48 lots. 48 INR cost bases. 48 LTCG countdowns. My spreadsheet was a liability.

Netflix has one of the most unusual compensation structures in tech. There are no formal performance bonuses — instead, total compensation is delivered primarily as salary, and for engineers at certain levels, a significant RSU component. What makes it different from every other company I know: RSUs vest monthly. Every month, like clockwork.

I've been at Netflix for four years now as a Staff Engineer. That means 48 vests. 48 separate lots of NFLX, each with its own vest date, its own INR cost basis, and its own 24-month LTCG countdown.

The spreadsheet phase

I'm an engineer. My first instinct was to build a system for this. I set up a Google Sheet in 2021: vest date, number of shares, USD price at vest, SBI TT rate for that day, INR equivalent, LTCG unlock date. Twelve new rows per year. I updated it manually every month after each vest.

For the first year and a half, it worked. The sheet was accurate, I felt in control, and I could see my LTCG windows clearly.

Then I started missing months. A vest would land while I was in a design review week, and I'd tell myself I'd update the sheet over the weekend. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I didn't. By late 2023, I had a backlog of 6–7 lots with incomplete data.

The CA notice

In early 2024 I received a notice from my CA. One of my NFLX lots — lot 31, vested in March 2022 — had an incorrect INR cost basis on my ITR. I had used the SBI TT rate from March 15 when the actual vest settlement was March 14. The difference was small in absolute terms but enough to trigger a mismatch flag.

The correction was manageable. The embarrassment, less so. I'm a Staff Engineer. I build systems that process millions of events without errors. I couldn't maintain my own 48-row spreadsheet.

What Rovia actually solved

I moved to Rovia after the notice. The onboarding took about 20 minutes. I uploaded my Morgan Stanley transaction history, and Rovia imported all 48 lots — vest dates, share counts, USD prices, and the INR cost basis at each vest date, pulled from SBI TT rate records for each specific day.

The dashboard shows all 48 lots. Each one has a status: long-term eligible (green), approaching the window, or still short-term. When I need to decide which lots to sell, I can see at a glance which ones have the most favourable tax treatment.

My May 2025 vest arrived and was imported automatically. I didn't open a spreadsheet.

The thing nobody tells you about Netflix comp

Monthly vesting sounds like a benefit — and it is, financially. But the tax complexity scales linearly with tenure. A new joiner has 12 lots after year one, manageable. I have 48, which means 48 separate INR calculations that all need to be right.

The standard advice is "just track it in a spreadsheet." That advice is fine for quarterly vesting. For monthly vesting, it's advice that eventually produces a CA notice. I know this from experience.