Broker guides

Comdirect export guide: the depot and the account are two files

Comdirect is a bank first and a broker second, and that shows in your paperwork. Your securities live in a depot, your money lives in a settlement account, and your investing history is split across the two. An export of one file gives you half of the history.

This guide covers what each file contains, where the exports are in online banking, how long the bank keeps old transactions online, which columns need a second look, and what to check before you trust the numbers.

How to get your history out of Comdirect

Log in to online banking in a browser. Bank exports are a desktop feature almost everywhere.
Export the depot transactions (your buys and sells) and the account transactions of the settlement account (dividends, fees, deposits, taxes).
Prefer a CSV or Excel download over a PDF wherever both are offered.
Set the range as far back as the interface allows, and repeat per year if it is capped.
Upload the files to BullBenchmark. Several files from one bank merge into one history.

Bank interfaces often keep only a limited window of history online. Find out how far back yours goes before you need the old data.

Why there are two files

At an app broker, one ledger tends to hold everything. At a bank, the division is older and stricter. The depot records what you own and what you traded: order date, quantity, price, and the costs charged on the order.

The settlement account records the money. That includes what left it to pay for a purchase, what arrived when you sold, dividends credited, taxes withheld, fees debited, and the transfers you made from your everyday bank account.

Each half is incomplete on its own. From the depot alone you can rebuild positions and cost basis, but the file shows no dividend income, because dividends are money and money sits in the other file. From the account alone you can see every euro that moved, but not what it bought. Together they are a complete history.

The same applies to deposits and withdrawals. Your deposits are what make a fair index comparison possible. A fair benchmark is a simulated index portfolio that received your deposits on the same dates, rather than the index's own chart, as explained in why benchmark your portfolio. Without the account file, the dates of your money are missing.

Where the exports are

At a bank broker, documents and exports live in online banking in a browser. Look for the transaction list of the settlement account, usually called something like account transactions or turnover, and for the equivalent list inside the depot.

Both views typically offer a download control near the date filter. Where a bank offers several formats, take the spreadsheet one. A PDF shows a table on a page, and only a CSV or Excel file can be recalculated.

A German bank also produces yearly tax paperwork: a statement of investment income and, on request or by default, the annual tax certificate. Those documents are for your tax return, not for your performance history. They are worth keeping, but a portfolio cannot be rebuilt from them.

Menu names and layouts change with every redesign, so this guide does not print a click path. What you are looking for stays the same: a list of transactions, a date range, and a download button.

How long the bank keeps old transactions online

Online transaction views at a bank frequently reach back a limited number of years. After that, older entries are no longer displayed, even though the account is the same one. There is no warning when the oldest year drops off.

Export your full available history once and store the files somewhere you will still have them in five years. Then export again once a quarter or once a year, so that the rolling window never costs you data.

If your history already has a gap because the window closed, the bank can usually still produce older statements on request. Yearly tax documents are often the fastest way to recover what a missing year contained.

Reading the columns

Four distinctions need a second look when you open the files.

The trade value and the total. One excludes the costs of the order, the other is what left your account. A cost basis built on the total includes the fees, which are part of what you paid. The arithmetic is in average cost basis explained.

Dividends and the tax on them. Investment income arrives gross and is usually reduced at source by tax for customers who are tax resident in Germany. In the account file this shows up as a credit and one or more debits around the same date. Counting only the net figure understates what your holdings produced by the tax withheld.

Currency. If you hold foreign shares, either the rate used sits in the file or it has to be reconstructed from the transaction date. Converting old purchases at today's rate changes your cost basis every time the euro moves, a problem examined in multi-currency portfolio tracking.

Corporate actions. Splits, mergers and fund changes appear as bookings that are neither a purchase nor a sale. Skip them and your share count no longer matches the depot, without any error showing on screen.

What to check before you trust the numbers

Does the depot file reach back to your first order, and the account file to your first deposit?
If you exported per year, do the files leave no gap between them?
Do buys minus sells reproduce the positions the depot shows today?
Are the dividend credits present for the months you know you were paid?
Do the transfers in and out add up to roughly the money you remember moving?

Tax debits appear in the account file as money leaving, including in a year in which you sold nothing. They are a cash flow, not a fall in the value of what you hold. This page describes what is in the file and is not tax advice.

From files to answers

BullBenchmark merges both files into one history. It shows the time-weighted return, dividends received and projected, costs, and your own deposits replayed into the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 in your currency. No banking login is involved at any point. The live demo shows the same screens on a sample portfolio.

BullBenchmark reads the transaction export from your broker and shows your return next to the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100, fed with the same deposits on the same dates, in your own currency. The first two weeks are free and no card is needed.