Schedule FA Excel Template — Build One or Skip It?

6 min read · Published July 2026 · Applies to AY 2026-27

Searching for a Schedule FA Excel template usually means one thing: you have US stock in a Fidelity, Schwab, E*TRADE, or Morgan Stanley account and want to organise the numbers before touching the ITR portal. There is no official CBDT workbook template for the whole schedule — the portal's offline utility imports a full-return JSON, not a single schedule (the portal does offer its own per-table CSV template for direct bulk-upload, which is a different, narrower thing — see the CSV bulk-upload guide). So here is exactly what a DIY spreadsheet needs, where it tends to break, and the honest line between "Excel is fine" and "use a tool".

The columns you need

Table A2 — the custodial account

• Institution name and address (e.g. Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC), account number, opening date
• Peak balance during Jan–Dec — converted at the SBI TTBR on that peak date, not Dec 31's rate — and closing balance on Dec 31 — both in INR
• One Nature of Amount (dividend, interest, sale proceeds, or other) plus its own Amount, per row — an account with both dividends and sale proceeds in the same year needs two A2 rows, not one row with two amount columns

Table A3 — the shares, one row per lot

• Entity name, address, ISIN of the stock
• Acquisition date (vest date for RSUs, purchase date for ESPP)
• Initial value in INR = USD cost basis × SBI TTBR on that exact date (not Rule 115 — see why — look rates up with the free SBI TTBR lookup)
• Peak value, closing value, income and sale proceeds per lot

Where the spreadsheet breaks

1. TTBR lookups. Every lot needs the SBI TTBR for its own acquisition date, plus Dec 31 for closing values. SBI publishes rates as daily PDFs; weekend and holiday dates need the last published rate. Ten lots means ten separate lookups — and using Income-tax Rule 115's preceding-month rate instead of the correct exact-date rate is the classic silent error.
2. Peak balance. The peak is the highest value during the year, which means a month-by-month (or better) price series multiplied by the shares you actually held in each month and that month's TTBR. This is the hardest cell in the whole schedule to get right by hand.
3. Converting the peak at the wrong day's rate. The peak USD value must convert at the SBI TTBR on the date it peaked — not a single blanket date (Dec 31, or the account's own peak date reused for a different lot). Get this wrong and a lot that genuinely peaked higher in USD can show a lower INR peak value than its own initial or closing value, which reads as an internal contradiction to anyone reviewing the sheet.
4. Lot explosion. Monthly vests over three years is 36 rows before ESPP purchases and sell-to-cover lots. Each row carries its own dates, rates and values — copy-paste errors scale with the row count.
5. Integers only. The portal rejects decimals in INR fields; every formula needs a final round-off that's easy to forget.

The honest verdict

One or two lots, no sales, and some patience with SBI rate PDFs — a careful spreadsheet is perfectly workable. Regular vests, ESPP, or any sales during the year — the lookup and peak-balance work grows fast, and a wrong rate on a single lot quietly misstates the disclosure. A Schedule FA generator does the same math from your broker CSVs in about two minutes: it filters events to the Jan–Dec window, fetches the exact-date TTBR for every lot, computes peak and closing balances, and exports the result as an Excel workbook anyway — so you still get the spreadsheet, just filled in.

FAQ

Related guides

• SBI TTBR Rate & Rule 115 — the exact-date exchange rate
• Calendar year vs financial year in Schedule FA
• Table A2 vs A3 — which value goes where
• Schedule FA CSV bulk-upload — the exact format that works