Reading your DeGiro account statement, line by line
The account statement is the most complete record DeGiro gives you, and the hardest to read: dozens of row types, all in one column of free text.
What the statement is
Account.csv is a cash ledger. Every row is one movement of money in or out of the account's cash — not of shares — with the date and time it was booked, the product and ISIN it relates to when there is one, a description, the change (a currency and an amount) and the balance straight after it. DeGiro exports it newest-first; read it bottom-up and it tells the story of the account in order.
The column that does all the work is the description. It's free text, it follows your display language, and it is the only thing that says what kind of movement a row is. The tracker sorts rows into kinds by looking for key words in it, in a fixed order — the first match wins — and the sections below follow the same kinds, with the words each one is recognised by.
The order matters because one line can contain more than one key word. Dividend wording is checked first, then interest, then fees, then trades, then internal transfers, then deposits and withdrawals, then currency conversions; anything left over is kept, unclassified.
Deposits and withdrawals
Money arriving from your bank is usually described with “Deposit” (“Storting” in Dutch), and money going back to it with “Withdrawal” (“Opname”). These are the rows that matter most to any return calculation: they are your external cash flows, the money you put in and took out, and XIRR, time-weighted return and the index comparison are all built from them, on their own dates.
Not every row with “deposit” in it is one. Depending on how the account is set up, DeGiro and its banking partner flatex book payment reservations and transfers between the trading balance and a linked cash account — rows described with words like “Reservation”, “Cash Sweep” or “Overboeking”. They move the cash balance without any real change in what the account is worth. The tracker checks for those words before it checks for deposits, so a reservation line for an incoming deposit is treated as internal bookkeeping rather than counted as new money twice.
Buys and sells
Each executed trade leaves a line beginning “Buy” or “Sell” (“Koop” or “Verkoop”), with the quantity, the product and the price in the text and the cash that changed hands in the Change column: negative for a buy, positive for a sale. The statement is not where the tracker learns about the shares — that comes from Transactions.csv — but the cash leg is what keeps the cash balance right.
A trade isn't a gain or a loss on the day it happens: cash goes down and holdings go up by the same amount, or the other way round. That's why the daily valuation leaves trade rows alone and lets the two sides offset within the same day's total.
Currency conversions
Buy a share listed in dollars from a euro account and the statement usually shows a pair of conversion rows around the trade: one taking euros out of the euro balance and one putting dollars into the dollar balance, or the reverse after a sale or a dollar dividend. On accounts with automatic conversion (AutoFX) this happens without you asking. The descriptions vary — “FX Debit” and “FX Credit” in English, “Valuta Debitering” and “Valuta Creditering” in Dutch — and the tracker recognises them by “FX”, “currency conversion” or “Valuta”.
Each currency has its own running balance, which is why the Balance column carries a currency of its own. Conversion rows move money between two of your own balances rather than into or out of the account, so for the time-weighted return they are netted out rather than counted as performance. If DeGiro charges a separate fee for a conversion, it shows up as its own line, which is the next kind.
Fees
Any description containing “fee”, “cost” or the Dutch “kosten” is counted as a fee: transaction fees charged per trade, the yearly connection fee for each foreign exchange you trade on, and any other charge DeGiro books with those words in it. Fees are a real cost of investing, so they stay in the return as a loss rather than being netted out, and the Income & Fees tab adds them up and lists each one. For what they do to a return over time, see the guide on how fees drag on returns.
Dividends and dividend tax
A dividend usually arrives as two lines on the same day: the gross dividend, positive, and the tax withheld at source, negative, described as dividend tax (“Dividendbelasting” in Dutch). Both contain the word “dividend”, which is the first thing the tracker checks for, so both are counted as dividend income and the total it reports is what you actually received after withholding. The dividends and withholding tax guide goes through this in more detail.
A dividend paid in a foreign currency lands in that currency's balance, and may be followed by a conversion pair if the account converts automatically. The tracker converts each income row to your display currency at the rate on the day it was paid, not at today's rate.
Interest
Rows described with “interest”, “rente” or “coupon” are counted as interest: interest on cash, which can be negative in some periods, and coupons paid on bonds. Like dividends, it is income the account earned rather than money you put in, so it counts towards the return.
Everything else
A real statement has plenty of rows that fit none of these: depending on the account, money-market fund movements, corporate-action adjustments, transfers between sub-accounts and other bookkeeping. Some even arrive with no amount in the Change column although the balance visibly moved; the tracker fills those in from the difference between consecutive balances in the same currency.
Rows it can't classify are treated as neither gain nor loss in the time-weighted return. That's a deliberate choice: wrongly counting an internal transfer as a loss can wreck a return figure, and netting out a genuinely ambiguous row does far less damage. They still affect the cash balance, because the balance is DeGiro's own running figure. The Transactions tab shows every row with the kind it was given, so you can see exactly how your own statement was read.