Here’s my Dividend Pro App review. I am not sure how other dividend investors do it, perhaps they have a calendar or perhaps they have a detailed spreadsheet, or perhaps their brokerage has the information available on their platform.
For me though, I found it difficult to keep track of the ex-dividend date and the dividend payout dates, and often just relied on Investing Twitter to keep tabs of the dividend pay days. For other lazy investors like me, the Dividend Pro App is pretty good.
I really hesitate to buy subscriptions for anything so getting this was a big deal for me! I don’t like to have anything automatically deducted. The price was reasonable enough, if it was $12.99 per month instead of per year, I would not have signed up.
What is the Dividend Pro App?
The Dividend Pro App was created by Summatrix Inc. It is a tool for dividend investors so you can figure out when you will get paid your dividend income. It used to be called Dividend Predictor but they changed the name.
The Dividend Pro App tracks future and past dividend payments and ex-dividend dates.
More importantly, it tracks recent dividend changes and how they will affect your cash flow.
It has over 5000 stocks/ ETFs covering both Canadian and United States exchanges.
Why is the Dividend Predictor App Useful?
For me the impetus to download something like this was mainly because I was having a difficult time keeping track of the ETF distribution amounts. I include the 12 month trailing distribution amounts in my ETFs to calculate my forward annual dividend yield.
Since ETFs hold a number of equities, it’s definitely more difficult to keep track of the changes of distribution yield and amounts- you don’t see something like “VXC ETF announces an increase on their distribution of 0.12%”, haha though it would be nice.
Anyway, my impression of my forward dividend yield was higher than it actually was because I had not updated my ETF distributions in a number of months. It wasn’t a very nice feeling to realize I was making less than I thought I was in passive income 🙂
I use Questrade as my brokerage but to my knowledge, I don’t think it can track your current dividend yield. Scotia iTrade has that but we have that for our joint investing account brokerage.
In fact, the graphing capabilities of Questrade are so lacking that I signed up for Wealthica (it’s free) to track my dividend income and my portfolio performance.
Related: Wealthica Review: The Ultimate Investment Portfolio Tracker
Is Dividend Pro Free to Sign Up?
The Dividend Pro App is free to sign up. In fact, I probably spent over an hour inputting my investments into the app. You can put your whole portfolio in there and marvel at when your next dividend payment for $POW might be.
Then suddenly (well not so suddenly they clearly state they give you a one month free trial), you only have access to three stocks to track.
When you have inputted over 20 stocks and ETFs to track you’ll be tempted to spend the $12.99 to subscribe for a year to get that information that you painstakingly entered into the app, back.
So yes, it is free to sign up, but be wary that you’ll likely cave and pay the money for the year’s subscription like I did!
Related: The 5 Best Dividend Stocks to Invest in Canada
How Much does the App Cost?
How much does Dividend Pro cost?
A subscription for:
- One Year of Dividend Predictor is $15.50
The subscription will automatically renew, but you can change your settings and ‘cancel’ the subscription if you don’t want it to automatically renew. You will still get access to your information until your subscription term is over.
If you are an index investor and only invest 3 ETFs max, then you are in luck! This app will be free for you because you won’t need to pay for the subscription.
For this Dividend Pro app review, let’s go over the pros and cons of this app.
Dividend Pro Pros
Obviously you will save a lot of time with this app. You won’t have to go and research the ex-dividend date of your intended dividend stock purchase, it will show you in the app (good for if you are planning to buy more of your current position).
It is a clean interface and streamlined, tells you all the information you want to know up front.
You can see your yield on cost and the current yield.
You can keep track of your monthly dividend income very easily, this is especially useful for those who rely on their passive dividend income to pay their monthly expenses.
You can track your dividend income by day, week, month, quarter or year.
You can also open up different portfolios (for example, adding an RRSP portfolio and your TFSA portfolio to better keep track of each).
Finally the best part that I like is the alerting of dividend changes. For example, it shows that Telus Corporation (T.TO) recently increased their dividend by 1.61%.
You can even press on Recent Dividends and it will show you all the dividend payouts, dividend increases or decreases and when they were done for a specific holding in your portfolio.
Dividend Pro Cons
There are a few downsides to the Dividend Pro app.
The main thing is the cost, but you do get to track three stocks or ETFs for free.
Another downside was the ‘bugginess’. When I first signed up for the Dividend Pro App I’m not sure if it was because of my iPhone (maybe I don’t have the most updated iOS, I’m not sure I’m not very technologically advanced) but every time I entered my holdings the app crashed and I had to turn off my iPhone and turn it on again. However once I subscribed and paid, this didn’t happen again.
The other downside is that the list of stocks they have available is not exhaustive, though they do have over 5000 stocks and ETFs between the US and Canada exchanges, so you are well covered. I had no trouble inputting the investments that I have into the Dividend Predictor app.
Finally, this is minor, I guess, but when you input a new stock and it is on the NYSE, you can choose to use a conversion rate when you input that stock e.g. 1.20 USD to CAD. It’s a bit difficult to keep track of what the current rate will be since it changes- so even though the exchange rate changes, the amount that you entered doesn’t really change.
Related: Norbert Gambit on Questrade exchange CAD to USD and vice versa
In summary, I think this is a great app as part of the dividend investor’s toolkit. It will save you a lot of time and you can look forward to when your next dividend payment will be very easily.
Changing and adjusting your portfolio is easy enough with the press of a few buttons. You can either do this by clicking “buy or sell” or you can click in the right bottom of the page, where it says “Change Values” for a quick and dirty change of your current number of shares.
You may also be interested in:
What is your Dividend Pro App review?
If you don’t use something like this, how do you keep track of your dividend pay dates and ex-dividend dates?
GYM is a 30 something millennial interested in achieving financial freedom through disciplined saving, dividend and ETF investing, and living a minimalist lifestyle. Before you go, check out my recommendations page of financial tools I use to save and invest money. Don’t forget to subscribe for blog updates, a free dividend yield spreadsheet, and the free Young Money Bootcamp eCourse.
Looks like a nice useful app! A very well spent money I’d say. But it is not for me. I see the info (ex-Date and $) on my Questrade Stock Dashboard which I put manually in my Excel Spreadsheet manually.
The spreadsheet does the rest of course calculating how much I’ll get annually and the yield on cost and yield on price. I like free stuff as you know!
Let’s read your review in a year and if you decided to renew it for another year.
@Mr Dreamer- Very organized Mr Dreamer! Maybe Questrade or Wealthica will have something like this and I won’t need it. It has been helpful (very much so) though for the ETF distributions. That stuff keeps changing and it’s hard to keep up. This app helps me see the 12 month trailing ETF distributions easily to calculate my “ETF yield”.
Thank you! I didn’t even know that this tool existed prior to reading your blog. I’ve been looking for a tool that can help me track dividends forever as I find this information frustratingly difficult to find. You would think that companies would be very transparent with when exactly dividends are going to be released but apparently that’s not always the case. Thanks for the time that you put into researching this! I’ll definitely be pointing people in your direction.
@Arthur DuBois- Thanks! Glad it’s not only me! It think some brokerages provide this information more easily (for example Scotia iTrade does) but the one I use does not. It’s not without some glitches this app- like using the buy/sell features vs the ‘change values’ buttons will help you track your dividends better. For example, me being lazy to do the change values buttons makes it look like I am getting a bigger dividend payment than I am actually getting because I did not purchase the shares before the ex-dividend date.
Hi Gym,
It’s difficult indeed to track down ex. div. date and payment dates specially if one is an individual stock investor like myself who have now a sizeable stocks to follow.
I am using microsoft calendar in my PC from previous data plot it on the calendar forward. It might be that accurate but as browse my calendar few times of the month then I make revision on the actual dates when it happens.
@Rommel- Sounds like you have a good system!
I simply just wait until dividends are deposited into my account that I track them via Wealthica. I guess I’m patient LOL. While it would be nice to see expected future dividends into the future, I’m curious if setting this up on this app is as easy as the set up is with Wealthica? Sounds like you have to input things manually?
@Dividend Daddy- No, Wealthica is way easier. This app you have to input your holdings/ book value. And when I add more, I input ‘change value’ so once you do the first part it doesn’t take much effort (unless you are buying 1 share here and there every few days). Wealthica, they have a P/L Timeline under “Power Ups” so now you can see the ex-dividend dates and dividend pay dates in a calendar format.
I love seeing when my pay day is and how much I will get paid though! Haha. It gives me something to look forward to week by week.