GainsKeeper Review - why 3.4 stars?

Shlomi Lavi / updated: Mar 12, 2022

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What is GainsKeeper?

GainsKeeper is an on-premises Desktop-based business tax software to assist businesses in the accounting and financial aspects. GainsKeeper has all the necessary business tax features, including portfolio analytics, brokerage import, automatic corporate action adjustments, capital gain/loss capitalization, automatic wash sale adjustments, schedule D creation, Excel File Import, and Quicken & Ms. Money Import.

Apart from these features, you can also export your tax preparations on other taxation tools such as TaxAct, TaxBrain, CompleteTax, TurboTax, and TaxCut. GainsKeeper is available on both Windows and Mac OS to not restrict users device specifications.

The target user audience of GainsKeeper are small, medium, and large-sized organizations. The business natures supported by GainsKeeper include brokerage, fund investment, and active trader & individual investor communities. However, GainsKeeper can be used by other businesses as well, but the support is limited.

GainsKeeper is owned by Wolters Kluwer North America, which is part of CCH INCORPORATED. Located in Quincy, Massachusetts, United States, GainsKeeper has 50 employees, which makes it a small-sized organization.

GainsKeeper was developed in the year 1998 to help businesses with their accounting and taxation needs. GainsKeeper has continuously improved itself to meet the needs of modern enterprises and change taxation laws.

Who is it best for?

GainsKeeper is a useful solution for individual brokers as well as companies. The software is a particularly viable solution for investors, accountants and financial advisors working in big and small businesses. Different editions of the software cater the needs of individual users and organizations.

Basically if you are into any business that needs financial management and tax dealings, GainsKeeper can be a viable solution for you. The software offers reliable tax and investment calculation to maximize the savings on tax returns. Major industries that use this software include accounting, corporate service, transport operations, financial services, and others.

The software has thousands of clients around the world and the company has been operating in over 150 countries.

Main features and functionalities

For financial advisors and accounts, the software offers various tools to manage the tax lot accounting services of their clients. This includes tax lot matching, processing wash sales, and adjusting cost basis for corporate actions. The software automatically adjusts the corporate action adjustments, saving the tedious manual calculations.

For the purpose of portfolio optimization, the software provides various trading strategies in order to maximize the after-tax returns of the clients. You can also easily generate schedule D for tax filing. GainsKeeper provides integration and compatibility with most of the popular tax preparation solutions and allows you to export your tax information to other systems.

With this software you can create custom gain and loss reports. Additionally, you can download various free tax forms that suite your needs.

What is the actual cost?

There are five pricing plans offered by GainsKeeper. The subscription level Investor 150 costs around $69/ month. However, the subscription level Trader 1000, Trader 3000, and Trader 5000 cost around $179/month, $359/month, and $499/month, respectively. Whereas the Trader Elite package costs around $659/month. Although there are various pricing plans, there are no restrictions on the feature.

You get all the features that are offered by GainsKeeper. As compared to other accounting and taxation tools in the industry, the cost of GainsKeeper is high. Since many organizations prefer cloud-based setups with integrations, GainsKeeper can be a costly alternative.

ITQlick pricing score is 6.4 out of 10 (10 is most expensive). Access ITQlick pricing guide for GainsKeeper.

Pros

• GainsKeeper is specifically designed for the stock and broker industry
• It helps to aggregate investments and data and automates the tax process
• Portfolio management tool for easy analysis
• The software supports major formats for report creation including HTML, PDF and others.
• For investors and brokers, the software offers the important facility of pre-trade analysis.

Cons

• The price might be high for many users
• Reporting services of the software do not include wash sale reporting.
• There is no feature for loan & savings calculation on GainsKeeper.
• Unlike some major tax preparation solutions, you don’t have the facility of separate and joint filing.
• Productivity feature of deduction finder is not available on GainsKeeper.

How it stacks up?

Access a head to head analysis of GainsKeeper vs alternative software solutions.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Is GainsKeeper right for you or your business?

Although GainsKeeper has the necessary features for the accounting and tax needs of businesses. However, the other taxation tools offer similar feature set with better pricing supporting different organization sizes. Moreover, the overall user interface is not interactive with a basic graphical interface. However, GainsKeeper has no restriction on features. Therefore, the users do not need to pay any additional amount to get more features.