Choosing the best Investment Platform for a GIA account

If you have used up your £20k ISA allowance, you may want to open a General Investment Account (GIA).

If so, you need to be aware that these are taxable.

Each year you will need to consider the following points:

1. You are allowed £3k of gains before Capital Gains (CG) is due.
2. If you sell your shares, you need to calculate the Capital Gain (CG).
3. Gains are calculated according to three main HMRC rules: same day transactions, 30-day rule and the Section 104 averaging rule.
4. Because of these three rules, the annual report supplied by your broker platform is not suitable to directly use in your tax report. e.g. you cannot simply use the net gain/loss figure for the tax year.
5. If you have more than one GIA with different brokers, you should combine all trades before you work out the CG for tax purposes. This is because you may have purchased the same shares on one platform within 30 days of selling the same shares on a different platform and this will affect CG calculations due to the 30-day rule.

Another complication of using a GIA is that you also need to calculate income and dividends. Note that even if you hold an accumulating ETF, you may need to declare the dividends that it earned in the tax year (see my ERI blog articles for details). Indeed, some distributing ETFs may also produce ERI (but usually in very small amounts) which also need to be declared as well as the paid dividends. Most investors prefer to hold distributing ETFs rather than accumulating ETFs within their GIA for this reason.

Fidelity, Invest Engine and Charles Stanley Direct are supposed to report gains/losses according to HMRC rules but most Investment platforms do not provide a suitable CG report for use with HMRC. 

I have found these tools which can calculate CG (and CGT) from broker downloaded data.

• cgtcalculator.com - free online site which requires data in a specific format. Conversion tools are available for several popular broker platforms. Mature, widely used site for many years.
• cgtcalc.co.uk UK Tax Calculator - very new online site which you can directly upload transaction files to and it will work out dividends, CG and ERI. The CG results seem to match (or very nearly match) the cgtcalulator.com results. I have not tested or examined Dividend and ERI results yet. It produces very nice PDF results with relevant tax form fields. The PDFs could be attached to your self assessment submission. It also accepts csv files in the same format used for cgtcalculator.com.
• cgttaxtool.uk - (not tested) - not sure if results are accurate. Reddit account appears to have been banned.
• taxbull.co.uk - tested with T212 data. Roughly agrees with cgtcalculator.com but may have to input stock splits manually. T212, Robinhood, Tastytrade, FreeTrade supported. Warns not to use for HMRC submissions due to same day and 30-day rule errors possible.

Note that you need to upload all CSVs for ALL dates/years. I suggest using and comparing the first two sites in the list above.

The table below may help you to decide which broker Platform to choose for your GIA account:

A blank fields means no calculator is known to exist.

The conversion tool for Interactive Investor CSVs on the cgtcalculator.com site does not cope with a nasty bug in ii CSV files (bug: price of foreign  $USD shares are denominated in £ not $USD, e.g. price £1.50 when the price was actually $1.50) but the conversion tool on my blog page works around this bug. It may mean that if you have an ii GIA, the cgtcalculator.com + my conversion tool is the only accurate way available as other online tools may not be aware of the bug in the ii CSV files! If you have not sold any non-£GBP shares on ii then you should have no problem.

If you have a correction or anything else to add to this article, please contact me.

cheers

Steve