How to Handle Scrip Dividends

First Week In StocksCafe Evan Koh

Learn how to account for scrip dividends, bonus shares, rights issues, etc

StocksCafe lets you tag transactions that are scrip dividends so that you can clearly track which dividends you have chosen to take as shares instead of cash. You can also see how much dividends you have reinvested yearly.

How to handle scrip dividends/re-invested dividends

Tagging transactions as Scrip

There are two main ways to do this:

  1. Recommended: From the collected dividends tab, under the “Scrip” column, click on Create. lt will bring you to the new transaction page and some fields are automatically filled out for you.

  2. When you create a new transaction, there is now a checkbox named “Scrip Dividend”. Select the checkbox for scrip dividends and fill out the rest as per usual.

FAQs

1) What values to enter for the various fields?


Units Purchased/Sold = Shares that you will receive.
Price Paid/Received = Total amount that you would receive if you have chosen cash / Shares you will receive
See this forum post for more details


2) Can I take dividends from one stock and reinvest into another? e.g Take dividends from Singtel (Z74) and use the dividends to buy STI ETF (ES3).

Yes, you can technically do that. StocksCafe will highlight the scrip dividends box in red (see image below) but it is perfectly fine to ignore.