There’s a number of issues with the current implementation that I want to address:
Importing dividends from a broker duplicates dividends created by the app. Because of that, you need to manually fix the automated dividends whenever you want to do taxes. Imported dividends should take precedence and suppress automated ones from being created.
Generated dividends use the ex-dividend date because it’s needed to properly calculate the value you receive. But on your broker statement you’ll see the payout date instead (actually a few days after).
Current portfolio analysis is nice, but could be done better. We’re missing things like dividend growth rate, or forecasting among others. As this is very fixed-income-specific, it would get it’s own Report page.
The Portfolio/Income tab will sport additional metrics. For quick-check and navigation, the Summary page will receive a widget with basic metrics and list of upcoming dividends.
DRIP or dividends paid in stock are not supported well right now while being quite popular.
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Really looking forward to seeing some of these updates listed here.
Can you explain your proposed implementation and/or any guidance for how we should currently record DRIP transactions for compatibility with the upcoming changes?
It made sense to me to have a ‘dividend’ transaction for the income and then a ‘transfer’ transaction of equal value and the associated quantity of shares.
Dividend paid out in shares - where you add the received quantity, alongside any cash residue right in the dividend transaction
Automatic dividend reinvestment, where for each generated dividend transaction, a BUY is added as well. I think Buy is more appropriate, as you reinvest the money from a dividend, while Transfer is more applicable in the first case, where you receive the stock as part of the dividend.
Also, the Buy won’t be added if there’s already a Buy with the same date and quantity.
I can also see the reasoning for listing it as a BUY transaction. How does either option (buy vs transfer) impact the Invested Principal? My thought was that I viewed that IP metric as the amount of cash I have put into my portfolio. The DRIP is investment generated rather than new cash.
I think I am convinced I should record the purchase of DRIP shares as a BUY. But asking further questions to make sure the accounting is clear in my head.
Both work exactly the same - they increase the quantity of what you hold, and the invested money (cost-basis) is included in the principal.
I think that DRIP still increases your IP. If not for reinvestment, you would hold that cash in hand - it didn’t come from nowhere.
The only distinction in C for Buy & Transfer is at the taxes level. All tax presets look only at the Buy & Sell, as transfers generally don’t have tax implications.
You can now see & edit the Payment Date for a dividend. If you’re using taxes, the dividend tax will be applied on the payment date, instead of a regular one.
If you manually added or imported an income transaction, it will suppress creating an automatic one, if the transaction’s date is anywhere between the ex-date and 2 weeks after the payment date. Previously the date had to be exactly the same.
You can now receive dividends or interest in shares (and residual cash). Such dividends will increase your asset position, but won’t currently change your cash position (they will in the future). The cost-basis is value - taxPaid - cash received.
You can now disable automatic dividend handling per asset, account or position. You can also enable automatic reinvestment, including discounts - which can be used to model DRIP accounts.
You can also set tags on specific positions - helpful if you have the same asset on two accounts and you want to differentiate them with tags.
You can now check all upcoming dividends - both in Transactions list and in the metrics & charts. Just select a future date as your date period, like +1y or -1y +1y or max +1y, or 2023 2025 and so on.
Incomplete/estimated data will be marked as such on the charts
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