A year-end wheel review checklist

The end of the year is when a small recording slip becomes a wrong number on a form. This checklist is about your records: that they are complete, and that they match your broker. What your tax rules make of them is for those rules and for your adviser. It is not tax advice.

The checklist

1. Every expiry is resolved. Each option that expired during the year is recorded as expired, assigned or called away. In yourfinance, Weekly review lists what is left under Unresolved past expiries.
2. Your positions match your broker’s year-end statement. For each ticker: the shares, the open contracts, and their strikes and expiries.
3. Every roll is two legs. The buy-back and the new sale are both there, on the right dates. See How to record a roll.
4. Fees are in. Commissions and other fees on every trade, options and shares alike, as your statement shows them.
5. Assignments are recorded as assignments. Shares that came in from a put, or left through a call, move at the strike, recorded as that event and not as a separate trade typed in by hand.
6. Finished cycles are finished. When shares were called away, that cycle is complete. Weekly review shows the Completed cycles since previous review.
7. Realized and open are kept apart. The premium of an option that is still open has been collected, not realized. In the demo roll, 420 was collected and 150 is realized; the open call’s 240 is not.
8. Nothing is waiting for review. No record sits under Records requiring review or recovery. Close the year’s last review with Mark review complete, and Save report to keep a copy.
9. The year’s files are exported. On the Income page, Export annual CSV for your own records. For Germany, the Netherlands or Czechia, choose the country and the year under Tax-year export, then Export tax CSV. These files arrange your records for a year; they are not a tax calculation.
10. A backup is made, and kept somewhere else. In Settings & recovery, Export backup, then copy the file off your computer.

In a spreadsheet

The same checks apply. The ones a sheet misses most often are 1, 3 and 7: an expiry never closed out, a roll netted into one row, and open premium added up as income. The spreadsheet guide shows one row per event, which makes all three easy to see.

What to take to your adviser

The exports, your broker’s statements for the year, and a note of anything you corrected. Which figures your tax rules look at, the premium when it was received or the result when the option was closed, is for those rules to say. The tax-year file gives both, side by side, and does not add them together.