I spent a full weekend every July rebuilding my own cost basis. Then I found Rovia.

I joined Google in 2018 as an L5 SWE and got promoted to EM in 2021. By the time I started thinking seriously about my RSUs, I had six years of quarterly vests — 24 lots of GOOGL sitting in Morgan Stanley at Work.

Every July, the same ritual. Download the Shareworks annual statement. Open a spreadsheet. For each lot: find the vest date, look up the SBI TT rate for that exact day on the RBI website, compute INR equivalent, record it. Twenty-four rows. Twenty-four manual calculations. Then cross-reference with my CA's Schedule FA template.

It took me a weekend the first time. By year four, I had it down to a Saturday — but it still dominated my calendar from the moment the financial year ended.

The year it broke

In 2023, my CA sent me a bill with a line item I hadn't seen before: "Complex foreign asset reconciliation — ₹15,000." I called him. He explained that my Schedule FA had errors — two of my SBI TT rates were from the wrong dates. I'd pulled rates for the date I *received* the vest notification, not the actual vest settlement date, which differed by a day or two. That's ₹15,000 to fix my own mistakes.

That's when I started looking.

I'd heard about Rovia from a colleague on my team. She had moved her GOOGL lots the previous quarter and mentioned it casually. I spent about an hour reading about it that week.

What I expected vs. what happened

I expected another brokerage account — something like IBKR or Vested, where you transfer shares in and then figure out the India tax side yourself. What Rovia actually does is different: it holds the INR cost basis *as data*, not just as shares.

When I transferred my lots from Morgan Stanley, Rovia matched each lot to its vest date and pulled the SBI TT rate for that specific day. Not an approximation. The actual rate, source-referenced. My first Schedule FA export took me 47 minutes — and most of that was me double-checking the output because I couldn't believe it was done.

What I tell other Googlers

The Morgan Stanley Shareworks interface isn't designed for Indian tax compliance. It was built for US employees. The USD reporting, the wire-heavy repatriation flow, the complete absence of anything India-tax-adjacent — it's not a flaw, it's just not built for us.

Rovia is.

I still have my Shareworks account for future vests. I just transfer to Rovia once they land, and I haven't opened a spreadsheet in July since.