How to Track Your Dividend Income

Tracking your dividends can be a little more complicated than first imagined. As you accumulate holdings along your investing journey and your net worth grows, you might decide to separate your investment strategies into multiple smaller portfolios. While it may be wise to do this, tracking your portfolios suddenly becomes more complex and also more critical.

Tracking your dividends with spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are a valuable tool many investors use to manage their portfolios. If you're a spreadsheet wizard, you can create spreadsheets with beautiful dashboards and charts that offer useful metrics to gain a deeper insight into your investment decisions. You also gain the advantage of tweaking everything to your liking, adding and removing features at will. However, most of us aren't willing to spend the hours necessary to create spreadsheets like this. So what's the alternative?

Dividend Tracking Apps

Fortunately, many web apps exist to replicate these complex dividend tracking spreadsheets and make tracking your portfolios much easier! Unless you're a wizard and enjoy spending your free time creating and managing spreadsheets, then a dividend tracking app is probably more suitable for you.

There are many paid dividend tracking applications out there. However, they often charge a high monthly subscription that can eat away at your gains. That's why we created Passive Income Tracker!

What is Passive Income Tracker?

Passive Income Tracker is a simple and free-to-use dividend tracking alternative for investors to ditch the subscriptions and save their hard-earned cash. Spend time enjoying your returns, not creating spreadsheets. Our goal is to eliminate the need for complex spreadsheets and expensive web apps to view aggregated charts and portfolio metrics.

Tracking Your Dividend Income With Passive Income Tracker

Passive Income Tracker makes it easy to track your stock portfolios' dividend payouts across multiple accounts and brokers in one location.

Step 1:

Before you can start adding your portfolio holdings, you will need to create a free Passive Income Tracker account.

Step 2:

After creating and logging into your free account, you will need to create a new portfolio before adding your stock, bond, and ETF holdings. To do so, navigate to the Portfolio's page and click "Add Portfolio".

Step 3:

You can name your portfolio whatever you want. You could name it something like "My 401(k) Retirement Account" or call it something that reflects your strategy like "Charlie's Dividend Aristocrat Portfolio.".

Step 4:

To add a new holding to your portfolio, click "Add Holding" and then start typing the stock's ticker symbol into the forms Symbol input field

Step 5:

After choosing the symbol, check your brokerage account to determine how many shares you own of the security and the average price paid for it. Enter the share count and average price into the respective fields and click save.

Step 6:

Repeat the steps above to add your remaining holdings to the portfolio. When you finish adding all of your holdings, move on to step 7.

Step 7:

Once you've added all of the ticker symbols to your portfolio, we can begin adding your actual dividend payouts received. Head over to the "Earned Income" page to add the data you wish to track.

Step 8:

On the Earned Income page for your portfolio, click the "Add Income" button and choose the date you want to add data for. Passive Income Tracker is only concerned about the month and year, so the day of the month is irrelevant.

Step 9:

Passive Income Tracker tracks total dividends received each month. Head over to your brokerage account, add up the actual dividend payouts received throughout the month, and enter the amount into the "Amount" field.

Step 10:

After you've entered the total dividends received for the month, take a look at your portfolio's value for the last day of the month, and enter the value into the "Value" field on the form.

Step 11:

Repeat the above steps for each month.

Conclusion

Passive Income Tracker makes it easy to track your actual received dividend income month to month. The Dashboard page uses your earned income data to produce meaningful charts and metrics, allowing you to visualize the progress made towards your investment goals!