Dividends

Dividend tracker for DeGiro: from account statement to calendar

DeGiro pays your dividends into your account, but the platform has no dividend screen, no yearly total and no calendar of what is coming. The information is in one file you can download in about a minute. What is missing is anything that turns it into an answer.

This guide covers where the dividend lines are in your DeGiro history, how to work out what you received after tax, and how to build a calendar and a projection from them, including what a projection cannot know.

How to get from the account statement to a calendar

Download the account statement from DeGiro for your complete history. The transaction export does not contain dividends.
Find the dividend lines. A payment is usually a gross credit and a separate negative line for the tax withheld, on the same date. Your net dividend is the sum of the two.
Convert foreign payments one by one, at the rate on the day each payment arrived.
Group the payments by position and by month. That is the historical half of the calendar.
Add what each holding is expected to pay, using the ex-dividend date rather than the payment date. That is the forward half.

Where the dividends are

The dividends are in the account statement, and only there. DeGiro's transaction export lists your buys and sells and does not contain dividends. That is the reason most people who think DeGiro never paid them anything cannot find the payments.

The account statement is the full cash ledger of your account. It holds the payments, the tax withheld on them, your trades, your deposits and everything else. The route to it, and what the columns mean, is in the DeGiro export guide. This article assumes you have that file in front of you.

Two details matter before you start counting.

A payment is usually two lines. The gross dividend arrives as a credit, and the tax withheld on it appears as a separate negative line, generally on the same date. Your net dividend is the sum of the two. Counting only the credit overstates your income. Counting only the net amount hides how much tax you pay and to whom.

The currency may not be yours. A dividend from an American company is paid in dollars and converted at the rate on the day it arrived, not at today's rate. A euro total for the year that matches your account therefore has to convert each payment on its own date. The general principle is explained in multi-currency portfolio tracking.

Gross, withheld, net

Dividends from foreign companies are typically reduced at source by the country the company is registered in. For European investors holding American shares the usual figure under the tax treaty is 15%, provided the paperwork at your broker is in order. Other countries have their own rates, and some are higher.

Two consequences follow. First, a headline dividend yield is a gross number, and what reaches your account is less. The net figure is the one that describes your income.

Second, the withheld amount is not necessarily lost. Whether you can reclaim or offset it depends on where you are tax resident and on your local rules. That is a question about your own tax situation and not one this article can answer.

Building the calendar

A dividend calendar has two halves: what has happened, and what is expected.

The historical half comes straight out of the account statement. Group the payments by position and by month, and the pattern of your own portfolio appears: which holdings pay quarterly, which pay once a year, which have been increasing, and which stopped.

The last one is worth knowing. A cut is not visible in a portfolio overview. It shows up as a payment that did not arrive.

The forward half rests on the ex-dividend date. If you own the share before that date, the payment is yours even if you sell the next day. If you buy on or after it, the dividend belongs to the seller.

The payment date, which is what you see in your export, usually follows weeks later. A calendar built from payment dates alone therefore runs weeks behind the dates that decide who receives the money. The full explanation is in the ex-dividend date explained.

What a projection can and cannot know

A projection multiplies what you hold by what each holding is expected to pay. It is useful for planning as long as you read it as what it is: an estimate built on the recent past.

Four things it cannot know. A company can cut its dividend, and the projection is based on the payments before the cut. A special dividend inflates last year's figure and will not repeat.

Exchange rates move, so a projection in euros of dollar income is two forecasts on top of each other. Funds distribute on their own schedules, and the size of a fund distribution can vary from quarter to quarter in a way individual company dividends often do not.

Read a projection as a run rate. It shows roughly what the current portfolio generates, at current rates, if nothing changes. It answers whether your income is growing and what a new purchase adds. It does not answer how much you will receive next April with any precision.

Current yield and yield on cost

Two yields get mixed up. The current yield is the expected payment divided by today's price, which is what a new euro invested would earn. Yield on cost is the expected payment divided by what you originally paid, which measures how a long-held position has developed.

Both are legitimate numbers, but they describe different things. A yield on cost of 9% on a position bought in 2015 is a fact about the past. It says nothing about what a euro invested in the same position today would earn. That is the current yield.

Reinvestment changes the arithmetic

If you reinvest, dividends stop being income and become deposits into your own portfolio, and they compound from then on. Your dividend total and your return are then two different statements about the same money, and neither replaces the other. The arithmetic of steady contributions over a working lifetime is in the compound math of monthly investing.

What to check in your own file

Does the export cover your complete history, so that the earliest payments are included?
Does every dividend credit have its withholding line, where you expect one?
Are foreign payments converted per payment date rather than at one convenient rate?
Did any position stop paying without you noticing?
Do your yearly totals roughly match what your broker's annual documents say?

Doing it without the spreadsheet

All of the above can be done by hand. For a portfolio of five positions it takes an afternoon. At fifteen positions in three currencies across two brokers it becomes a recurring job, which is where the spreadsheet-or-tool question usually answers itself.

BullBenchmark reads the same account statement and produces the dividend history per position and per month, net of what was withheld, in your own currency, with a projection of what the current portfolio generates. It shows that next to your time-weighted return and the index comparison, because income and performance are two views of one portfolio.

The live demo shows both on a sample account.

BullBenchmark reads the transaction export from your broker and shows your return next to the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100, fed with the same deposits on the same dates, in your own currency. The first two weeks are free and no card is needed.