Introducing the Dividend Portfolio Tracker V9.32 Beta

One of my side projects has been building a Dividend Portfolio Tracker. We did this years ago, and it worked pretty well. However, we recently solved 3 challenges:

1. Supplying members with updated dividend rates was challenging. At least for now, it only requires one click.
2. Importing ex-dividend dates tends to be another challenge. We currently have a solution.
3. Sometimes Google would throttle price imports. That may still happen, especially if someone has a very large amount of positions. However, we are beta testing some code that should reduce it.

Necessary Scripts

Due to limitations created by Google, we run some core parts of the code through scripts. Google makes these sound scary, but they are the most effective tool to keep spreadsheets working. All of these improvements were enabled via scripts. 

What Do You Want?

Now I come to members to ask:

“What features do you want most in a dividend portfolio tracker?”

For instance, here are some things we could add (probably) if they are commonly requested:

1. A tab for closed positions.
2. Columns to indicate allocations to a stock by CWMF or SK (automatically imported for members of our service).
3. A check on preferred shares to estimate the upcoming dividend rate for floating-rate shares (rather than using the trailing rate).
4. Risk ratings or other fundamental data for REITs and BDCs.

Most of those features, if built, would be restricted to our members (which includes you). 

Of course, there are many things we can’t do. That’s pretty normal. We will regularly lean towards simplicity. Complexity inherently produces costs, so we want to minimize it.

The big thing here is simply finding out what features commonly show up as requests.

Beta Status

This is a beta. There may be bugs. Some members will prefer to wait until we have a stable release. That’s perfectly fine. We want to provide the beta to our members so they have early access and have the opportunity to provide feedback. The beta doesn’t have a tool to alert people when a new version is released. We may add that. 

Links

There are two links you’re going to want. I’m including them in order. If you’re a software engineer, you can skip the Youtube video. For everyone else, it’s less than 4 minutes and it will make using the sheet a breeze. I’ll demonstrate how to add positions and how to activate the scripts. When you copy the portfolio tracker, it will alert you that the sheet includes scripts. You need to hit the blue button for “Make a copy”.

Here are the two links:

1. This is a Youtube video demonstrating how to activate your Portfolio Tracker. 
2. This is the link to copy our Dividend Portfolio Tracker.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoy this tool. I’m looking forward to your feedback. I believe this tool manages to be much simpler, much more reliable, and much more automatic than any competing tools. Most competing tools are unable to do what we’ve done with dividend imports. If they can do it, they require a separate subscription. They often require addons for sheets and logging into those addons. We’ve found ways to bypass those features. 

If you have questions about using it, you can hit the “reply” button on your email or hit the link to “comment” on this article.