas and their public track record for information. Crypto is volatile and you can lose money. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Do your own research.