How to Export Freetrade Data to CSV: Your Activity in Three Taps

Freetrade is an app-first broker, and its export is app-first too: no website login, no settings page, just the activity feed and a share button. If you have ever needed your Freetrade holdings in a spreadsheet, for a tax record or for a portfolio tracker, this is the guide. The Freetrade CSV export takes three taps, contains everything a tracker needs, and avoids the pence problem that makes other UK broker files awkward. Here is how it works and what to do with the result.

What Freetrade Lets You Export

Freetrade does not have a public API or a "connect your account" option for third-party tools. What it does offer is a complete activity export per account: every order, dividend, deposit, withdrawal and fee, as a CSV file, from inside the app. That is the only export that carries dates, quantities and prices for every deal, which is what a tracker needs to rebuild your portfolio from scratch.

If you hold more than one account (a general investment account, a Stocks & Shares ISA, a SIPP), each has its own activity feed and its own export. That is normal; the files combine cleanly later.

How to Export Freetrade Data Step by Step

• Open the Freetrade app and go to the Activity tab at the bottom of the screen.
• Tap the export / share arrow in the top-right corner.
• Confirm All Activity, so the file covers every transaction rather than a filtered view.
• Choose where to send the CSV: save it to your phone's files, email it to yourself, or share it straight to a computer or cloud drive.
• Repeat for each account you hold.

The whole thing takes under a minute. If you are switching between accounts, make sure the right one is selected before you export, and name each file by account when you save it.

Already have the file?

Import it into Openbook as it downloaded

No reformatting. Openbook reads the Ticker, Buy / Sell, Quantity, Timestamp and Price per Share columns automatically, keeps the prices in pounds, and shows you what it found before saving. Verified against a real Freetrade export.

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What Is in the Freetrade Export

Each row is one event in the account. The columns a tracker cares about are:

• Timestamp: when the order filled or the dividend was paid.
• Ticker: the listed symbol for the holding, which is what makes Freetrade files easy to match.
• Buy / Sell: the direction of the trade.
• Quantity: the number of shares, including fractions, so a purchase of 0.37 of an Apple share is exactly that.
• Price per Share: in the currency of the trade, in pounds for UK shares rather than pence.

Dividend rows carry the payer and the cash amount; deposit and withdrawal rows show the cash movements. Together they are enough to rebuild your positions, your income history and your true money-weighted return.

Why the Freetrade File Is Easier Than Most

Two things that trip people up with other UK brokers do not apply here. Hargreaves Lansdown exports names with no tickers, so every holding has to be matched by name; Freetrade gives you the ticker. And HL, AJ Bell and interactive investor all quote UK prices in pence, so every UK price has to be divided by a hundred before a valuation makes sense; Freetrade's prices are already in pounds. If you paste the export into a spreadsheet and multiply quantity by price, the answer is right first time. The one thing to remember is the reverse trap: a tool that assumes UK prices are in pence will read Freetrade's values a hundred times too low. Openbook's import knows the difference: choose Freetrade and the pence option is off.

Opening the Export in Excel or Google Sheets

The CSV opens directly in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. Format the timestamp column as a date before sorting, enter sells as negative quantities, and a pivot table summing quantity by ticker gives you current positions. A second pivot on the dividend rows by month gives an income history, which our dividend tracker guide shows how to turn into yield on cost. For a longer-lived setup, our Freetrade portfolio tracker guide covers the full spreadsheet structure and where it stops being worth the effort.

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What the Freetrade Export Does Not Include

The activity file is a record of events, not a snapshot. It does not contain a current value for any holding, so a tracker or spreadsheet rebuilds positions from the buys and sells and prices them from a separate source. It does not carry the price of a holding on any day other than the day you dealt, so performance over time needs price history from elsewhere. And for US shares it records the price in dollars at the time of the trade, without the exchange rate Freetrade applied, so a sterling cost basis has to be reconstructed at the day's rate. None of this is a shortcoming of the export; it is the difference between a broker's ledger and a portfolio tracker, and it is what a tracker is for.

Using the Export for Tax Records

Inside a Stocks & Shares ISA or a SIPP there is nothing to report, and the export is purely for tracking. In a general investment account the export does a second job. Capital gains tax needs the acquisition date and cost of every lot sold, and with fractional monthly purchases that can be dozens of lots per holding; the activity file has all of them, which makes it the practical way to work out a gain. Dividends received in a general account count towards the annual dividend allowance and are taxable above it, and the dividend rows summed by tax year give the figure. A good habit is to export the general account's activity once a year, just after the tax year ends, and keep it with your records.

Common Export Problems and Fixes

• The file seems to be missing older trades. A filter was applied to the activity feed before exporting. Clear it and confirm "All Activity".
• US prices in dollars. Expected: the price is recorded in the trade's currency. A tracker converts at the day's rate; if you are in a spreadsheet, add an exchange-rate column.
• The file will not open on the phone. Share it to a computer or a cloud drive and open it there; phone apps sometimes preview CSV files badly.
• Fractional quantities look odd. They are correct. Keep the quantity column as a decimal number, not text.

What to Do With Your Freetrade Data Next

An export is only useful for what it lets you see. The questions worth answering are whether your portfolio has beaten a simple tracker, how much of your income depends on your largest payers, and whether your sector mix is the one you intended. If you also use another broker, the same import takes Hargreaves Lansdown, AJ Bell and Trading 212 exports, so everything ends up in one view.

Next step

Turn the file into a portfolio

Upload the Freetrade export, confirm the holdings it found, and see your combined portfolio with income, concentration and risk in one view.

Open your portfolio →

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