Recording of Dividends

[BHaskell]

I am using the trial Professional version. I note that dividends appear to be registered in the cash account on the ex-date, instead of the receipt date. This makes it hard to compare against the cash account's actual balances. Is there some way to control which date it uses to post to the account?

[Mark]

Hi BHaskell,

The cash side of a dividend posts on the same data as the dividend itself. How are you retrieving dividends? In the Professional version you can either retrieve them from your broker, or you can retrieve dividends when using the Yahoo (Historical) quote server. If you're retrieving from your broker, you would not also want to get them from Yahoo (Historical) as you would be double recording them.

[BHaskell]

Hi Mark,

I am downloading them from my broker.

[Mark]

Hi BHaskell,

Are the dividends downloaded into the stock investments dated the same as the cash deposits?

[BHaskell]

On further inspection, it appears that on the ex-date the dividend is recorded in the investment and "Cash" (with the ex-date as the transaction date). Then, on the payment date, the dividend is again recorded in the investment (with the receipt date) and the "Cash" transaction's date is changed to the receipt date from the ex-date. In the Investment both dividend transaction show "DIVIDEND RECEIVED" in the memo window. In "Cash", it first appears with a memo of "Distributed Dividend from XXX", then when it is received, the memo changes to "(Imported) Distribution Dividend from XXX".

This is still the same problem in that it is hard to reconcile against the brokerage statement if the dividends are recorded on the ex-date, even if, they change later.

FYI, the brokerage download is coming from Fidelity.

[Mark]

Hi BHaskell,

It should not work this way... Typically you should only see the dividend show up on the payment date. You should just have one dividend in the investment, and one buy into cash for the same amount on this same date. Also, recording a new dividend should not be able to modify any prior dividend, or the cash side of that dividend transaction. Fund Manager does record the transactions just however your broker reports them.

To isolate what happened, or is happening we would need to try and reproduce this, and look at the log files. Are you able to reproduce this problem at this point, or would you need to wait for another investment to have an ex-date? For example, if you used the New Portfolio Wizard to retrieve all historical transactions and positions into a copy of your account, does everything show up correctly?