For UK companies with investment portfolios
Buying a share is simple. Accounting for it correctly is not.
Portive is the investment subledger for Xero. Every buy, sell, dividend and corporate action your company makes is checked against the UK tax rules that apply to it and turned into the right journal — with the working shown, for you or your accountant to approve before anything posts.
Your transactions arrive
Contract notes by email, or upload your broker statements.
Portive works out the treatment
Each one checked against the rules that apply to it.
You approve it
The working is shown. Nothing posts on its own.
It lands in Xero
As the right journal, split correctly.
What Portive does
One line on a broker statement is rarely one entry.
Selling a gilt is one line on the broker statement. In the accounts it is four: the cash received, the holding coming off the books, the interest that had built up inside the price, and the profit. The broker calls that last one a gain on disposal. For a company it is not a gain at all — it is income, and it belongs in a different total on the tax return.
Portive works out which rules apply, and to what. Buys, sells, dividends, interest, foreign currency, corporate actions — every event, every time, against the rule in force on the day it happened.
You check it
Pick a line. Watch it decide.
Portive always shows its working. Pick one of the three lines below and you get what the holding is, the rule it applied, and exactly what it posts to Xero.
Nothing posts by itself. Every treatment waits in an approval queue with its reasoning attached. You, your bookkeeper or your accountant approve it, and then it lands in Xero.
Year-end
Year-end is the part that should be boring.
Because every transaction was split and characterised when it happened, there is nothing left to work out in March. Portive keeps a running record rather than a spreadsheet rebuilt each year, so the position is always current — and can be shown as it stood on any date you ask.
You should not need to know any of what this page describes. That is the point of it.
What the close shows
Where each company has got to, and what is still open. Not a list of everything — a list of the things somebody actually has to decide, with the figures attached. When it is empty, the period is done.
What your accountant gets
A schedule that ties back to the accounts, set out by type of income and gain, laid out to match what the corporation-tax return asks for. They check it and use it. They do not rebuild it, and there are no manual calculations. Portive does not file the return — that stays with them.
Why Portive can do this
A tax engine, and the instrument data to feed it.
The rules are only half of it. Applying them means knowing what each holding actually is — and that is rarely on the broker statement. Portive keeps its own instrument reference data, checks it against the published sources, and asks you to confirm rather than guessing.
It also knows what your company is. A trading company investing surplus cash is treated differently from an investment holding company, and the accounting framework you report under changes the entries again. Neither is a one-off — what the company is gets reviewed every accounting period, and Portive applies the determination in force for the period each transaction falls in.
Holding one
1,000 units · £10,000 · acquired 14 Mar
UK reporting fund
Holding two
1,000 units · £10,000 · acquired 14 Mar
Not a reporting fund
Reporting status is not on the broker statement — not in the fund’s name, its domicile, or whether it pays out. HMRC publishes the list and the fund manager publishes the figures. Neither is on your accountant’s desk. Portive holds it, so the treatment follows on its own.
We publish the reasoning behind all of it — pooling, loan relationships, the dividend exemption, foreign currency, offshore funds. Read the technical writing →
Getting your data in
Forward the contract note, or upload the broker statement.
Portive reads broker contract notes, dividend confirmations and position statements. Send them on by email as they arrive, or upload a period’s worth at once. AJ Bell and Pictet at launch, with more to follow. No API access needed from your broker.
Feed it as the broker statements arrive, or hand over a year at once. Everything is worked out in date order regardless of when it turns up, and reconciled against the broker’s own valuation so nothing has gone missing.
It’s not straightforward. We are.
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Nothing else, and not often.