Understanding the Accounting Report

‍Sheet "Overview"

‍The overview sheet provides you with a summary of the data reported in more detail on the other sheets. Ideally, all accountants need to do is copy the relevant data from the overview sheet to their accounting system and attach the rest as a reference for those who want to dig into the details.

The overview has two sections. The first section consists of all crypto asset balances at the beginning and the end of the period, as well as the difference. Besides summarizing the balances sheet, it also shows "transitory" balances (if there are any). The second section provides an overview over all Brokerbot sales. For the security that was selected in the dashboard when the accounting report was generated (most companies only have one security). Transitory sales are attributed to the period in which the payment was confirmed, and not to the period the shares were delivered.

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Sheet "Balance"

‍This sheet shows the balances by address instead of aggregated by asset like in the overview sheet. It can also be used to verify if all the relevant address have been included in the report.

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Sheet "Brokerbot Trades"

This sheet lists all trades from within the selected period and the selected token. It includes trades that were initiated before the period, but not yet settled at the beginning of the period, allowing you to reconcile transitory balances. It does not include manual shares sales and it does not include sales of other tokens by the same issuer. The name of the counterparty is shown if the user is a registered shareholder or has been a registered shareholder in the past.

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Sheet "Raw Transfers"

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This sheet shows the raw ERC-20 transfers involving the company's addresses for the selected period. This can be useful when trying to track balance changes that cannot be explained by Brokerbot trades, i.e. when the company sent out tokens in manual transactions.

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Taxation

‍We recommend to opt for a tax-neutral booking of transactions with own shares in accordance with international accounting standards. Incoming proceeds from share sales should directly be booked into the capital reserves ("Kapitaleinlagereserve") and outgoing payments from share repurchases deducted from that reserve. That way, transactions with own shares are profit-neutral. In theory, this should also be the case for the tax-relevant accounting ("Massgeblichkeitsprinzip"). Aktionariat itself reported the Kapitaleinlagereserve accumulated over the past years using form 170 and declared emission tax (Emissionsabgabe) using form 4. As the tax base for the emission tax, we simply compared the capital reserves at the end and the beginning of the period, disregarding ups and downs in between. Both forms are available under https://www.estv.admin.ch/estv/de/home/verrechnungssteuer/vst-abrechnen/vst-formulare.html . This is the method that is most likely correct to our best knowledge, but whether the Massgeblichkeitsprinzip really holds is still subject to ongoing judicial disputes that our tax experts are watching closely.

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Swiss legal entities owning more than 10 million worth of securities are subject to a transaction securities when trading. Tax ("Umsatzabgabe") of 0.15% for Swiss securities and 0.3% for foreign securities. It is your responsibility to further assess this. The transaction tax is only owed on transactions for which the counterparty did not already pay it. See chapter two in the Bundesgesetz über die Stempelabgaben (https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1974/11_11_11/de#art_13).

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Transitory Trades

‍For trade by bank transfer, the payment date and the delivery date are not the same. This raises the question on how to treat trades that cross date boundaries. As a general rule, we attribute a trade to the period in which the payment was confirmed in the dashboard. This can lead to transitory share positions, i.e. shares that have been sold but still reside on corporate addresses. If there are such shares, we report them as "transitory" on an extra line. For example, if the company has a balance of 1000 shares and a transitory balance of -100, the true number of shares owned by the company is 900, as 100 shares are undelivered shares that are held on behalf of the buyer until delivery.

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Ether Transactions

‍Unfortunately, the Ethereum system does not offer a convenient way to track the flow of ETH. Consequently, Ether movements are not shown in the accounting report. In case of sales using the "keep Ether" option, the detected amount of Ether may not be accurate as we only capture how much was sent to the Brokerbot, but not the amount of change that might have been returned. Future Brokerbot versions should have more explicit and better tracking of Ether, but having general support for tracking the flow of Ether will remain difficult.