We Exported a Month of Transactions From Five Wallets
Which fields each provided, which required reconstruction, and how long reconciliation actually took.
Wallet selection usually happens on security features. We ran a month of real transactions through five and then tried to reconcile each. To reproduce any of this, a business crypto wallet with enforced approvals is the easiest starting point because nothing has to be requested.
The fields we needed
Transaction identifier. Timestamp with timezone. Asset and amount. Direction and counterparty. Fee amount and fee asset. Fiat value of the transfer and of the fee at the time. Rate source and methodology. Internal reference. Initiator and approver.
Eleven fields. Nothing exotic.
What we got
One provider supplied all eleven.
Two supplied nine, missing the fee’s fiat value and the rate methodology.
One supplied seven, missing both fee fields entirely. The fees were visible on-chain and had to be looked up per transaction.
One supplied a report that was not machine readable at all, requiring manual transcription.
The time cost
Reconciling the complete export: about forty minutes for the month.
The nine-field export: about ninety minutes, because fee values had to be calculated from rate data.
The seven-field export: four and a half hours, mostly looking up fees on a block explorer.
The non-machine-readable one: we stopped after two hours.
That is the difference between forty minutes a month and a recurring half-day.
The rate methodology problem
Three providers used a daily closing rate. One used the rate at the transaction timestamp. One did not state which.
If your accounting policy specifies one and the export uses another, every line disagrees slightly. It is not a large difference per transaction and it is a difference the auditor will ask about. The receiving side we measured through a regulated European crypto platform, where settlement is included.
Confirm the methodology and make sure it matches your policy.
The fee asset issue
Sending a token costs a fee in the network’s own currency. That is a separate disposal stream requiring its own valuation.
Only two providers reported it cleanly as a separate line. The others bundled it or omitted it, which means somebody reconstructs it. Test anything you are offered against the list of countries covered before committing to it.
What we would do
Ask for a sample export covering a real month before committing. Not a demonstration file with four rows.
Check the eleven fields. Check the rate methodology. Check whether it loads into your accounting system without editing.
That request takes a provider ten minutes and saves you a recurring half-day for as long as you use them.
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