i’ve invested in shares for a while, but never had anything to do with managed investment trusts.
I have some Sydney airport (SYD) shares and i wanted to clarify how their distributions need for be reported for Taxation?.
Sharesight seems to recognise dividends as income from a trust ? even though to my simple view i just own the stock.
So by hovering over the information triangle where dividends are imported it looks like recording the dividend information is more complex than just the normal dividend , franking, non franked % for “normal” securities
do i really need to care about how SYD dividend is generated on the inside via their SAT 1 trust ?
if so do i need to re edit the pre populated dividend information once i get the distribution information from SYD ?
sorry if this is obvious, but i wasn’t able to find anything simply on the ATO site
Trusts and shares are slightly different from a tax point of view, Sydney Airport for some strange reason is what is called a stapled security.When you buy a share on the ASX you are actually buying one normal share and one share in a trust. That is why there is trust income. I do not own that share myself so I am not sure how Sharesight splits the income.
Hi Mark
SYD is an Attribution Managed Investment Trust (AMIT) (See link for further info).
I have literally just completed this process for FY20 for my AMIT holdings. There is a sharesight help article that explains the process (How Sharesight helps you handle Australian AMIT tax components | Sharesight Australia Help) but basically you leave each of the individual entries alone and then when you receive the FY AMIT report you update the total yearly components and Sharesight automatically pro-ratas them across each of the individual entries. It can be a little confusing because the naming conventions in Sharesight don’t exactly match those on the AMIT report. With a bit of trial and error you can work it out though - just need to make sure the total cash distribution amount matches the AMIT report total. Give it a go.
Hope that helps.
I use a different method which I personally find easier and more rational. Not much point considering FY21 but using FY20 as an example. The 14/08/2020 SYD Tax statement is used to generate two income entries dated EOFY 30/06/2020. The first one is for the unfranked dividend from SAL and the second is for the trust distribution from SAT1 (SYD is a stapled security). After a check that everthing matches the two payments of 15/08/2019 and 14/02/2020 can safely be deleted.
Not fond of the Sharesight method because it makes pro-rata changes to actual data in the income payments but if it works for you then use it.
Fractal, thanks for your thoughts on how to handle Trust and Non-Trust payments for stapled securities better than the way that Sharesight does natively. It’s helped me clean up the reporting for a couple of the holdings I have.
Can I ask how you handled this year’s tax details from SYD, where there’s a 13U Trust Income amount, and an equal offsetting AMIT cost base increase, resulting in a $0 Net Dividend?
I’m unable to add a payment, so that it flows through to the tax reporting. I get the error:
Sorry, we have found some errors:
Net Dividend must be a valid positive amount
Total Income amount needs to be greater than zero
The relevant fields I used are:
Trust Income
Paid On: 31/03/2021
Ex Date: 31/12/2020
Unfranked Amount: $Value
AMIT cost base Increase: $Value
I had missed the EOFY statement so just looked at it now.
I had exactly the same problem as you. The form will not accept a $0.00 net dividend saying it is not a positive amount. But 0.00 is a positive number.
I added $0.01 to the 13U trust income giving a net dividend of $0.01 and as expected Sharesight let it go through.
The advice from Sharesight is that a fix is not simple because there are second order effects such as divide by zero and the need to address the perfomance return of a zero dividend. So there will be a delay.
A work around is to add $0.01 to the trust income as described above producing an error which is in the noise.
The Taxable Income report could be downloaded as a spreadsheet and the error fixed manually for supply to the accountant.
Continuing the discussion from Recording SYD dividends correctly for Tax:
Hi Fractal
Having asked this question from Client Support the following was their answer, my apologies if I’m barking up the wrong tree with this post.
SYD hasn’t paid any DIVS last F/year. How should the AMIT (Increase cost base) be handled in Sharesight?
thanks for your message. Currently because the system doesn’t accept zero dividend, in this case, you will have to enter $151.27 in unfranked field and $151.26 in AMIT field.
Let me know if you need any further help on this. : )
in SYD holding page, you should see the dividend, you just need to open the existing ones and edit the figure in there. At the end of the day, as long you report the correct figure and correct FY to the ATO that’s fine.
The reply from Client Support aligns with the discussion in this post. On 31 Mar 2021 you should have a payment of trust income comprising $151.27 unfranked amount and $151.26 AMIT cost base increase. Double check you have a net dividend of $0.01.
