Dividend Tracker (FREE Spreadsheet Download)

When you get started on your dividend investing journey, the best part is dividend tracking. It is so rewarding to input your dividend raises that come from your dividend paying companies (without having to add your own invested capital).  However, despite the popularity of dividend investing, it is difficult to find a dividend tracker spreadsheet online to keep track of your forward dividend yield.  Here’s a free dividend tracking spreadsheet for you to download with a step-by-step guide on how to use THIS dividend tracker spreadsheet in Excel.

Why Use A Dividend Tracker?

First, let me explain why a dividend tracker spreadsheet is a good idea for any avid dividend investor.  Similar to tracking your net worth or tracking your spending, tracking your dividend yield is a great way to look at how much more in income producing assets you are accumulating.  

Also, unless you are an index investor,  it is good practice to review which companies are cutting or increasing dividends. Once a company cuts their dividends, this is usually bad news for investors and also for the company.

I personally update my dividend yield spreadsheet on a monthly basis and you can check my recent forward dividend income updates here if you’re interested.  

Here’s how to use a dividend yield spreadsheet to keep track of your dividends which we can’t forget to cultivate and weed, just like your vegetable garden.  Thanks to my investing and Excel spreadsheet savvy husband, he helped create this spreadsheet for me. I personally use a similar one to keep track of my dividends with Google Sheets.

Some brokerages like Scotia iTrade have a dividend tracker (forward yield) built into their dashboard and interface, while others, like Questrade don’t.

I also use Dividend Pro App to keep track of the ETF distribution changes and I update my spreadsheet.

Free Dividend Portfolio Tracker Step-by-Step Guide

If you haven’t already downloaded this dividend yield spreadsheet, you can sign up here.  Once you receive it in your email, press the orange button to download it.

If you don’t like subscribing to genymoney.ca you can always unsubscribe, but I do hope that you won’t 😉

Here’s an explanation of each column in your Excel spreadsheet that you have just downloaded.

Name

This is pretty self-explanatory.  Here you can input the Ticker Symbol of the dividend stock that you have purchased in your portfolio.

Market Value

For this, you don’t have to input anything into the spreadsheet.  It is automatically calculated using the spreadsheet by multiplying the current price by the number of shares owned.

Price

Every time you want to update your dividend portfolio, you will need to update this manually with the current market price of the dividend stock.  This number is the market price, or what it is currently sold at on the stock market.  Google Docs has an option where you can input a Google Finance command and it pulls the data so you don’t have to update manually.  However, this spreadsheet is in Excel instead.

Book Value

Book value will be inputted when you first buy your dividend stock and will be adjusted every time you add to your dividend stock.  This includes adding via dripped shares or buy additional purchases of equities.  The book value is the actual cost of how much you spent buying these shares including commissions.

ACB (Adjusted Cost Base)

The adjusted cost base is the book value divided by the number of shares that you own.  You don’t need to input this, as it is calculated from the dividend spreadsheet.  It is the price per share that you bought the stock at.  You will want this to be as low as possible 🙂

Capital Gain/ Loss

The capital gain or loss is calculated by subtracting book value (what you have purchased the dividend stock at) from the market value (what the dividend stock is currently priced at on the market).  Again, you don’t need to input this, as it is calculated from the dividend spreadsheet automatically.

percentage %

The percentage (shown as an increase or decrease, or a positive or negative number) is basically the capital gain or loss divided by the Adjusted Cost Base (ACB).  You do not need to input this as the calculation is built into the spreadsheet.

Shares

This is self-explanatory and you can input the number of shares that you own of your dividend company.  If you have dividend re-investment plan (or DRIPs) you can change the number of shares that you own.  In addition, when you purchase more shares you can update the numbers here.

To DRIP or not to DRIP that’s a matter of personal preference for any dividend investor.  I like a balanced approach.  I have one dividend stocks that I DRIP (Sunlife Financial, SLF.TO).  I do like to have control over most of my dividend income and use the dividends received to buy other dividend stocks that might be more well-priced than what the DRIP stocks are offering.

Dividends per Share

The value (may it continue to increase for you) will need to be updated as companies increase their dividend (or decrease… or cut).  Increasing dividends is MUSIC to any dividend investor’s ears.  “X company increases their dividend by 12% to $3.50/share paid out on a quarterly basis”.

The dividend per share will be the annual dividend per share.  Some companies pay every month and some pay every quarter.  Here’s where you would find this information in a stock quote.  

This is an example of Altria (NYSE: MO) on Yahoo Finance.

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Total Dividend

The total dividend is calculated for you in the spreadsheet and equals the dividends per share multiplied by the number of shares you own.  This number is very soothing when it keeps going up, especially if the dividends per share keeps going up and the company continues to increase their dividend- and not because the number of shares held is going up!

Dividend Yield

Finally, this is another field that is calculated for you.  It is equal to the total dividend divided by the adjusted cost base.  This is how much of a dividend yield you are getting on the amount of dividend stock you paid.

The lower you paid for your dividend stock, usually the higher your dividend yield is.

You can also see the total dividends (the sum of all the dividend income) and the total dividend yield of your portfolio.  This is probably one of the most important numbers available because it tells you how much dividend yield you are getting from your portfolio as a whole.  The total dividend yield number is created by the total dividends divided by the total ACB or total cost of your portfolio.

You may have a few dividend stocks that are paying a 10% dividend and others that are 1.35% but you don’t know what your average dividend yield is.  When you know the total dividend yield, you do.

Hope that explains the spreadsheet and how to use it!  

Again, if you’re interested in downloading it, please subscribe to genymoney.ca updates and get a free dividend yield spreadsheet tracker!

How to Track Dividends Received

This dividend tracker spreadsheet helps you track your forward annual dividend yield (or expected dividends in the next 12 months, give or take depending on whether you invested before the ex-dividend dates).

I hope the dividend tracker template is useful for you on your dividend investing journey. I wouldn’t say it’s the best dividend tracker spreadsheet out there, but it’s free and easy to use and gets the job done!

Dividend investing is like gardening, very enjoyable to see your fruits of labour!

Wealthica: The Personal Capital of Canada

To track actual dividends received, I use Wealthica, which is a net worth and portfolio tracker in Canada. It’s very easy for me to track my dividends received.

I just log into Wealthica (it’s free) and I go to “Power Ups” and then click on Income.

It then tells me the past 12 months of dividends received. It separates both US dollar dividends and Canadian dividends and converts the total to Canadian dollars.

Here’s a screenshot of what the dividend tracker in Wealthica looks like. You can toggle the timeline to any date or period of time, for example, you can check how many dividends you received for the month of December.

You can click here to sign up for Wealthica for free here. They have an app and a desktop version which are both excellent.

Dividend Pro App

Another way to keep track of forward dividend yield very specifically, even down to ex-dividend dates and the exact pay dates of your dividends is using a dividend tracker app called Dividend Pro.

It’s free to download but after certain time period, you are only allowed 3 stocks to monitor and if you want to unlock all the stocks you inputted previously, you have to pay $12.99 per year to access them.

Here’s my review of the Dividend Predictor app.

Passiv

Finally another alternative is using Passiv. It is also free (if you are a Questrade user) and provides excellent analytics and tracking of your dividends and dividend history.

This is what Passiv looks like when you are looking at tracking your dividends:

Here’s my review of Passiv if you are interested.

If you want to get started dividend investing, a good way is to check out what other dividend investors are investing in or you can start off by looking at these top 5 Canadian Dividend Stocks.  Feel free to check out my compilation of the Ultimate List of Canadian Dividend Investing Bloggers.

If you’re interested in reading more about dividend investing through books, here are the top 5 dividend investing books that I would recommend.

You may also be interested in:

• How are dividends taxed in Canada
• Tax efficient investing in Canada

Readers, do you use a dividend investing spreadsheet?  

How often do you update your dividend tracker spreadsheet?