Account Statements & Data Exporting - What formats would you want to see?

An exporting function taking into account the diverse tax reporting requirements of each country youā€™re operating into would be great!
So UK for now but then Sweden, France, Ireland, Germanyā€¦

@Eden I donā€™t necessarily think this is insurmountable but I think we need to be careful here because a) it should not be up to freetrade to do tax calculations and neither should we expect them to. & b) all the main data that will allow us to do tax returns and the likes is already in the app they just have to figure out a neat way to export them out to us.

Sure if they want to throw in fancy statements that aggregate stuff Iā€™m all for that, but it really shouldnā€™t be that difficult to return data that they already control back to each user.

To throw my two pence in (hint hint @simonpoole) I think the simplest way to start all this is individual transaction download on a weekly/monthly/yearly level.
Ie you bought this much of that symbol at that price at that time and date within this timeframe.

Once they implement that as a feature they can start building on it :upside_down_face::upside_down_face::slightly_smiling_face:

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This is exactly what Iā€™m doing, actually - so good suggestion :slight_smile:

Starting with initial easy statements and the actual mechanism for requesting and delivering statements/reports - once that is done, the work for adding each individual format is a relatively small, self-contained chunk of work.

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We definitely need withholded tax, stamp duty and commissions in any export though, as they can be deductible.
Exchange rate would be very useful because I seem to remember that everything is calculated in local currency at the time of the transaction. Hence, for UK investors Capital Gains tax is calculated based on the gains in GBP (based on the exchange rate at the time of purchase-sale).

Note: I looked into it a while ago, before opening my ISA, but I have not actually had to submit a self-assessment form.

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Just completing my Self Assessment tax paperwork for 2019-20 and have used the Consolidated Tax Certificate from Interactive Investor which is a very easy to use document covering:
UK Equity Income in GBP
UK Equity Income in USD
Property Income Distribution
Overseas Dividend in GBP ( London listed but company incorporated in Guernsey)
Also indicates which boxes on the SA100 Form are applicable to each area which is helpful.

Only had a few investments on FT in FY19-20 so not too much of a problem to handle, but with a lot more activity in FY20-21 I am not looking forward to doing this manually next year with US Investments and withholding taxes ( e.g. did not realise B&M (FTSE100) were a Luxembourg based company so 15% W/H Tax) to take into account.

Awaiting an innovative FT solution

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@simonpoole thanks for opening this thread and look forward to seeing what the team can produce.

My main requirement would be to export my transactions as CSVs to import into 3rd party tools such as Simply Wall Street, Yahoo Finance and currently trialing Stockopedia. Might worth doing a poll to see what 3rd Party Analysis tools the community is using to see what formats to focus on.

Secondary requirement would be to export my orders for piece of mind that can provide some proof that I own shares (šŸ’€ What happens to your account if you die? šŸ’€ - #10 by markrc)

Youā€™ll probably do more research in at the time of dev but from what I can see these are the formats that Iā€™ve seen that the CSVs need to be in

Simply Wall Street (https://support.simplywall.st/hc/en-us/articles/360001842916-How-to-upload-CSV-File-for-Transactions-Portfolio)

Ticker Symbol,Date (mm/dd/yyyy),Shares,Price,Cost,Type
NasdaqGS:AAPL,01/11/2012,5,596.55,2982.69965,Buy
NYSE:TWTR,05/15/2014,100,32.77,3277,Buy
NasdaqGS:AAPL,10/06/2015,20,111.31,2226.2,Sell

Yahoo Finance (Export and import portfolio data in Yahoo Finance | Finance for Web Help - SLN15034)

Symbol,Current Price,Date,Time,Change,Open,High,Low,Volume,Trade Date,Purchase Price,Quantity,Commission,High Limit,Low Limit,Comment
AAL.L,2470.881,2020/12/04,08:38 GMT,-6.6188965,2482.5,2492.5,2470.5,202255,20200902,1876.56,16.0,
AAPL,122.94,2020/12/03,16:00 EST,-0.13999939,123.52,123.78,122.21,78967630,20200828,0.0,15.0,

Stockopedia (Stockopedia)

TICKER,DATE,ā€œTIME (optional)ā€,TYPE,SHARES,PRICE,ā€œCURRENCY (optional)ā€,ā€œEXCHANGE RATE (optional)ā€,ā€œCOMMISSION (optional)ā€,ā€œTAX (optional)ā€
LON:BT.A,02/01/2019,BUY,2083,240,GBX,1,5,
NSQ:AAPL,07/02/2019,BUY,10,170.94,USD,1.295,12,

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Also would like to add that any sort of export that will allow me/accountant/software to calculate capital gains is also another requirement.

Iā€™m not sure what an accountant would ask for if I were to ask them to calculate my capital gains from stocks but that would define what I would need in an export.

As an example, just using the gov website and based on the questions they asked me some of this information would be needed, how we do this at a mass level is scary to think how much time it would take. Due to do a self assessment at some point this year so Iā€™ll see what the accountant will ask for and report back.

When did you sell or give away the shares?
1 January 2019

Did you sell the shares for less than they were worth to help the buyer?
No

How much did you sell the shares for?
Ā£100,000

How much did you pay in costs when you sold the shares?
Ā£5

Did you own the shares before 1 April 1982?
No

Did you inherit the shares?
No

How much did you pay for the shares?
Ā£50,000

How much did you pay in costs when you got the shares?
Ā£1

Are you claiming any Capital Gains Tax losses from tax years before 2018/19?
No

In the 2018/19 tax year, what was your income?
Ā£90,000

In the 2018/19 tax year, what was your Personal Allowance?
Ā£11,850

Any update on this?

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+1 cannot wait for this feature, I was hoping we get it before Christmas so I can play with my data as a side project.

Definitely not before Christmas Iā€™m afraid!

That being said, weā€™ve made good progress so far with internal testing so far.

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Good to hear this is being worked on. Hopefully itā€™s shipped by June 2021 so we can use it for 2020-21 tax year :slight_smile:

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Would love to test this for you

I use 4 separate fintech products between which I need to transfer data so can give different dimensions too

this would be a lifesaver

Any ETA yet?

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I propose a motion that those in this thread get to early beta test this featureā€¦ :grin:

In all seriousness i presume this work was paused for a moment the past couple of weeks to work on other engineering work but i hope we might get some sneak peaks of thoughts on this at some point? Never thought id be excited for statements and data exporting :smiley:

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DeGiro, Stake, Fidelity etcā€¦every broker I use does this-- they do a data dump in a spreadsheet and you filter thru it, how hard can it be? Is there so much technical debt that you break stuff when u rewrite stuff

Hey @simonpoole, Any updates on when we can expect this functionality?

A good example flow is seen on Trading212ā€¦ May be worth scoping out/doing a teardown of their offering (If you havenā€™t already) as it provides all data needed and is also super easy to use client side.

Thank you

People expect everything to be completed straight away, in reality, yes I agree things seem to take time, longer than weā€™d hope but we do not know whatā€™s going on behind the scenes, what else they are working on, what issues they may be facing and need to overcome that might take priority.

De giro, founded 2008, opened to Dutch retail customers in 2013.
Stake, founded 2017 and has made great progress establishing in Australia and last year in the UK too.
Fidelity, established UK presence in 1979.

Things can happen quickly, but more often than not, Rome wasnā€™t built in a day. Especially when they need to hire more IT professionals.

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Iā€™m sure users would appreciate just having the statements available (no matter what format they are in).

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Well Iā€™ve managed to get an export file of all my trades in the GIA account in .csv format.

Unfortunately itā€™s really just a data dump.

  1. All of the critical information is buried in a single text box under details (i.e. ticker, price, currency, exchange rate)

  2. There are multiple rows of data for the same trade (i.e. stamp duty and fx fees)

Does anyone have any experience in how they sliced and diced the data in order to analyze it?

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How did you export it? :slight_smile: