Searching for a Schedule FA Excel template usually means one thing: you have US stock in a Fidelity or Schwab account and want to organise the numbers before touching the ITR portal. There is no official CBDT template — the portal's offline utility imports a full-return JSON, not a single schedule. 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".
Free sample Schedule FA workbook
See the exact Table A2 and A3 layout with sample values — the same format the generator exports.
Institution name and address (e.g. Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC), account number, opening date
Peak balance during Jan–Dec and closing balance on Dec 31 — both in INR
Gross amount credited (dividends, interest) and gross proceeds from sales during the calendar year
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 (Rule 115 — look rates up with the free SBI TTBR lookup)
Peak value, closing value, income and sale proceeds per lot
Where the spreadsheet breaks
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 Rule 26's preceding-month rate instead of Rule 115's exact-date rate is the classic silent error.
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.
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.
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
No — CBDT publishes none. Any spreadsheet is a working aid; values are entered in the portal manually or via CA software.
Not directly. The offline utility imports a complete return JSON. The spreadsheet organises your numbers; entry is still manual or through CA software.
SBI TTBR on the exact event date per Rule 115 — acquisition date for initial value, Dec 31 for closing. Not Rule 26's preceding-month rate.
Skip the lookups — get the filled workbook
Upload Fidelity or Schwab CSVs. ITRFA.in computes every A2/A3 value at exact-date TTBR rates and exports a ready Excel workbook plus JSON.