ETrade Document Parsing
Document Types
Skatteguru processes three main types of ETrade documents to track your stock transactions:
Stock Plan Release Confirmation
Handles RSU (Restricted Stock Unit) releases, including information about shares released, tax withholding, and market values.
Stock Exercise Confirmation
Processes stock option exercises, including both cash exercises and same-day sales. Can contain multiple grants in a single document.
Trade Confirmation
Handles regular stock trades in both modern Morgan Stanley format and legacy ETrade format. Can contain multiple trades in a single document.
Event Types
When processing your documents, we generate standardized events that track different types of stock transactions:
RSU Vesting
Generated when RSUs vest and become actual shares.
- Number of shares vested
- Market value per share at vesting
- Grant details and FMV information
ESOP Exercise
Created when you exercise stock options.
- Number of shares exercised
- Grant price (strike price)
- Total cost (grant_price × shares + taxable_gain)
- Grant details and expected benefit tax
Sell
Generated for stock sales, including same-day sales.
- Number of shares sold (negative value)
- Sale price per share
- Commission and fees
- Net proceeds (gross proceeds minus fees)
Document Processing
RSU Release Confirmation
We extract key information including release date, and shares released. The system generates an RSU_VESTING event.
Stock Exercise Confirmation
For exercises, we process both cash exercises and same-day sales. With same-day sales, we generate both ESOP_EXERCISE and SELL events from the same document.
Trade Confirmation
We support both modern Morgan Stanley and legacy ETrade formats, processing multiple trades in a single document while handling various fee types.
Fees
We capture several types of fees from the documents to ensure accurate cost basis calculations:
Fees
- Commission fees per trade
- SEC regulatory fees
- Broker assist fees
- Disbursement fees - for immediate transfers out of ETrade after exercising options (e.g. $25 USD)
Disbursement Fees and Swedish Bank Fees
When transferring money from E*TRADE to a Swedish bank account later, the $25 USD disbursement fee won't show on the confirmation PDF. Add this fee, along with any Swedish bank processing fees, as COST events in Skatteguru to properly reduce your taxable profit.
Extreme Details: Document Parsing
RSU Vesting (Release) Events
For RSU releases, our parser performs careful validation and event creation:
- Validates that share counts are integers and award price is zero (RSUs vest at no cost)
- Confirms all market values are in USD
- Creates vesting events using market value per share as the cost basis
- Sets fees to zero since vesting has no exercise cost
Stock Exercise Events
Stock exercises involve more complex cost calculations:
Fee Aggregation
- Sums commission fees
- Adds broker assist fees
- Includes disbursement fees
- Factors in SEC fees
- Validates total fees match grant-level fees
Transaction Calculations
- Determines fair market value from sale price or exercise value
- Computes total transaction amount including exercise cost and tax implications
- For same-day sales: calculates net proceeds after commission
Data Integrity
Our system ensures accuracy through:
- Type-safe handling of monetary values with explicit currency tracking (and automatic conversion to SEK when needed)
- Cross-validation of totals between document header and individual grants
- Verification of share counts and monetary amounts across all calculations
- Special handling of edge cases like the $25 USD disbursement fee
Deduplication of Trades
When processing stock transactions, we often receive both a Trade Confirmation and a Stock Plan Exercise Confirmation document for the same same-day sale. This is because E*TRADE generates separate documents for option exercises and the associated sales.
Best Practice: Avoid uploading Trade Confirmations for same-day sales
If you only have stock option exercises with same-day sales, you do not need to upload Trade Confirmations at all. The Stock Exercise Confirmation already contains all the information about the sale. Uploading both documents may lead to duplicate entries that our system will typically, but not always, detect and ignore.
When should you upload Trade Confirmations?
- When you have bought shares and held them before selling (outside of stock option exercises)
- When you have received and then sold RSU shares
- When you have any other trades that are not part of a stock option exercise
Our system attempts to deduplicate events when both documents are uploaded by matching:
Matching Criteria
- Same stock symbol and account
- Identical transaction date
- Matching number of shares
- Equal price per share
- Consistent transaction type (e.g. SELL)
Source Document Handling
- Preserves metadata from both documents
- Combines source document references
- Retains exercise-specific information
- Maintains audit trail of merged events
If you see duplicate sales in your results:
Check if you have both a Trade Confirmation and a Stock Exercise Confirmation for the same date. If so, you can delete the Trade Confirmation document — the Stock Exercise Confirmation contains the same sale information and is sufficient for accurate tax calculations.
Important Note About Same-Day Trades
The deduplication system may face challenges when you have multiple identical trades on the same day. For example, if you:
- Sell the same number of shares
- At the same price per share
- Multiple times during the same trading day
If this happens, you can review the ignored events at the bottom of the Trade History tab, and click the Restore action for the ones you want to keep in your trade history.
We're Here to Help
Have questions or feedback? We'd love to hear from you. Get in touch.