Contract notes, ledgers, P&L statements and bank records — the archive that makes tax season and disputes painless.
Key takeaways
- Download contract notes and ledgers monthly, not annually.
- Keep trading bank transactions separate from personal ones.
- Reconcile broker statements with your own journal quarterly.
Brokers provide contract notes for every trading day, monthly ledgers and annual P&L and tax statements. Download them monthly and store them in a dated folder structure. Retrieval limits and platform migrations make late retrieval unnecessarily difficult.
Use a dedicated bank account for trading. Mixed accounts make it hard to demonstrate the source and use of funds, complicate expense claims and make reconciliation tedious.
Reconcile quarterly. Compare the broker's P&L with your own journal and investigate any discrepancy immediately — differences usually reveal an untracked charge, a missed trade in the journal, or occasionally an actual error worth raising.
For prop payouts, keep invoices, TDS certificates and bank credits together with the firm's statements. A complete file turns filing season into an afternoon rather than a fortnight.
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