AJ Bell Portfolio Tracker: Track Your AJ Bell Investments Properly

AJ Bell is one of the big three UK DIY platforms, and its account pages do the basics well: current holdings, cash, today's movement, and a simple gain or loss per position. What it does not do is act as an AJ Bell portfolio tracker in any meaningful sense. There is no view of your total wealth across an ISA, a SIPP and a dealing account, no benchmark to tell you whether your choices have paid off, and nothing about income or risk. The good news is that AJ Bell's transaction history export is one of the cleaner ones among UK brokers, which makes building that layer yourself straightforward. This guide shows how.

What the AJ Bell Account View Leaves Out

Log in and you see each account on its own. That is fine for checking a balance and useless for judging a portfolio. The gaps are the same ones every broker leaves, and they matter more the longer you have been investing.

• No combined view. National Grid held in both your ISA and your SIPP is two lines on two pages, never one position with one weight in your total.
• No benchmark. A holding up 20% since purchase sounds good until you learn a FTSE All-Share tracker did 35% over the same period.
• No income history. Dividends appear as cash transactions, not as a view of what your portfolio pays you month by month.
• No risk measure. How concentrated you are, how far you fell in the last correction, which holdings the numbers actually support: none of it is there.

How to Export Your AJ Bell Transaction History

AJ Bell has no API, so the route is the transaction history download. It takes about a minute per account.

• Log in at ajbell.co.uk and select the account: ISA, SIPP, Dealing account, Lifetime ISA or Junior ISA.
• Open Transaction history under the account menu.
• Filter to Deals, so the file contains your buys and sells, and set a date range that covers every purchase you have made in the account.
• Export or download the history as a CSV.
• Repeat for each account you hold.

The file lists each deal with its date, the security, the quantity, the price and, usefully, an Amount (GBP) column giving the total consideration in pounds. That last column is what makes AJ Bell exports easy to check: quantity times price should equal the amount, and if it does not, you know a unit problem has crept in.

Skip the spreadsheet

Import your AJ Bell CSV straight into Openbook

Upload the file as it downloaded. Openbook works out which column is which, reads UK prices as pence, cross-checks every price against the Amount (GBP) column so a unit mix-up is caught and corrected, and shows you what it read before saving.

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The Pence Trap, and Why AJ Bell's File Lets You Catch It

Like most UK platforms, AJ Bell quotes UK share prices in pence. A purchase of BP at 480p is exported as 480, and if a spreadsheet treats that as pounds the holding is valued a hundred times too high. The Amount (GBP) column is the antidote: 100 shares of BP at 480 with an amount of about 480 pounds tells you instantly that the price is in pence. When you build a spreadsheet, add a check column that divides the amount by the quantity and compares it with the price. When you import into Openbook, that check runs on every row automatically, and any row where the price and amount disagree by a factor of 100 is corrected in the preview.

Building an AJ Bell Spreadsheet Tracker

If you prefer to stay in Excel or Google Sheets, the structure that works is:

• One tab per account, pasted from each export, with sells entered as negative quantities.
• A pounds-price column (UK share price divided by 100; fund prices left alone).
• A pivot table summing quantity by security to give current positions.
• A price lookup for each security, multiplied out for current value.
• A summary tab adding each security across accounts, which is where your real concentration shows up.

It is a sound approach and it teaches you a lot about your own portfolio. The cost is upkeep: every re-export means re-pasting, and the sheet never gains a benchmark, an income calendar or a risk view unless you build them. Our guide to portfolio trackers for UK investors is honest about when the spreadsheet stops being worth it.

What a Dedicated Tracker Adds

With the deals loaded into a tool built for the job, the analysis AJ Bell cannot offer is a screen away.

• Performance against a benchmark for the whole portfolio and per account, so you know whether stock picking has beaten the index you could have bought.
• Income by month and by holding, with yield on the price you paid rather than today's price. Income investors will want our guide to how UK dividends work alongside it.
• Concentration by sector, country and company once every account is added together.
• Reward and Risk scores on every holding. Openbook scores UK and US-listed companies on Growth, Momentum, Profitability and Valuation for Reward, and Volatility, Financial Solvency, Operational Quality and Size for Risk. Seeing the scores next to your positions tells you which holdings the fundamentals support. The methodology explains each factor.
• Drawdown history: how far the portfolio fell from its peak in each downturn, which is the honest measure of the risk you have been running.

No card required

Set the analytics layer up once

Create a free Openbook account, import your AJ Bell accounts, and the analysis is waiting each time you log in. Re-import a fresh export when you deal and the picture updates.

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Regular Investing, Dividends and Reinvestment in the AJ Bell File

Three features of an AJ Bell account show up in the export in ways worth understanding before you analyse it.

Regular investing. If you use AJ Bell's regular investment service to buy the same holdings every month, the export contains one deal row per month per holding, often at slightly different prices. That is exactly what you want for a true average cost: a tracker nets the lots into one position and works out what you really paid across all of them, rather than the price of the most recent purchase. It does mean the file is long. A hundred rows for a single fund over eight years is normal, and no cause to tidy anything up before importing.

Dividends. With the history filtered to Deals, dividend payments are not in the file. That is fine for rebuilding your holdings, and Openbook works out expected income from the holdings themselves. If you want your actual received income history in the tracker too, export the full transaction history without the Deals filter as a second file; the dividend rows carry the payer, the date and the cash amount.

Reinvested dividends. Where you have chosen to reinvest income automatically, each reinvestment appears as an ordinary purchase. For your cost basis that is correct: the reinvested cash did buy shares. For your income history, count the dividend as income and the purchase as cost, and do not count the purchase as income as well. A tracker that reads both rows handles this naturally.

Common Problems with AJ Bell Exports

• Only recent deals in the file. The date range defaulted to a short window. Widen it and export again; the import shows totals you can check against your account page.
• Funds and ETFs matching to the wrong line. Accumulation and income versions of the same fund are different securities. Confirm the class in the preview.
• A stock held in two accounts. Expected. A good tracker combines it in the portfolio view and keeps the per-account split available.
• Dividends missing. If you filtered the export to Deals only, dividend rows are not in the file. Export again without the filter if you want the full income history, or let the tracker calculate income from the holdings and their pay dates.

Taking Your AJ Bell Analysis Further

The reason to get your data out of AJ Bell is not a prettier statement. It is to answer the questions that decide what you do next: whether to keep picking individual names like National Grid (NG.) and BP (BP.) or lean further into trackers, whether too much of your income rides on two payers, and whether the risk you are carrying is the risk you chose. Once the export is in a tracker those are five-minute checks. If you also hold accounts elsewhere, the same import takes Hargreaves Lansdown, interactive investor and Trading 212 files, so the whole picture ends up in one place. And if you are weighing up AJ Bell against HL, our Hargreaves Lansdown vs AJ Bell comparison covers the differences that matter for tracking.

Next step

See what your AJ Bell portfolio is actually exposed to

Sector concentration, income by holding, drawdown history and a Reward and Risk score on every position, across all your AJ Bell accounts. Bring the CSV; the rest is done for you.

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You can Compare AJB, NG, BP side by side on Openbook, or find stocks with the screener.