Your reports
Realised gains
Sales matched back to purchases, under the rule your country actually uses.
A disposal on its own is not a gain. The gain depends on which purchase the sale is matched against, and different countries answer that differently. Accuren applies one of four rules and tells you which.
| Rule | Matches against | Used by |
|---|---|---|
| FIFO | The oldest lot you still hold | The default in most places, and Accuren's assumption until you choose |
| LIFO | The most recent lot | Permitted in some jurisdictions, not others |
| HIFO | The dearest lot, which minimises the gain | A US election, not a default anywhere |
| Average cost (ACB) | One running average across every purchase | Canada's adjusted cost base, close to the UK's section 104 pooling |
The rule changes the number, so the number is never shown without it
Buy 10 at $100, buy 10 more at $300, sell 10 at $400. FIFO reports a $3,000 long-term gain. LIFO and HIFO report $1,000, short-term. Average cost reports $2,000 with no holding-period split at all. Same three trades, three different answers — a figure that does not name its rule is not checkable.
#What it will not do
- Average cost has no holding period. Pooling deliberately destroys the identity of individual purchases, so there is no acquisition date left to measure from. The page says so rather than averaging the dates into a number that looks like an answer.
- HIFO skips lots with no price. An unpriced lot is not the cheapest one; it is an unknown one.
- A lot with no price carries a null basis, not a zero one. Zero would report the entire proceeds as gain.
- A zero-cost lot really is zero. A mint at no cost is a real basis of nothing, and writing null there would hide a fully taxable gain.
- A transfer out with no counterparty label is neither. It goes in a separate
unclassifiedlist, outside every total, with a link to name the address once.
Matched first, filtered second
Lots are matched across your whole history and only then narrowed to the year you asked about. The other order produces numbers that are wrong and look reasonable, because a sale gets matched against whichever purchase happened to survive the filter.
Every converted figure uses the rate on the date of the disposal, not today's, and the exported file carries the rule, the rate, its publication date, and the individual lots each sale consumed.