Can we all put our ideas for improvement of contract note?
Can Zerodha team please do the necessary modifications to show how these charges/fees/taxes are calculated in each contract note along the line items ?
for ex:
taxable value of brokerage : 0.01% of total turnover of 20 lakhs = 200 Rs
@Neostar we’ll soon be showing tradewise charges on the tradebook on Console. This should solve for the use case you have pointed out. Showing the tradewise charges on the contract note will be difficult, it’ll make the statement too cluttered and hard to decipher.
Also, as @siva mentioned, we follow the contract note format prescribed by the exchange. Brokers are directed to display a few disclaimers and notes in the contract note which we do. We’ll consider increasing the size of the font.
One way to work around this is the following: keep the current contract note format as it is, and add the extra information that @Neostar requested for, as an extra sheet or two to the contract note. This will not add to the clutter: those who were happy/satisfied with the current level of non-clutter can just ignore the extra pages.
As it is now, Zerodha’s contract notes make it impossible to read out the STT paid on each separate purchase/trade transaction that was done on a certain day. As far as I could figure out, we can only read out the total STT paid on all transactions done on one day, from that day’s Zerodha contract note. One can do some arithmetic acrobatics to infer the STT per transaction, but this gets very tiring very soon.
I know from past experience that this will come back to bite me when it comes to filing taxes, because there we are supposed to discount STT on both legs of the trade. So I have restricted myself to doing at most one trade a day using Zerodha so that I can easily figure out from today’s contract note what the STT I paid on purchasing a certain share was, when I sell it five years down the line.
This workaround suits my trading style, so I am OK with it. But I imagine most customers of Zerodha won’t be well served by restricting themselves to one trade a day, just so that they can be happy on their tax filing day later in the year or many years down the line. I also have a suspicion that Zerodha won’t find it very funny if everyone takes this route 
.
The ability to read out per-transaction STT amounts is critical for easily (and correctly) filing tax returns, so I would be very surprised if the contract note format mandated by NSE enforces that all STT be clubbed for the day, and not reported on a per-trade/per-scrip basis. The contract note from HDFC Securities explicitly lists the STT on a per-scrip basis, so this is definitely not prohibited by NSE.
Oops, I am not aware if I should be keeping track of individual trades. I thought Zerodha tax P&L report takes care of all these calculations per scrip/per trade. I am in for big trouble if this is not so as I have been taking many trades per day !
@siva or zerodha_team, can you please confirm if we need to keep track of our trades or Tax P&L report takes care of these ?
All these years i was filing itr1. Since iam in stonks since April 2020,for this tax year i have to file itr3.
All my trades are intraday or btst or max 3-7 days stocks.
No futures or options…
Iam also under assumption that i will just go with tax p&l given by zerodha. Whether tax audit or not i will figure out by march 31st after calculating turnover…
No stocks in dmat by march 31st &all funds in broker back in to bank account.
No trades on 30 & 31st march…
Regarding STT ,i have an active account in another broker apart from zerodha
scripwise (not trade wise ) STT is shown .infact intraday & delivery stt is shown separately & added to the total stt amount. Zerodha can give stt beeak up at the end…
The need to keep track of STT per trade arises when you are reporting the gains/losses from your transactions as capital gain/loss . If you are reporting this as business/speculative income and not as capital gains/losses, then you may not have to keep track of this. I have never had to do this latter thing till now, so I am not sure about the reporting requirements when it comes to non-capital gain incomes/losses from shares.
If you are reporting capital gains or losses from buying and selling shares, then you do have to know how much STT you paid on each trade. This is because we are, somewhat counter-intuitively, not allowed to discount the STT paid, from our gains. That is, suppose we do the following trades (all numbers made-up):
Bought 1000 shares of INFY on 01-Jan-2019 at a market cost of Rs.1000 per share. Paid Rs.1000 as brokerage, Rs.500 as stamp duty, Rs.200 as sundry charges and taxes, and Rs.1000 as STT.
Sold the above 1000 shares of INFY on 01-Aug-2020 at a market price of Rs.1500 per share. Paid Rs.1000 as brokerage, Rs.500 as stamp duty, Rs.200 as sundry charges and taxes, and Rs.1500 as STT.
Then the total money that we spent on acquiring these 1000 INFY shares is Rs.(1000x1000 + (1000 + 500 + 200 + 1000)) = Rs.1002700. And the total money that we got by selling these 1000 INFY shares is Rs.(1000x1500 - (1000 + 500 + 200 + 1500)) = Rs.1496800. So the net profit we made—the actual amount or rupees that we have extra in our account, because of this pair of trades—is Rs.(1496800 - 1002700) = Rs.494100. And 10% of this is Rs.49410, which is the marginal amount of tax that we assume we have to pay on these gains.
But for computing LTCG we are not allowed to write off the STT that we paid, as part of the cost of buying/selling. So we have to report these numbers as: total cost = Rs.(1000x1000 + (1000 + 500 + 200)) = Rs.1001700 and total amount realized = Rs.(1000x1500 - (1000 + 500 + 200)) = Rs.1498300, so that the total capital gains is Rs.(1498300 - 1001700) = Rs.496600. And the marginal tax on this is Rs.49660, which is more than what we found in the previous paragraph.
(Note that all the above numbers are bogus; my point was only to illustrate that not discounting STT has an effect in the tax liability, and so I didn’t put in any effort into making the numbers realistic. )
If we are to compute the tax liability correctly, we need to know the STT that we paid on each leg of the transaction. If you did 10 transactions (say 5 buy, and 5 sell) on 01-Jan-2019, 15 transactions (say 5 sell, 10 buy) on 01-Aug-2020, and Zerodha only tells you the total STT that you paid on each of these days, then you will have some real fun trying to keep track of the various STT amounts to add/subtract when doing the filing.
If you are mandated by Exchange on contract note format etc, please consider generating a tax filing/calculation friendly report in console showing column wise the charges(Xchg, SGST, CGST, STT, Stamp Duty, SEBI etc along with Total Charges column) for each trade.
At Annual Filing stage or at Advance Tax stage, your contract notes or present reports are not so friendly to file taxes. Only when you guys Trade/Invest yourself & more importantly file taxes/filings YOURSELF would you realise the utility of your present report formats 
May be if you tweet it tagging related ministries and secretaries, and PMO, there may be some action in this direction
