comdirect: exporting holdings and transactions as CSV

comdirect has no single button that emits “my portfolio as a file”. It has one well documented route for account transactions, a second, much quieter one for securities transactions, a third for documents — and, for current holdings, a gap that comdirect describes nowhere. The search results on this topic consist almost entirely of forum threads, because the bank publishes nothing at all about its file formats. This article sorts out what can be evidenced, and says plainly what cannot. As of 22 July 2026.

Route 1: transactions as CSV

This is the official route, described by comdirect itself. The FAQ “Umsätze” (retrieved 22 July 2026) states the path verbatim: transactions sit “in the app or in the Persönlicher Bereich free of charge under Konto & Karte > Umsätze”. The export control itself hides at the very bottom of the page — the FAQ describes clicking “Export als csv” at the end of the page. Anyone scanning the top of the screen for a download icon is looking in the wrong place.

Two details of this route matter more than they sound. First, the period selector: comdirect offers presets of 1, 3, 10, 30, 60, 90 and 180 days plus free date fields. Those free fields have a logic of their own that regularly produces half-empty files — enter only a start date and the period runs to today; enter only an end date and the period starts 90 days before it. A full year requires both fields.

Second, the 540-day limit. The FAQ is unambiguous: the search function shows the transactions of the last 540 days, and anything older is found in the Finanzreporte in the Postbox. That is roughly eighteen months — more generous than the widely repeated “90 days”, but still a hard wall. A long-standing customer who needs the complete history will not get it from the CSV export at all, only from the PDF Finanzreporte. The practical consequence: exporting once a year is not diligence theatre, it is the only way to keep the history machine-readable.

The same view also controls whether accounts and the Depot are shown separately or together — and that choice determines what lands in the file. It is why two people following an identical click path can produce files with entirely different structures.

Route 2: Depot transactions — the file trackers actually want

Securities bookings have their own, more modern format. comdirect does not document it, but it is well evidenced: Portfolio Performance has shipped a built-in import template called “comdirect Depotumsätze (Persönlicher Bereich)” since April 2019, and its configuration names the columns exactly: Datum · Art · Bezeichnung · WKN · ISIN · Menge · Mengeneinheit · Kurs · Kurswährung · Devisenkurs · Kurswert · Kurswertwährung. The Art column carries six values: Kauf, Verkauf, Umbuchung (Eingang), Umbuchung (Ausgang), Einlieferung, Auslieferung. That this template has been maintained unchanged for seven years is the strongest available evidence of format stability.

For a portfolio tracker this is the more valuable file: it has an ISIN column, clean quantities and prices, and it distinguishes acquisitions from transfers. The account transaction file, by contrast, has no ISIN at all and expresses securities events only as a cash movement with free text.

Holdings are the awkward case

The honest answer: comdirect documents no holdings export. There is no official page describing a “Depotbestand exportieren” button. What exists are third-party pointers — a blog post from 2022 describes a path in the portfolio overview via Tabelle > Depot > im Excel-Format speichern. That is four years old, unconfirmed, and the weakest claim in this entire article; check it in your own account before relying on it.

Officially documented, by contrast, is a related function: the FAQ “Wertpapierabrechnung” names an Abrechnungsdaten function under the Depot menu — “a transaction data listing that is an efficient alternative to checking every individual settlement note in the Postbox”. Whether that listing can be downloaded as CSV, comdirect does not say. That stays open here too.

The pragmatic detour: holdings are implicit in the transaction history. Sum all acquisitions and disposals per ISIN and you know the current quantity — and most trackers do exactly that automatically on import.

The files themselves: two conventions, one nuisance

Now the part where imports fail. The two exports follow opposite technical conventions — and the account file is the more unpleasant of the two.

The account transaction file is encoded in ISO-8859-1, not UTF-8. Open it in an editor that assumes UTF-8 and “Umsätze” turns into “Ums?tze”. Four independent open-source importers — from beancount-comdirect (2022) to a project dated 8 July 2026 — hard-code the same encoding. The Depot transaction file, by contrast, is UTF-8 with a BOM: its first column heading is technically not “Datum” but carries three invisible bytes in front of it. Both are solvable — but only if you know.

Five further quirks of the account file, each traceable in third-party importers:

• Four preamble lines. Before the real header row sit a lone semicolon, a line “Umsätze <account>” with the period, a “Neuer Kontostand” line, and a blank line. Spreadsheet software mistakes the first of these for the header.
• Several accounts in one file. Current account, Visa, savings, settlement account and Depot are concatenated — each with its own preamble, its own header row, and its own footer. An importer that reads the header once and then parses to end-of-file produces garbage.
• Rows saying “offen”. Unbooked items carry the word “offen” instead of a date in the booking-date column. Every importer examined skips them.
• The amount column is not always EUR. On foreign-currency accounts it is headed “Umsatz in USD”. Hard-code the column name and your totals will be wrong.
• Buchungstext is one blob. Payer, payee, IBAN, reference and purpose sit unstructured in a single field. This is the oldest known complaint about the export — a community thread from October 2016 already puts it in exactly those terms, and ten years on it still applies. Any separation requires pattern matching.

And the golden rule for both files: do not open them in Excel and re-save. Excel rewrites encoding, date format and decimal separator on save. Work on a copy, archive the original untouched.

Route 3: Finanzreport and Postbox — the PDF path

What other banks call a statement, comdirect calls a Finanzreport. Its FAQ records that Finanzreporte arrive online in the Postbox free of charge, and that “the Finanzreport for the previous month is created from the second banking day of the current month”. Paper delivery costs extra; Commerzbank’s statement printers are explicitly not available to comdirect customers. There is no CSV variant of the Finanzreport — the Postbox FAQ provides documents exclusively “in Portable Document Format (PDF)”.

The practically most important change concerns bulk download. Historically this required third-party tooling; the function now exists natively. Parqet’s comdirect import guide describes it: at the bottom of the Postbox page a Sammeldownload can be activated, several PDFs selected, and the batch downloaded as a ZIP folder. For everything beyond the 540-day wall this is the only way to reach the history. One planning note: retrieving sensitive documents has required a periodic TAN since 14 September 2019 — have the TAN app ready before you tick sixty documents.

Tax documents: what arrives when

Two documents get confused routinely. The Jahressteuerbescheinigung arrives automatically: comdirect places “a copy of the annual tax certificate for the past year, expected by 31 March of the following year” in the Postbox, and that copy has “been sufficient for submission to the tax office since 2016”. The Erträgnisaufstellung, by contrast, contains the individual income items, must be actively ordered under Verwaltung > Steuerübersicht > Steuerbescheinigung beantragen, and carries a fee — and per the FAQ the order cannot be cancelled once placed. Both are PDFs, not CSVs.

This article is general information about document types and file formats, not tax advice. For your own situation, consult a qualified tax professional.

One more detail for tracker users, as of January 2026: Parqet no longer accepts the Ertragsgutschrift or Dividendengutschrift as an import document because it lacks tax information — there, the Steuermitteilung is the correct document instead.

What to do with the file

A CSV is at first only a list. Its value appears when a portfolio tool reads it: it then becomes cost basis per position, distribution history, total fees, and a defensible return calculation. The routine is the same at every bank — pull the maximum period once, import it, check three numbers against a second source (quantity per position, total distributions for one completed year, total fees), and afterwards only load the period since the last export.

Acutic’s CSV portfolio import works from a lean holdings template — symbol, share count, average cost. The Depot transaction file contains every number needed to fill it, and the ISIN column makes the mapping unambiguous. What the analysis layer then does with an imported portfolio — weights, concentration, per-position quality metrics — is described on the features page.

Edge cases and frequent questions

Is there MT940 or CAMT? No comdirect page mentions either format. The FinTS interface (server fints.comdirect.de) queries account and Depot transactions and is used by programs such as StarMoney or WISO Mein Geld — which formats it delivers, comdirect does not document. We assert nothing in either direction.

Did the interface change in 2026? We looked for it actively and found nothing: comdirect remains a distinct Commerzbank brand, the FAQ still speaks of the “Persönlicher Bereich”, and the export still sits at the foot of the page. Two things are in motion nonetheless — UniCredit tabled a takeover offer for Commerzbank in March 2026 (the outcome was open at the time of writing), and the legacy photoTAN environment is being switched off in July 2026. The latter touches exports indirectly: without a working TAN app you cannot reach the Postbox documents.

Portfolio transfer — what happens to the history? An incoming transfer appears in the Depot transactions as Einlieferung or Umbuchung (Eingang), an outgoing one as Auslieferung. Acquisition data for transferred securities then originates from the delivering bank and is not necessarily in the file — for cost basis, the settlement documents of the originating bank remain the authoritative source in that case.

Why is all of this so poorly documented? Because comdirect publishes no format specification. Every technical detail in this article comes from reverse-engineered importers and from real export files in public repositories. That several independent implementations agree across four years is strong evidence — it is not vendor-confirmed, and that is worth keeping in mind while reading.

Further reading: Trade Republic CSV export: the 2026 guide and Scalable Capital: exporting your portfolio as CSV — the same job at the neobrokers — plus portfolio trackers without a bank login — why the detour through a file exists at all. Create free account.

Acutic provides investment research and educational analysis under MAR Art. 20 / § 85 WpHG. Acutic does not provide investment advice (Anlageberatung per § 1 Abs. 1a S. 2 Nr. 1a KWG / Art. 4(1)(4) MiFID II), portfolio management, or any other licensed investment service. No content in this article constitutes a personal recommendation.