How do you calculate Capital Gain/Loss with foreign shares???

Originally posted by alohame ↑

Thanks mate, appreciate it.

Are you asking your accountant to do it? How much is charged?
I think I roughly understand how it should be calculated, but also thinking it's gonna take me ages to sort this out.

For instance, in IB/Activity/Trades/Forex, I found so many forex transactions, some lump sum figures were exchanged to buy the shares, but also quite a few random numbers like $1, $5, $0.479, $0.12333 on various dates both AUD/USD and USD/AUD... that I had no idea what was it for and who did it! Can't imagine how much work needed just to match these buy/sell numbers and calculate forex gain/loss over the years... I can ignore all these, but it could mean that my calculation would be wrong or inaccurate, if ATO find out that I paid $1 less, will I be fined?
I'm pretty sure there are other places where small numbers or commission/fees/cost price has to be calculated propotionally coz I did too many partial buy/sell orders...

In the end, I cannot guarantee my calculation would be 100% accurate, will I be fined if ATO someday audit my account and found that I need to pay extra? btw it's overall capital loss due to asx shares.

"
Interest is converted to AUD at the exchange rate of the day the interest was applied to your account and gets added in with your other Australian interest.
"
Not sure if I misunderstood, but I think the foreign interest should only be calculated when it's exchanged back to AUD, you could claim $100 AUD worth of interest when USD applied to your account, but when exchange back to AUD, the USD probably only worth $70 AUD.

Expand

Are you asking your accountant to do it? How much is charged?

No I do the forex myself, but it is too complex to explain how it works here.

I only use IB reports as independent confirmation of what I buy and sell, dividends received, withholding tax paid and interest paid and received. I do everything on a spreadsheet, usually the day after when the IB activity reports are produced. This makes it much easier to keep track of things. The IB reports themselves are a dogs breakfast, particulalrly full year reports, and I am not sure how any accountant could decipher them unless they do it regularly.

Dividends received, withholding tax paid, interest paid and interest received are recorded for Australian Tax by converting to Australian dollars using the exchange rate of the transaction date that they are posted to your foreign currency account. It doesn't matter when the funds are repatriated to Australian dollars (this might never occur if you decide to leave everything in US currency).