Account reports are dull until the week you need them, at which point they become urgent and confusing simultaneously. Your accountant asks for something, the reports page offers five things, and the names do not obviously map onto the request.
Here is what each one is.
Tradebook
What it is. The complete record of every executed trade over a period — instrument, quantity, price, date, buy or sell, with charges.
What it is for. This is the raw material. Every gain and loss calculation is derived from it, and it is the document to reach for when you need to reconstruct what actually happened.
When you need it. Computing capital gains, resolving a dispute about a fill, or working out what you did during a period you no longer remember accurately.
Read it once a year even if nobody asks. Traders consistently underestimate their trade count and overestimate their win rate. The tradebook is the correction, and it is usually uncomfortable.
Ledger
What it is. The money record. Funds in, funds out, charges debited, credits received, running balance.
What it is for. Reconciling cash. The tradebook says what you traded; the ledger says what happened to your money.
When you need it. Confirming a payout, checking a charge you did not recognise, or reconciling against bank statements.
The one to check when something looks wrong. If your funds are not what you expected, the answer is in the ledger. Charges, penalties and adjustments all appear here, and a shortfall penalty you did not know you had incurred will show up in this document and nowhere else you routinely look.
Contract note
What it is. The legal confirmation of trades for a given day — trades executed, prices, and a full breakdown of charges and taxes.
What it is for. It is the primary evidence document. Where a dispute arises about what was executed and at what price, the contract note is what counts.
When you need it. Disputes, and any situation requiring documentary proof of a specific day's activity.
Worth reading occasionally even without a dispute, because the charge breakdown is itemised. Most traders have never read a full breakdown of what a trade cost them, and the exercise changes how they think about frequency. The applicable rates are set out on the trading charges page.
Tax report
What it is. Trading activity organised for tax purposes — gains and losses categorised in the form tax computation requires.
What it is for. Filing. It takes the tradebook and arranges it into the categories that matter for tax rather than the chronological order that matters for trading.
When you need it. Annually, at filing time.
The essential caveat, stated plainly: this is a report, not tax advice. It organises your activity. It does not determine how your specific situation should be treated, and that determination depends on facts the report does not contain — whether your activity constitutes business income or capital gains, your other sources of income, your residency status, and treatments specific to your circumstances.
Give it to a qualified professional. The report is the input to that conversation, not a substitute for it.
TOR — turnover report
What it is. A summary of turnover across segments for a period.
What it is for. Turnover figures are needed for several compliance purposes, and the definition of turnover is not the same as the value of your trades. It is computed differently across segments, and derivatives in particular follow rules that surprise people who assume turnover means the notional value of contracts traded.
When you need it. When an accountant asks for it — typically in connection with audit applicability thresholds.
Do not compute this yourself. The segment-specific rules are exactly the kind of thing that is easy to get wrong and consequential when wrong. Use the generated report.
Which one is being asked for
A rough translation of common requests:
- "Send me your trade details" → tradebook
- "I need your capital gains statement" → tax report
- "What is your turnover?" → TOR
- "Can you show me the fund movement?" → ledger
- "I need proof of that trade" → contract note for that date
When genuinely unsure, the tradebook and ledger together contain nearly everything. The others are those two, reorganised for a specific purpose.
Why the reports and your spreadsheet disagree
They always do, and the reports are right. Common causes:
Charges. Personal records track prices. The reports track prices and brokerage, STT, exchange charges, GST and stamp duty. Charges are why your realised gain is smaller than your arithmetic suggested.
Corporate actions. Splits, bonuses and dividends change your holding without a trade. Manual records rarely handle these correctly.
Partial fills. An order filled in three parts is three trades at three prices. Spreadsheets tend to record one intended fill.
Expired derivatives. Contracts that expired worthless still occurred and still count. They are easy to forget precisely because nothing was actively closed.
The general principle: the reports are the record, your spreadsheet is a recollection. When they conflict, update the spreadsheet.
Habits worth adopting
Download annually, at minimum. Tradebook, ledger and tax report at the end of each financial year, stored somewhere you will still have access to in five years.
Check the ledger quarterly. Unexpected charges are far easier to query near the event than eleven months later.
Read one contract note in full, once. The itemised charges on a single day's trading are more educational than any article about costs, this one included.
Reconcile before filing, not during. Discovering a discrepancy in the last week of the deadline is an avoidable kind of stress.
What these reports are not
Worth being explicit, because the boundary matters.
- Not tax advice. They organise data. A qualified professional interprets it for your situation.
- Not a performance analysis. The tradebook shows what you did, not how well. For that you need a benchmark, and reading your portfolio honestly covers why a raw percentage misleads.
- Not a substitute for your own records of intent. No report captures why you took a trade. That log is yours to keep, and it is the one that actually improves your decisions.
Report downloads and money-transfer actions sit outside the portfolio layer, on the reports surface. Keep the annual set somewhere durable — the year you need them urgently is never the year you expected to.