Every broker produces a document headed something like "capital gains statement", and every one of them computes the gain differently.
That is not carelessness. The broker knows what was bought and sold through that broker. It does not know what else the client holds, what the grandfathered cost is for a holding transferred in from somewhere else, or which of two lots the client intends to treat as sold.
So the broker's gain figure is an input, not an answer, and the most useful thing a practice can do is keep the reading of the file and the working out of the tax firmly apart.
Two jobs, and why they should not be one
Reading the file means turning whatever the house printed into plain lines: a buy, a sell, a corporate action, each with a date, a quantity, an amount and an instrument.
Working out the gain means applying holding periods, grandfathered costs, indexation where it still applies, set-off rules and the rates for the year.
The first is a document problem and it is stable. The second is a law problem and it changes with every Finance Act.
Merge them and two bad things happen. A change in the law means editing the thing that reads files, which is how a reading regression gets shipped in a tax update. And a figure can no longer be traced: you cannot tell whether a wrong gain came from a misread row or a misapplied rule, which is exactly what you need to know when a client questions it.
Kept apart, the reading says "these are the transactions" and the computation says "and this is the gain, under these dated rules", and either one can be checked without the other.
The shapes a practice actually receives
A real client folder has several, and they are not interchangeable.
The consolidated account statement covers holdings across registrars and is the closest thing to a complete picture of a client's mutual fund history. Per-broker statements cover one relationship. Contract notes are the primary document for a single trade and are the only thing that settles a dispute about a price.
Each house lays its file out differently, and several change the layout between years. The useful property of a reading step is that whatever goes in, one shape comes out, so the computation does not need to know which house a line came from.
What it must also do is refuse. A file it does not recognise, from a house it has no layout for, has to say so plainly rather than read it approximately. An approximate read of a trade file is indistinguishable from a correct one until somebody checks a total.
Pro tip
Ask for the consolidated account statement for mutual funds and the broker ledger plus contract notes for equity, every year, in the same request. Chasing the second half in July is where the time goes.
The decimal places that break a quantity
A detail that sounds trivial and is not.
Equity trades in whole shares. Mutual fund units do not: a systematic plan produces quantities to three or four decimal places, and a redemption is usually of a fractional holding. A reading step that stores quantities as whole numbers loses the fraction, and a reading step that stores them as ordinary decimal numbers accumulates rounding across a few hundred instalments.
The safe approach is to keep quantities as whole numbers of a small fixed fraction, say ten-thousandths of a unit, and to have every file state the scale it was read at, so that anything consuming it can refuse a file it would otherwise read at the wrong scale.
The same discipline applies to money. Hold it in paise as whole numbers and divide once at the end, which is the rule that keeps a GST return file to exactly two decimals as well.
It matters because the error is small, systematic and invisible. Nobody reviews a unit balance to four decimal places, and a figure that is off in the fourth decimal across two hundred instalments is off in the rupees by the time it reaches the return.
Corporate actions are not transactions
A bonus issue, a split, a merger and a buyback all change what the client holds without a purchase or a sale, and each one is handled differently for cost.
They have to be read out of the file as what they are. A split silently recorded as a purchase of the new shares at nil cost produces a gain that is wrong in a way no total will reveal, because the quantity and the cash both reconcile.
This is the clearest case for keeping the reading honest and letting the law layer decide: the file says "there was a split in this ratio on this date", and what that does to the cost of each lot is a rule, dated, that someone can check against the provision.
Important
A statement that shows only the net position after a corporate action, without the action itself, cannot support a defensible gain computation. Go back for the registrar statement rather than reconstructing it.
What a defensible figure looks like
When the client asks where a number came from, and at some point one of them will, the answer should be reachable in three steps: this line in this file, read this way; this dated rule, quoted; this arithmetic.
That is also what makes a gap possible. Where a rule has not been verified against the official text for the year in question, the right output is no figure and a reason, not a figure computed from last year's rule. A capital gains working with two holes and six good numbers is more use than eight numbers where two are quietly stale.
The gain then flows into the return the same way every other head does, from the computation sheet rather than from the portal's own view of the client. The prefilled JSON will often carry a securities figure, and it is there to be compared against the working, not copied into it.
Conclusion
The broker is telling the truth about what happened in that account. It is not in a position to tell you what the gain is, and a figure adopted from it is a figure you cannot defend in detail.
Separate the two jobs. Read the files into plain transactions, keep quantities precise enough for mutual fund units, carry corporate actions as themselves, and apply the law on top with every rule dated and quotable.
Greenote reads broker and mutual fund statements on your own PC into one shape whatever house they came from, with no tax rule anywhere in the reading, and applies the dated rules separately so a rule it cannot verify leaves a gap rather than a number. See what the return workspace covers.
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