Tracking Eligible Canadian Dividends Separately

[ThomasK]

Hi Mark,

I'm taking over from our accountants on both personal and corporate fronts and need to figure out the best way to track "eligible" vs "ineligible" dividends. I'm using Fund Manager to do the heavy lifting for the investments side and then putting the key numbers into Intuit's QuickBooks then exporting to Intuit Tax software.

For these "eligible" Canadian dividends the accountant would separate them out at tax time using amounts reported on tax slips sent from the bank/brokerage.

(For readers, personal Canadian income taxes, dividends from Canadian stocks are taxed differently...they are defined as "eligible" or "ineligible" by the issuing company. Most dividends from Canadian corporations are "eligible" but some are not. All US dividends are considered "ineligible" by default.)

QUESTION:
Mark, how would you record "eligible" dividends separately from "non-eligible" dividends? Would you do this in FundManager or keep things status quo by keeping all dividends as dividends in FM and split that amount up at tax time using the tax slips?

Thanks.
Thomas

[Mark]

Hi Thomas,

One option would be to create 2 distribution types, one for eligible and another for ineligible dividends. See "Options / Distribution Labels...". Please keep in mind, if you change the labels, anything in that distribution type will have the new label, so you might want to maybe utilize one of the distribution types you weren't using before, like maybe "user-defined 1".