Demat records at tax-filing time

The plain answer

Your demat activity reaches the tax return through a small set of documents. The broker's capital gains statement nets the year's delivery trades; the contract notes sit behind it as the per-trade evidence; the Consolidated Account Statement (CAS) confirms what you held; and Form 26AS with the Annual Information Statement (AIS) carries the TDS credits and the department's view of your reported income.

The division of labour is fixed: the gains statement is the working document at filing time, and the rest exist for reconciliation. This page maps each document, what it proves, and when it appears during the year. It describes the records, not how to file any specific return.

The documents

Five documents, five jobs. The filing error to avoid is mixing them up: the CAS proves you owned shares, not what you earned; Form 26AS proves someone deducted tax on your behalf, not that your dividend was fully taxed; and the AIS shows what was reported about you, not what you owe. Each section below pins down one document's exact role.

From trade to return

The documents are not independent; they are stages of one chain, and the chain starts the moment an order executes:

Every stage exists because the next one summarises the one before. The contract note records the trade, the ledger accumulates the notes, the gains statement condenses the ledger, and the return reports what the statement computed. When a later stage looks wrong, the fix is to walk one stage back down the chain until the arithmetic matches.

The capital gains statement

This is the document your CA will ask for first, and for a delivery-only investor it is usually sufficient on its own. For every delivery trade in the financial year it lists the scrip, the buy date and sell date, the quantity, the reported cost of acquisition, the sale proceeds, the gain or loss, and the short-term or long-term classification.

The reported cost is not just the price you paid. The buy-side brokerage, STT and stamp duty sit inside it, and the sale value is the net amount after sell-side charges, which is why the statement's gain can differ from the simple price difference you remember. Corporate actions are also folded in, so a bonus issue or a split changes the quantity and average cost on the statement exactly as the law requires.

Where you bought the same share on several dates, the statement applies the broker's cost convention, first-in-first-out or average, to the sales it reports, and prints the cost basis it used. That printed number is the one the return works from, which is why the statement beats any spreadsheet you could keep on your own.

The statement issues after the financial year closes, once every trade has settled, and brokers keep it downloadable in the app and website for the years that matter. Download it once a year, in the same session that you glance at your CAS. Two files a year, and the evidence trail for the return exists without reconstructing anything from memory.

The contract notes

Every executed order produces a contract note, and the note is the atomic record the annual statement summarises. It shows the trade date, the rate and quantity, the brokerage with its rate, and every statutory line: STT, stamp duty, exchange transaction charges, SEBI fees and GST, plus the DP charge on delivery sells. Because each line prints with its own rate, the note is the document you can audit by hand.

Brokers issue the notes by email on the trade day, and they are required to retain them for a prescribed period, so old notes can usually be re-fetched from the app or the reports section. The practical habit is to store them without curating them: the note for any disputed trade is the first thing a CA will ask to see, and it settles arguments that no statement summary can.

The trading report for intraday and F&O

Intraday and futures and options never enter the capital gains statement. Brokers report them in a separate trading report, because the income from them is business income, speculative for intraday under Section 43(5) and non-speculative for futures and options. The report lists every trade with its buy value, sell value and charges, and nets the result into a profit or loss figure for the year.

The report feeds a different part of the return: the business income schedules of ITR-3, not Schedule CG. Where the business crosses the audit thresholds, the same report and the ledger behind it become the audit trail, which is one more reason the contract notes matter even though they are never filed with anything.

For a delivery-only investor this report is empty and ITR-2 stays correct. The moment a single intraday or F&O trade happens in the year, the report exists, ITR-3 applies, and the CA's first request changes from the gains statement to both reports together.

The CAS

The Consolidated Account Statement comes from the depositories themselves, NSDL and CDSL, not from your broker. Every month it lists every holding across every demat account linked to your PAN, with quantities, value and the month's corporate actions. When you hold accounts at two brokers or two depositories, the CAS is the one document that shows the whole picture.

At filing time the CAS plays a reconciliation role. It proves what you held at each month-end, which matters when cost needs reconstructing for old holdings, especially pre-2018 purchases where the grandfathered cost rules apply. It also confirms bonus and rights credits, which must match the quantities on the gains statement. When the statement and the CAS disagree on a quantity, the CAS is the authority, because it is the depositories' own record.

The CAS is also the document that proves ownership when no return question is involved at all: a bank loan application, an inheritance dispute or a plain audit of what you own. It is the neutral record in a system where your broker's app is one window and the depository's file is the ledger behind it.

Form 26AS and the AIS

Form 26AS is the tax credit statement. It lists the TDS deducted on your dividends (10% under Section 194 for residents with PAN, once the ₹10,000 yearly threshold from the financial year 2025-26 is crossed, and 20% without a PAN), along with TDS on other income. You view it through the TRACES portal after logging in at the e-filing portal, and it is the document that makes the TDS a claimable credit in your return.

The Annual Information Statement is wider. It lists what financial institutions have reported against your PAN: securities transactions, dividends, interest, purchases and sales of property, and more. The Taxpayer Information Summary condenses the AIS into the categories the return pre-filling uses. Both carry a feedback mechanism, so an entry that is wrong, duplicated or belongs to another year can be flagged at the source before you file.

The access paths are fixed and worth knowing once. From the e-filing portal after login, Form 26AS opens through the income tax returns section, which redirects to TRACES, and the AIS opens under the services section, with downloads in the standard file formats. Both are free, both are on demand, and neither requires a CA or a fee.

The filing habit that follows: before the return goes in, cross-check the AIS against your broker records, and cross-check the TDS amounts against your Form 26AS. A return that disagrees with the AIS without explanation is the most common invitation to a mismatch notice, and almost all such notices are avoidable with a ten-minute comparison.

Dividends and TDS credits

Dividends are income taxed at your slab, and the TDS deducted on them appears in Form 26AS as a credit against your total tax. The gross dividend is reported as income and the TDS is claimed as a credit, which is why the dividend line in the bank statement and the 26AS entry are both worth a glance at filing time.

The two documents should agree through simple arithmetic. If Form 26AS shows ₹1,200 deducted at the 10% rate, the gross dividend behind it is ₹12,000, and the bank or broker ledger should show that ₹12,000 arriving, minus the ₹1,200 deducted. When the bank shows a different gross, the mismatch usually traces to a PAN issue, a second dividend, or a credit that has not yet posted, and each has its own fix upstream of the return.

The full mechanics of the deduction, the threshold and the credit live on the TDS on dividends page.

When each document appears

Nothing on this list needs weekly attention. The two annual actions that matter are downloading the gains statement when it issues and reviewing the AIS against your records before filing. Everything else is available on demand, which is the point of the system: the records exist before you need them, and the habit is only to keep them.

What the department matches

The department assembles its own picture of your year from Statements of Financial Transaction filed by brokers, depositories and banks: every buy and sell, every dividend credit and every large bank movement reported against your PAN. The AIS is the readable form of that picture, and it is what your return is matched against after filing.

The matching is mechanical. The return's Schedule CG is compared with the reported securities turnover; the gross dividend in Schedule OS is compared with the reported dividend credits; the TDS claimed is compared with Form 26AS. A return that matches all three is processed quietly; a return that disagrees anywhere produces the standard notice asking for the difference.

That is the real reason the records on this page matter: they are not just your filing inputs, they are the documents that make your return equal the department's own picture. Two versions of the same year, yours and the department's, should be one version, and the records are what reconcile them.

Reconciling the records

Before any return goes in, four checks catch almost every mismatch the records can contain:

• Quantities: the closing quantity per scrip on the gains statement should match the month-end quantity in the CAS after every buy, sell and corporate action of the year.
• Corporate actions: every bonus or rights credit the CAS shows must appear in the statement's adjusted quantity and cost. A missing adjustment means a wrong gain.
• Dates: the buy date on the statement should match the date on your earliest contract note for that holding, because the holding period runs from that date.
• Dividends: the gross dividend in your bank and broker records should equal the TDS in Form 26AS divided by the deduction rate, ₹1,200 deducted at 10% means a ₹12,000 gross.

When a check fails, the mismatch usually matches one of these four fixes:

None of these checks needs accounting skill; each is a comparison between two numbers that should be equal. The value of doing them is quiet: a return filed on reconciled records does not produce a notice asking you to explain them later.

How long to keep records

The honest answer is: longer than most people assume. Capital losses carry forward for up to eight assessment years under Section 74, so a trade from this year can still be load-bearing in the arithmetic of a return eight years from now. The retention rule that follows is simple, and it is the same for every document in this page:

• Annual gains statements and year-end CAS: keep for at least eight years, one folder per financial year.
• Contract notes: keep for the same window; the broker retains its copies, but your own archive is the one you control.
• Form 26AS and AIS downloads: downloadable on demand, so archiving is optional, but a copy at filing time costs nothing.

The storage cost of a folder of PDFs is zero, and the cost of missing one when a notice arrives is a reconstruction exercise no one enjoys. The eight-year window is the number that makes the habit rational, not paranoia.

The habit that makes the calendar work is one folder per financial year. Statements, CAS files, notes and certificates drop into the folder as they arrive, and eight years of folders occupy less space than a single photo album on a phone. When a notice or a CA asks a question about any year, the answer is already filed.

A worked filing

A concrete year makes the roles concrete. Suppose the financial year 2025-26 ended with a long-term gain of ₹1,80,000 from delivery shares, a gross dividend of ₹12,000 on which the company deducted ₹1,200, and no other market activity.

• Capital gains: ₹1,80,000 minus the ₹1.25 lakh exemption leaves ₹55,000 taxable at 12.5%, which is ₹6,875.
• Dividend: the gross ₹12,000 is income taxed at your slab. At a 20% slab that is ₹2,400, reduced by the ₹1,200 TDS credit from Form 26AS, leaving ₹1,200 to pay.
• Total additional tax: ₹8,075 before the health and education cess, reported through Schedule CG and Schedule OS of ITR-2.
• AIS cross-check: the Annual Information Statement should list the same securities transactions and the ₹1,200 dividend TDS. Where it agrees with the return, the filing is ready; where it disagrees, the feedback option or a correction comes first.

Every number in that example came from a specific document: the gain from the broker's statement, the exemption from the law as applied in Schedule CG, the gross dividend from the bank and broker records, and the credit from Form 26AS. When the documents are in place, the return is an assembly job rather than a research project.

The limits of this page

What people usually get wrong

Questions people ask

Where to go next

Sources

• TRACES, Income Tax Department. “FAQs on Form 26AS for taxpayers.” Accessed 16 August 2026.
• Income Tax Department. “Annual Information System (AIS) tutorial.” Accessed 16 August 2026.
• Mint. “Annual Information Statement: Here's how to download Form 26AS.” Accessed 16 August 2026.
• National Securities Depository Limited. “NSDL official website.” Accessed 16 August 2026.
• Central Depository Services (India) Limited. “CDSL official website.” Accessed 16 August 2026.