Is there a possibility that sharesight could provide support for bonus share plans (aka dividend substitution share plans) for securities that offer them? There are a few companies that offer these plans (the two big ones were AFIC and Whitefield but I’ve seen a few others including I think ANZ now offer something similar). My understanding is that sharesight cannot track these manually with the DRP as shares issued under these plans are not considered taxable income and are considered to have been acquired as $0.
My work-around for this has been to manually reject the dividend payment that sharesight auto-generates, then obtain the number of bonus shares issued from my share registry and manually add a transaction to sharesight to reflect that. It would however be really good if this could be automated.
My work-around for this has been to manually reject the dividend payment that sharesight auto-generates, then obtain the number of bonus shares issued from my share registry and manually add a transaction to sharesight to reflect that. It would however be really good if this could be automated.
+1. I dislike rejecting the automatic dividend as I’m worried I’d lose a record of the Franking Credits, Dates etc, so I let the automatic transactions sit there unconfirmed, and still manually enter the Trade as a Bonus. However, this is both tedious and messy.
Can see this Feature Request has had approx 1000 views - can anyone looking for this feature please ‘heart’ RM2020’s original comment?
Shareshight - can we please get a response on this feature request?
Hi @simonm thanks for the feedback. We haven’t got any plan to build this at the moment but we are constantly monitoring to priorities features that our customers wants. Currently the workaround for DSSP are:
Tick ‘Non-Taxable’ in the dividend trade
Delete any franking credits
Total net dividend amount should all be added under ‘Unfranked amount’
I don’t think this will work. The class ruling from ATO is that these shares are bonus shares ($0) and the cost base of shares held before the issue has to adjusted according to the new total shares held. So a cost base adjustment needs to be done. Records of franking credits, unfranked dividend not taxed etc does not appear relevant . There is a bonus option in sharesight already. Shouldn’t this be the way of recording? What happens in the background for this function. Investors may want to make a comment or note that it was a dividend foregone, but according to ATO is a bonus. Refer to CR2020/35 for mirrabooka, and CR2012/10 AFI pending this model.
As far as I’m aware the correct workaround is to delete the dividend entirely and then add the number of DSSP shares as bonus shares, as the shares are considered bonus shares according to the share register.
However it would be ideal if this could be automated as by far and away one of the major advantages of sharesight is the ability to automatically track trades, dividends and so forth, so a set of bonus shares that’s automatically issued every so often would be far more preferable to automate.
I’m on the ANZ Bonus option plan (BOP). Can someone confirm if my understanding of the above steps is correct, or not?
Here’s how I believe I should process the BOP dividends:
Under All trade section, create a new “Bonus” trade. Use the BOP ‘Record date’ as the Sharesight Trade date. Enter # bonus shares in Qty field.
Under section All Dividend, delete the dividend record.
Did I misunderstand anything?