Hello,
I am currently on another investment platform, thinking about switching to FreeTrade. I was checking out some threads on this forum and it seems like FreeTrade does NOT provide its customers with an end-of-year statement which clearly states the amount of money they’ve earnt, which massively simplifies tax declarations.
Most of those threads are a couple of years old, and I am wondering if the situation has improved since then. Surely an investment platform must provide its users with a way to easily declare taxes that is not a csv file of all of your buy/sell actions… right? Otherwise I can’t explain how Freetrade has made it this far and gained so many users.
I would plan on joining in the most premium tier so if this is a paid feature that’s okay. Or is customer support able to sort this out? I really need to hear that the answer is yes or I will not join FreeTrade, obviously.
No, they don’t provide a CGT statement, however to be fair none of the other brokers do to the best of my knowledge. Which platform are you with that provides this info?
T212 provide a p/l figure for the tax year however they don’t give you all the info needed to complete a tax return. ie. total purchase amounts and total disposal amount.
What is your current platform that does? Would be interested to know ( assuming you’re actually talking about CGT and not dividends). If you’re switching into Freetrade how would they know the price you originally bought them for ?
Do they provide any statements at all? How do they help customers file tax returns? Surely they must produce some sort of document with tax-relevant information on it.
Freetrade give you an income statement (interest, dividend, etc).
But Freetrade (or any individual investment platform) can’t do your capital gains calculations for you. This is because when you calculate your CGT liability you need to consider the purchase prices of all the shares you own in a particular stock, and these purchases may have occured on multiple different platforms. Something Freetrade won’t have details for.
Yeah obviously I’m not expecting them to do the calculations for me regarding other platforms… not sure where you got that from.
But sounds good enough if they give an income statement with all the freetrade income
The point is it can’t be usefully done on a platform-by-platform basis. If you have purchased shares of a particular stock on multiple platforms a CGT calculation based on only on your Freetrade trades will be useless/incorrect. And even if you have only ever used Freetrade to buy/sell shares (a scenario in which it would be possible for Freetrade to do a useful and accurate CGT calculation), Freetrade can’t make this assumption because for many people this won’t be true.