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How to track monthly dividend income from your investments

by Prashant Mohan, Chief Marketing Officer, Sharesight | Dec 6th 2020

If you’re a dividend income or dividend growth investor, tracking the value of dividends from your investments over time is essential, particularly if you rely on dividend income to fund your lifestyle. While there are a number of ways to track dividend performance in Sharesight, one of our users shared a trick he uses to track his dividend income on a monthly basis to help manage cash flow.

We love it when investors find creative ways to use Sharesight, and we found this method so useful that we thought it was worth sharing with you.

How to track monthly dividend income from your investments

Get all your investments into Sharesight

The first step for any dividend investor is to get all their investments into Sharesight, including any investment property and fixed income securities.

Dividend income portfolio

Use the Future Income Report to see income on a monthly basis

In this particularly unique method, our user shared how he uses the Future Income Report to look at historical dividends.

This differs somewhat from the typical use of the Future Income Report, which is to view upcoming declared dividends. Because of this, the default time period for this report is set to the following 12 months.

View upcoming dividends

However, using the date filter you can set the date range for the report to any time period, including the past. To view a monthly snapshot, just set the date range as the start and end of the month in question.

Company dividends by month

With the date filter set, the report will show every dividend and distribution paid by investments in your portfolio. The report also includes the date each dividend was paid, the ex-dividend date, the total value of the dividend, plus the value of any tax or franking credits (as applicable to some ASX-listed stocks).

Historic dividend payments

To view a summary of just the total dividend income received each month, you can change the Future Income Report view using the "advanced options" menu to instead just show monthly totals over your set time frame.

Monthly dividend income totals

After selecting the ‘show monthly totals’ filter, your dividend income is calculated by month over the date range.

Dividend income paid per month

Export it to a spreadsheet to build your monthly dividend income statement

Any report in Sharesight can be exported to a spreadsheet in Excel or Google or to a PDF. Using a Google spreadsheet, you could look to build a monthly income graph to see if your dividend income fluctuates in predictable ways at certain times each year -- allowing you to better smooth out this cash flow variability over the long term.

Sharesight – built for dividend investors

Sharesight was built for the needs of dividend investors just like you to make tracking dividend income portfolios easy. With Sharesight you can:

Sign up for a free Sharesight account and start tracking the impact of dividends on your investment portfolio today!

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