Managed Fund Tax Statement Reconciliation

I have just entered all my figures for Vanguard VGE and come up $8.23 short (“recalculated net amount” versus the Computershare net cash distribution).

That $8.23 corresponds precisely to the “Non primary production income” attribution shown on the statement, which is not required to be entered anywhere on the Sharesight adjustment page according to the instructions at How Sharesight helps you handle Australian AMIT tax components | Sharesight Australia Help .

How do I account for this?

Hi @hmof

I’d say to look through this section to find what the $8.23 is made up of. If you haven’t already, reach out to our support team regarding this and we’ll be able to help you directly :+1:

Thanks Jack. As I wrote the $8.23 is exactly the figure under "Non primary production income” on the Vanguard statement, but the instructions on the help site don’t require to put that figure in anywhere on Sharesight. However this results in a discrepancy in the end result.

I do not like the confusing way Sharesight handles EOFY Trust and AMMA statements.

The distribution payment advice was intended to notify the investor of the cash distribution and was never intended to record the detailed source of the income. That is the purpose of the EOFY Trust or AMMA statement.

Yet Sharesight over writes the credible data in the distribution payment advices with fictitious pro-rata data. The complex process provides opportunity for things to go wrong.

The process simply lacks rigour. Fortunately the old fashioned basic method can still be used.

I simply create a new payment for the EOFY statement which is usually 30 June.

I then go through the statement carefully adding components. For AMMA statements the fields are all there but are difficult to find. When the net dividend in the box matches the cash payout on the statement it means success. If they do not match the difference can often hint where the mistake lies.

The distribution advices are no longer needed and can be deleted. If you have a DRP this needs to be added manually. Some DRPs round up, some round down, some carry forward so the advantage of doing it manually is you can enter it precisely from the payment advice with no errors.

I understand it. It is simple. It works for me.

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Here’s part 2 - dealing with linking to Xero
Xero guides - Managed Fund Statements & year-end adjustments (part 2) )

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Totally agree. It is waste of time and counter productive, what Sharesight does. No way tallying with what accountants are doing where they exactly reflect company’s AMIT statements.

My accountant got it easy and their data tallies with AMIT statement fields.

Now I am deleting all trust distributions, reentering for each period and then for the final payment or zero net payment on 30/06, manually enter all AMIT statement fields.

I’ve many many trust statements. I’ve long way to go but I can trust this way than Sharesight.

Very very disappointed. If this is what it is, it is not helping annual tax return time for SMSF at all.

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Particularly for funds, AMIT entry changes already reconciled periodical distribution amounts. That caused lot of inconveniences.
Tax statement reconciliation is okay to some extent for ETF’s but not at all for funds.

To make it effective, following way may be of use for further comments and reconsideration:

  1. Store Tax statement entries filed by field as they’re shown in annual statement.
  2. Do not alter any fields of the distribution entries for that year.
  3. Create new entry called “adjustment entry” showing field by field differences between annual statement fields and total of past distribution fields.
  4. No. 3 and total of no.2 all distribution entries should match Annual statement.

This way, No.3 adjustment entry alone will be new and no other existing entries will be altered and (1) remains as reference entry for tax statement calculations.

Any comments are welcome. Request Sharesight to consider this as High priority item, moving forward so that the product remains suitable and competitive product in all angles.

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Hi @rn233343 @Fractal

Just some points to add here:

We receive data for the below listed ETFs, for any managed funds these need to be manually entered.

The Pro Rata is there mainly to help you keep your CGT and cost base accurate since all that data is only available in your AMMA tax statements. Once your AMIT data is accurate within Sharesight, the CGT report will also be accurate.

Sharesight works best for filing your taxes when you file using the paper form rather than MyTax. I have passed your feedback to our product team for review.

Hi Jack

I understand what Sharesight is doing, what I am trying to understand is why.

We agree the EOFY AMMA statement is a tax statement containing all the taxable components. The question then is why not use it to create a single unambiguous EOFY entry?

Sharesight’s method modifies the cash distribution advice from the ETF. Is that a wise thing to do? It lacks rigour.

If there are 4 distributions for the year that would mean say CGT is pro-rated by 4. I can see rounding errors and people chasing to find the odd cent error. The data now implies the CGT is spread through the quarters. But is that really the case? The ETF may have had all the CGT events in one quarter. But then the quarterly distribution of tax components is of no interest - we are only interested in EOFY. So why do it?

If you wanted to automate it and make it easier for customers the first step could be to have a PDF reader which extracts the relevant Sharesight entry data from the AMMA statement. The AMMA statement is a sea of data and it can be hard to find what you need, e.g. you have to remember you need the grossed up CGT ignoring the discounted CGT and get the AMIT up/down correct. This would not be a trivial exercise since there does not seem to be any sort of standard for statements. The next step could be to load an entry directly for checking.

The cash distribution advices, if recorded in Sharesight would be non-taxable cash income. They would only be used for say adding cash income to a bank account although I am not sure Sharesight does that. The EOFY AMMA would be the taxable entry but the cash income would now be ignored.

You will have gathered that I do manual entry of the AMMA statement. It only takes a couple of minutes and I am happy to keep on doing that. Am interested in any efforts to make it easier which comply with accounting standards.

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I had previously entered the Dividends as at the received date manually (including the DRP).

I have been trying to use this process and followed the Help article (https://www.sharesight.com/blog/australian-etf-distribution-components-now-available-for-fy20-21/) to distribute the entries.

This looks like it could be good on the service, but if you automatically assign using the information provided (as per the article), then the DRP buttons get wiped from the previous entries. So now my total shares are not correct (new DRP shares missing)

Is it expected that the process for this assisted flow be:

  • automatically distribute the dividends
  • go and edit each dividend to update the DRP flag?

→ does this then overwrite the Sharesight automation entries in a meaningful way?

Or what is the way to add the DRP entries correctly?

When you set up these DRP trades, did you do these manually by editing the dividend? Or are your dividends able to be automatically reinvested?

I have to agree wholeheartedly with this - it’s extremely confusing currently.

This would make far more sense to me as well as it matches up with what the funds are actually providing.

If this was kept separate, then all of the documentation provided by a fund throughout the year (dividend statements, EOFY statement) would have a corresponding obvious and discoverable home in sharesight.

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Hi Jack,
Following the video, I had deleted the manual entries I had made, and let Sharesight update the dividends.

I did notice that there is a button per company that can set up dividends as DRP, and maybe if this was ticked PRIOR to running the update, then the correct allocations would be made, without having to go back and manually update the automated entries?

Having just completed my 2020-21 tax (after an extension for another matter), I wanted to add my 2c worth before we move into the next AMMA/AMIT season.

I agree with the points that have been made by @fractal, @rn233343 and @Teks and wanted to add my experience that sent me back to using spreadsheets, as I’d lost confidence in relying on Sharesight’s inconsistent and flawed methodology of splitting AMMA statement components into quarterly amounts and altering the distribution payment records.

The inconsistency is that Sharesight does have some actual quarterly data for a selection of ETFs, as does the ATO in their prefill data, but when they don’t get this feed, they just make an estimate/guess of each component based solely on the share of each quarter’s net cash amount.

The flaw is that as a taxpayer, I only receive 1 annual tax statement for each ETF, which covers the entire year, so the only way I can treat this information, based on my records, is as full year data and make any adjustments at the end of the year.

My investments are split between a portfolio that I manage myself and a 3rd-party professionally managed portfolio. Throughout the year, small tranches of shares are bought and sold to balance the components across both portfolios. This triggers capital gains events.

When I get the EOFY account reconciliation from my portfolio manager, they correctly assign any AMIT cost base adjustment for each year to June 30 and calculate CGT cost bases and gains/losses for that years events correctly.

When Sharesight moves the date some of the AMIT cost base adjustment amounts from 30 June to earlier in the year, using information I don’t receive as a holder of the ETF, or even just doing it arbitrarily, it incorrectly calculates the cost base of the units sold, and in doing so passes on the error to all other units continuing to be held.

Like others have noted, I frustratingly delete the perfectly entered periodic cash distributions, with payment advice documents attached, and enter a single balancing trust income event with a paid and ex date of June 30, in order to force Sharesight to make the correct calculations for my tax return and ongoing cost bases.

I don’t like having to make this workaround, as reporting is the main reason for my Sharesight subscription, and it leaves me wondering what I’m paying for.

I hope that in the future, Sharesight is able to come up with a solution that separates the tax reporting from the income events. (and improves the way they deal with trust and non-trust income from stapled securities, but that’s another topic).

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As a new user, I’ve tried to enter AMIT and annual tax summary data for ETFs and managed funds for last year and earlier. What a nightmare!
Just finding where to enter the info is a challenge. Why does this option only appear if you select a REPORT and have to specify a financial year in the date fields? Surely the information is a key part of the record for an ETF or managed fund holding and should be readily accessible in the same way as distribution details are.
I’d expect, having entered the data, to be able to provide a report that makes sense to my accountant and auditor of my SMSF. It needs to, at a minimum, show the items relevant to the ATO (e.g. 13C, 20E, etc) and any changes to the cost base in a clear statement.

Is there an ATO ruling to justify the Sharesight approach of allocating cost base changes proportionally over distributions during the year?
What is the cost base if I sell 50% of an ETF holding I’ve held for >12 months on Mar 30, 2022.
Is it:

  • the cost base as it was recorded on 30/6/21 as part of the SMSF financial records.
  • the cost base as determined by Sharesight retrospectively in September 2022 and applied proportionally to distributions for the periods ending 30/9/21 and 31/12/21.
  • the cost base proprtionally adjusted for 9 months (1/7/21-30/3/22) applied retrospectively when the cost base adjustment for the year is known.
    The choice will not only affect the cost base of the sale but the ongoing cost base of the remaining holding.
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Hi all,

Thank you for your patience. I want to clarify Sharesight’s logic around these distributions and how we apply our logic to the Taxable Income Report.

Firstly with CGT components (and all components for that matter) ETF and fund investors will receive an end of year tax statement but we will always apply the components to each payment. We do this to ensure the correct and most accurate reporting for capital gains is displayed at any point during the financial year.

To address the concerns around how we split off the cost base components in particular: Sharesight splits these adjustments into each payment in the financial year as we believe this is the most accurate way to track your cost base throughout the year.

We base this on getting the most accurate capital gains on any potential sales that may occur throughout the year where the cost base would be adjusted. It should be noted that none of our component adjustments will affect the final dividend/income amount, this will always remain the same.

As an example:

  • You own 100 units in a fund at the start of the FY and sold 90 units halfway through the year.
  • Throughout the year you also receive quarterly payments.
  • Adjusting the cost base at the end of the FY would lead to the cost base of the remaining 10 units based on the 100 units that you owned at the start of the FY.

As we split off the components, your CGT for the sale would have adjusted the cost base as each payment comes through. Firstly, this leads to more accurate CGT reporting on the sale. Secondly, the next two cost base adjustments would be more accurate as these would be based on the 10 units you continued to hold until the end of that FY.

Last financial year, we received and updated components for around 550 funds, with form checks being run regularly on all corporate actions in Sharesight. For these funds, we distribute the components across each applicable payment as per the logic above. This is accurate down to the cent through rounding methods used by Sharesight. Vanguard provides us with more detailed information on components per quarterly payment. We’re confident that we have accurate information being distributed across the report.

We acknowledge that we can make improvements to this report. The feedback shared has led to our team adding in labels on each component to fill out that matches the end of year statement. You can expect to see this from the week of March 7th.

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I appreciate the changes that Sharesight are making to improve this process.

The problem I have is that it is recommended not to confirm any dividends from ETFs until after Sharesight have entered the AMIT info in August/September. The result is that no dividend income appears in my Cash account and I am unable to check the Cash account balance against my bank statements nor have an accurate assessment of cash holdings within Sharesight.

I suggest the following 2 step approval process:

  1. users should be able to confirm the cash amount received from a dividend distribution. This figure will not change and the amount should appear in the Sharesight Cash Account. This might occur quarterly during the year.
  2. The tax treatment of the dividend income is confirmed after the AMIT data becomes available aftr the end of financial year. The cash amount received should not be able to be changed by this process. If I received $1,219.34 as my 1st quarter dividend in October, the AMIT reconciliation process, that occurs 8-9 months later, should never change that amount but rather divide it into the appropriate categories for tax and cost base purposes.

The payment amount & tax should change regardless of whether the payment is confirmed or not. The AMIT components are simply adjusted when actioned through the Taxable Income Report, and shouldn’t change the final amounts paid.

If you’re seeing this, please reach out to our support team directly and we can look into this.

The problem is that unconfirmed payouts do not appear in my linked cash account until they have been confirmed.
Sharesight recommends leaving ETF dividends unconfirmed until AMIT data is incorporated.
So an October dividend will appear in Sharesight but not in the cash account until 9 months later when the AMIT data is available and the payout is confirmed for the first time. That is a problem for me.

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Thanks for clarifying. Is this a Xero cash account? If you haven’t already, reach out to our support team and we’ll work on the issue at hand. I’ll update this thread once resolved :+1: