5 CoinTracking Mistakes Beginners Make (And the Fixes)

The Five Mistakes at a Glance

CoinTracking does not guess. It shows you exactly what it was given, transaction by transaction. The logic is straightforward: incomplete or miscategorised input produces an incomplete output, and the software has no way to know that on its own.

The five mistakes below: an unchecked import, a miscategorised staking reward, a skipped discount, a late start, and error reports left unopened. None of these are software bugs, and most of them take only a few minutes to fix once you know where to look. A large or genuinely messy transaction history is the exception, where the fix takes longer or is worth handing to CoinTracking's own Full-Service team instead.

In practice, we use CoinTracking ourselves for our own crypto tax reporting, which is where this list comes from. If your portfolio spans traditional assets too, our Parqet review covers a comparable tracker for stocks, ETFs and real estate.

Our Video Walkthrough

We recorded all five mistakes on screen, including where they show up inside a CoinTracking account.

Mistake 1: Importing Data Without Checking It

The mistake is not importing incorrectly. It is importing and assuming the result is correct without looking.

An exchange's API or CSV export can be incomplete. This can show up around DeFi swaps, internal transfers or older trades an exchange no longer surfaces cleanly. CoinTracking cannot detect data that never arrived; it can only show you the imported transaction list, exactly as received.

The fix is straightforward and starts with one comparison. After an import, open the balance CoinTracking calculated for that exchange. Match it against the balance shown on the exchange itself. A mismatch is a clear sign something is missing. Agreement holds up as a good first check, though it confirms the current balance, not necessarily every historical transaction, date or classification behind it. Either way, it is worth checking early, before the transaction count grows into the hundreds and a gap gets harder to trace.

Mistake 2: Misclassifying Staking, Airdrops and Rewards

CoinTracking's smart categorisation detects a lot of activity automatically, including many DeFi swaps, staking rewards and similar transactions, sorting each into one of more than 40 transaction types. The mistake is trusting that automatic classification without checking it, especially on transaction types the platform flags as uncertain or leaves for manual review.

The one caveat is that tax treatment for staking, airdrops and mining differs by country, sometimes sharply. What counts as income on receipt in one jurisdiction may be taxed only on disposal in another. CoinTracking's transaction types give you the categories to sort activity correctly, whether assigned automatically or by hand. They do not tell you which category applies where you file. That part is worth a few minutes with your own country's guidance, or a tax advisor, before the report goes out.

Whatever actually happened on-chain should show up as the matching transaction type in CoinTracking. A staking reward left as a generic deposit, whether by an automatic miss or a manual entry, looks harmless in the moment. It turns into a surprise the day the tax report is generated.

Mistake 3: Leaving the Bitcoin Payment Discount on the Table

This one is easy to miss on the payment screen. CoinTracking accepts one-time Bitcoin payments through NOWPayments and Crypto.com, and doing so comes with a 5% discount on the licence, according to CoinTracking's own pricing FAQ.

It is a minor drawback next to import accuracy. If you already hold Bitcoin and were planning to pay by card anyway, switching the payment method at checkout is worth doing. Any tax consequences of spending that Bitcoin are a separate question for your own situation, not something this discount changes.

Separately, our own referral link currently carries up to 15% off. Whether the two combine depends on the checkout, so check the final price rather than assuming. Our CoinTracking discount code guide walks through exactly how to activate it and what it does and does not cover.

Mistake 4: Starting Too Close to the Deadline

A single coin bought once, moved to a hardware wallet and later sold already produces four transactions: the buy, the withdrawal, the matching deposit and the sale. Multiply that across a full year of trading on more than one exchange, and the count adds up quickly.

Starting early is not about discipline for its own sake. It is about catching a broken import while there is still time to fix it, whether that means contacting an exchange's support or digging up an old CSV export. The alternative is discovering the gap the week a filing is due. On top of that, CoinTracking's plans cover every past and future tax year in one subscription. Setting up a paid plan early does not mean paying twice for the same tax year later.

Mistake 5: Skipping the Built-in Error Reports

CoinTracking ships with reports built specifically to catch the kind of import gap described in mistake one. In our own experience, they are easy to forget until something already looks wrong. They are less suited to mistake two: catching a wrong tax-category assignment usually still takes a human read of the transaction list, not just these three checks.

A missing-transactions check flags the gaps a broken or partial import leaves behind: a withdrawal on record with no matching deposit anywhere, or the other way round. A duplicate check catches transactions that came in twice, usually from overlapping API and CSV imports for the same exchange. A validation pass reviews the full transaction list for entries that do not add up. Running through all three before generating a tax report is worth the time it takes. That can be a few minutes, or considerably longer on a large or messy history. Skipping them does not break anything by itself. Any gap or duplicate they would have caught can still show up as an error once the report itself is generated.

One More Thing Worth Checking: Account Security

None of the five mistakes above are security issues, but a clean tax report is worth little if the account behind it gets compromised first. CoinTracking's own support pages carry an active warning about phishing emails impersonating the platform, aimed at getting a victim to enter exchange login details on a fake page.

CoinTracking states plainly that it never holds user funds and connects to exchanges through read-only API keys. That is a meaningful distinction from a wallet or an exchange, where a compromised account can move money directly. Two-factor authentication is available on the account itself and is worth enabling. A reused password from an unrelated breach is a well-known way any account, not just this one, ends up taken over. CoinTracking's security page names cointracking.info as its own communication domain, while its support page names freshdesk.cointracking.com specifically for support replies. Worth checking either against the sender before clicking a link in any unexpected email.

Comparing Starter, Pro and Expert

Is CoinTracking Worth Setting Up Properly?

For anyone trading on more than one exchange, yes. CoinTracking's own numbers back that up: 400+ exchanges and wallets, full DeFi and NFT support, and tax reports for 100+ countries. Cost-basis methods, including FIFO, LIFO and HIFO, number 11 to 14 depending on which of CoinTracking's own pages you check. None of that helps if the data going in is incomplete or miscategorised, which is the entire point of this article.

Beyond that, a quick note on the name. CoinTracking (cointracking.info, founded 2012 in Germany) is a separate company from CoinTracker (cointracker.io, founded 2017 in the US). CoinTracking says so directly on its own security page. The names are easy to confuse in a web search, and only one of them is what this article covers.

We are not licensed tax advisors, and this is not tax advice. CoinTracking's own AI Tax Saver feature carries the same disclaimer for the same reason: it surfaces legal optimisations from your data. It is not a substitute for a professional who knows your specific situation. In practice, get the import right and get the categorisation right. A proper tax advisor then has a clean starting point to work from, instead of a data set that needs rebuilding first.