Portfolio Manager > Securities Screen > Income Section
The Stock Doctor Portfolio accommodates monitoring dividends paid to you from the securities you own.
Dividends are listed in descending order of payment date in the table titled 'Income and Expenses'.
Automatic and Unconfirmed Dividends
If you have 'Automatically create dividends' checked in the portfolio settings, dividends are automatically created based on the holdings on the eve of the ex-dividend date. Holdings on this date are calculated based on the trades and adjustments you have entered.
Automatically generated dividends will have an ‘Unconfirmed’ transaction Status.
Unconfirmed automatically generated dividend need to be confirmed.
**We recommend you check your dividends against the dividend statements you receive from the share registry.
You can confirm auto-dividend transactions, by clicking the Confirm button alongside the dividend.
You can also manually enter dividends using the 'New Dividend' button.
One or more dividends can be deleted by checking the box to the left of the row and clicking 'Delete'
Dividend reinvestment plans
The 'Reinvest' button to the right of each dividend transaction will open a dialog enabling you to enter the buy transaction representing the reinvestment of the dividend. The 'Trade Date', 'No. of Shares', 'Price ($)' and 'Total ($)' are defaulted based on the 'Payment Date', 'Total Received ($)' and the open price on the payment date. You will need to manually change these to reflect actual values.
Trust Distributions fields
Listed trust funds distribute income, capital gains and capital returns to investors.
Your share of the trust's net income must be included in your assessable income. You record this in the 'Australian income distributed by a trust' and 'Foreign income' sections on the Income tab of the Dividend dialog. The distribution statement you receive from the trust will generally contain tax return labels, these give a clue as to what field to enter the amount into on the income dialog.
You need to pay capital gains tax on capital gains distributed by the trust. These should be recorded on the 'Other' tab of the dialog. They are reported in the capital gain report.
- Discounted capital gain: gains on assets sold by the trust after they held them for more than a year. Normally the trust applies a 50% CGT discount to these capital gains and reports the discounted amount. If so you enter the amount reported. Stock Doctor will gross this up and report the gross amount on the capital gains report. Sometimes (as in the Lincoln fund example below) the trust reports the gross amount prior to discounting, in this case you need to record half the amount reported.
- CGT concession: the trust's CGT discount component of any actual distribution.
- Other capital gain: gains on assets sold by the trust after they held them for less than a year. No discounting applies to these.
You don't pay tax this year on capital returns, tax deferred amounts and tax free amounts distributed by the trust, however they need to be added together and recorded in the 'Capital return, tax deferred amount or tax free amount' field on the 'Other tab'. They reduce the cost base of your trust shares and therefore increase the capital gain when you sell them.
Distribute Final Dividend feature
The purpose of the Distribute Final Dividend feature comes from the following scenario:
- fund pays dividends during the year
- the exact split of the dividend between various components is not known until the final dividend of the year
- at the final dividend time the fund calculates the split between components and needs to redistribute the amounts paid previously into the correct components
- that is the purpose of the dialog - to reallocate previously paid amounts without changing the total amount paid.
So, yes, you should use the actual, end of year amounts in the dialog, but, no, it will not change the total amounts paid on each dividend.
Using the Lincoln Wholesale Australian Income Fund distribution as example, the following shows the annual income distribution statement and how the amounts highlighted should be entered into the income dialog: