Investing and tax time

Hi Carla,

Thanks for a great question and hopefully we can help a little with growing your confidence here to a toddler level at least :)

I’m sure many people would be in the same boat of wanting to complete tax returns independently. The good news is that if you are mainly buying and holding your investments (not selling), it should be a pretty straightforward process. Given that everyone’s circumstances are different and the various investing products we offer, we’ve created the following pages to help you get a better understanding of how we can assist at tax time:

https://pearler.com/tax-return

Your dividends and distributions data should be pre-filled to the ATO at tax time if you have provided us with your TFN. If not, the share registries will still release dividend or managed investment distribution statements that contain all the information you need to complete your tax return. Check out this article for details steps on how to download these statements.

If your portfolio includes any US-domiciled shares or ETFs (i.e. ASX:VEU & ASX:VTS), you may need to fill out a W-8 BEN form via your share registry to avoid being taxed twice. You should always refer to the Product Disclosure Statement (PDS) of the investment to learn where your investment is domiciled.

Apart from the above, we also support integrations with popular performance tracking and tax reporting tools such as Sharesight and .css-1ihet4v{box-sizing:border-box;margin:0;min-width:0;font-size:14px;line-height:22px;font-weight:400;-webkit-transition:all 0.3s ease;transition:all 0.3s ease;display:inline-block;color:var(--theme-ui-colors-primaryDark,var(--primaryDark));margin-bottom:16px;}.css-1ihet4v img{max-width:100%;}

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Hi Carla, great question.

When you start investing in shares, it’s usually very straightforward as far as tax goes.

After the end of financial year, your share funds (Vanguard, Betashares,etc) will typically sent all the info to the ATO automatically. So if you wait until say August, September, all the dividend information tends to show up by itself on the mygov ATO portal.

Then it’s just a case of checking the information is accurate by comparing that to the dividend statements you receive during the year (or by comparing it to the record that Sharesight has). If you don’t have a Sharesight account, you can get a free one which you can then link to Pearler so that all your purchases + dividends + performance can be recorded there automatically too.

Hope that helps.