“My exchange export will not import into my accounting software”
An exchange export describes quantities of assets at prices, not amounts of money, and most accounting importers have no field for the first two. What arrives is either rejected outright or flattened into a currency figure that loses everything the file was for.
Symptoms
The importer rejects the amount column as invalid Quantities with eight decimal places are truncated or rounded Trades, deposits and fees all arrive as the same transaction type
What actually causes it
Quantities carry more decimal places than money does
Accounting software stores amounts to two decimal places because currencies work that way. An asset quantity written to eight places either fails validation or is rounded to zero, and a zero-quantity holding is worse than no record at all.
One row can describe two assets at once
A trade removes one asset and adds another in a single line. A ledger built around a single amount per transaction has nowhere to put the second side, so half of every trade is silently dropped.
Fees are recorded in a third asset
Many exchanges charge fees in their own token rather than in either traded asset. That produces a third movement per trade that no two-column import format can carry.
How to fix it
- Use software built for asset tracking for the trades themselves, and import only the fiat movements into your general accounts.
- Check the export with the tool below before mapping: these files carry many columns and the layout changes between exchange versions.
- Where the exchange offers a tax or gains report, prefer it over the raw trade list for anything that ends up on a return.
- Keep the original export unchanged; recomputing gains later requires the full precision that any import will have discarded.
Related import problems
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The checker reports column structure and separator so a layout change between exchange versions does not silently shift your mapping. Free, no signup, no upload.
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