A dedicated file with its own rules.
The FreeAgent CSV contains three fields per transaction: a day-first date, a signed amount and a one-line description. It has no header row. Dates are written consistently, money paid out stays negative and amounts contain a decimal point without a thousands separator. The headings in the browser preview help you review the fields; they are not exported.
FreeAgent's basic CSV guidance excludes double quotes. Descriptions containing commas or double quotes therefore need attention rather than ordinary CSV quoting. Edit the description or explicitly enable punctuation cleanup. The cleanup only changes this dedicated export, leaving the source transaction table available for comparison.
Review transactions in FreeAgent.
After uploading the file to your chosen bank account in FreeAgent, open the latest statement upload. Compare the transaction count, signed amounts and first and last dates with your original statement.
If you choose OFX, confirm the bank, full account identifier, account type, currency, printed closing balance and balance date. The UTF-8 option preserves international text. A legacy Windows-1252 option is available for compatibility testing and refuses characters it cannot preserve.
Keep a gap between preparation and posting.
The tool prepares a file for manual import. It does not log in to FreeAgent, assign tax categories, explain transactions or reconcile the books. Open the intended bank account in FreeAgent, use its statement upload flow and review the imported entries before explaining them.
Use a period that does not overlap transactions already supplied by a bank feed or a previous upload. The report's duplicate signals and OFX identifiers can help with review, but neither can guarantee how a destination will match entries. Keep the original statement and downloaded check report for the next person who works with the data.