budgeting dividends by individual security and account

Question

I have about 20 investment accounts and 150 securities.  Each month the exercise to determine if the dividends I expected from each security matched what I received - requires a lot of spreadsheet work.

Can I, within quicken, budget the anticipated dividend for each individual security (sort of like the "est. income" field - but with expected payout dates) and then generate a report that shows actual dividends vs expected dividends.  Right now I export all the dividend payment data from quicken and merge it with a spreadsheet that holds all my anticipated dividend data and then generate reports to identify the differences.

I see discussions on budgeting dividends at an account level - but not at a security level.  As a retiree, it becomes important to quickly identify when a security pays out a dividend that was different from what you expected. Some months an investment may pay out a special (higher) dividend and another investment might miss its dividend entirely - and they could cancel each other out in a high level report - thus the need to budget at a security level.

Suggestion? Thoughts?

Sherlock · Answer

We've been using recurring reminders.  There is a bit of maintenance where dates and amounts may vary but it's not really different than any other reminder.

We also maintain a spreadsheet we use for our federal and state estimate tax payments which includes the prior years dividends and we update the spreadsheet each month with the actual data from the Tax Summary report.

mshiggins · Answer

@bmciance 
I keep a spreadsheet for the tax year for estimating and tracking dividends and other tax related data. So a bit of double entry, but as you stated, my way makes sense for me.

bmciance · Answer

@mshiggins,   I only use one-time reminders for dividends.  I have a spreadsheet that calculates estimated dividends per month going out to the following calendar year.  I have gone back and forth as to whether I should do recurring reminders but since most of my stocks I do dividend reinvestment and the fact that many of them also pay variable dividends or pay semi-regular special dividends I decided not to do it that way.  I keep my spreadsheet as my master list and just enter the reminder in Quicken once a dividend is declared.  I can see benefits of doing recurring reminders also but my way works for the way I like to do things.