Team: Dana Kessler, Author at CoinReckon

CoinReckon is a small editorial site. In this first wave there is one person behind it, and this page says who she is, what she does and where her expertise stops.

Dana Kessler

Dana (she/her) kept books for small businesses around Columbus, Ohio, for nine years. The work was reconciliations, 1099s for contractors and year-end packets handed to the clients' tax preparers. It is where she picked up the habit of matching every figure on a form to a source record.

She bought her first coins in 2017. She lived through the years when exchanges sent either nothing or a form that did not match reality, and she has prepared her own crypto schedules every season since. Those records span four exchanges, two hardware wallets and one year of DeFi that produced several thousand transactions.

Since 2021 she has written about crypto record-keeping full time. Each season she runs the same test data sets through the major tax programs and writes up where their outputs disagree.

What she does here

Dana writes and checks the tax section, /taxes/. Federal rules cite IRS sources and state rules cite the relevant state authorities, with tax years and evidence limits shown. Software claims come from a documented test or the vendor's own page, with any printed dates and access limits identified. What she adds is the part a form cannot do for you: finding the records, lining them up and seeing where they disagree.

What she is not

Dana is not a CPA and not an enrolled agent. She does not prepare returns for other people and holds no license. No page on this site is currently checked by a CPA or an enrolled agent. Nothing here is tax advice, and the disclaimer explains what that means for you.

Where the work comes from

A few of the situations behind the guides:

• A transfer between two exchanges arrived with no history, and the receiving exchange treated the coins as bought for nothing. She rebuilt the original purchase from an old email receipt and a bank statement.
• One test file went through several tax programs and came back with gains that did not agree. She spent hours finding which import rule caused each gap.
• A friend received an IRS letter proposing tax on the full proceeds of old sales, because no cost basis had been reported. She spent an evening assembling the purchase records that answered it.

How to reach her

Write to [email protected]. The contacts page has the details. There is no contact form, no newsletter and no comment section, so email is the only channel.

To see how the site works, read the editorial policy and the methodology.