Sometimes you may see that the calculated price of a crypto you had added is completely wrong, or the capital gains and losses are just way off.

This could be down to the symbol name for the crypto and the price lookups we have to perform.

Unfortunately, there is no standard for crypto symbols like there is for stocks and shares. So if your wallet has trades for "WHALE" then that could mean a number of different crypto assets. There are currently 4 different crypto assets that use the WHALE symbol, all with differing prices.

While this issue has always existed in the crypto world, it is becoming more and more an annoyance and can lead to erroneous data.

How can I fix it?

tl:dr; use our Symbol Mapping feature in your Account settings

There are a few ways to fix this.

1) Custom Pricing

If we do not have the crypto pricing for an asset you can enter your own value. This is simple when it's Income or Spending, or a trade for fiat, but if it's crypto-crypto then that is more complicated. You could split the trade into 2 parts, sell an asset for a fiat amount and then buy the new one with that same amount. However, that is a lot of effort and there are better ways.

2) Unique Symbol Names

We try and maintain unique names for crypto symbols. If you visit out crypto pricing page at https://bitcoin.tax/prices, you'll see the list of current prices for the major crypto symbols we track. If we search for WHALE, we'll see a number of crypto, include Whale, White Whale, Blue Whale and Crypto Whale, all using the same symbol.

However, for each of these you'll see we have another symbol name, for instance, White Whale is "WHITEWHALE". If you used WHITEWHALE instead of WHALE you will get the correct pricing.

That's good for building a CSV, but what if you are importing from an exchange. It would mean you would have to download the entries, change them, and then reupload them. 

3) Symbol Mapping

In your Account settings there is a Symbol Mapping section.

Here you can enter the symbol name, e.g. WHALE and then select the actual crypto asset from our tables of the one you own.

Here we can choose the specific one we want to associate and then all price lookups will use this asset.

Search and find the symbol you want to map, and click OK. Remember, you also have to click the Update button at the bottom of the page.