How to record a dividend and its franking credits

A dividend is two numbers at tax time, not one. There is the cash that landed in your bank account, and there is the franking credit attached to it. Both belong on your tax return. The second one is the part people forget, and it is the part that can come back to you as a refund.

This guide walks through recording one dividend in SavvyPortfolio, using the CBA interim payment from the demo portfolio: $2.10 per share, fully franked, on 30 shares held. It takes about a minute.

Before you start, you need the holding already in your portfolio. If you have not opened a holding page yet, drilling into one holding shows you around. Have your dividend statement handy so you can read the per-share amounts off it. For the theory behind franking, read Franking Credits Explained.

Step 1 — Open the Dividends tab

Dividends live on the holding, not on a page of their own. Open the holding you are recording against, CBA in this example, and click the Dividends tab.

The header reads Dividend history, with "Payments and franking credits for CBA · Updated Just now" underneath. Below that sits a row of controls: a treatment select reading Cash, a franking select reading Franking: not set, a ⟳ Refresh button and + Add.

If you have never recorded a payment for this holding, the panel says "No dividend history yet" above an Add First Dividend button, which does the same job as + Add. That is the expected starting point, not an error. Everything you record from here builds the dividend income section of your year-end report.

Step 2 — Click "+ Add"

Click + Add. The Add Dividend Payment modal opens, described as "Record a dividend payment for CBA." so you can be sure you are recording against the right stock.

The form is split into four short sections. The first, Basic Information, holds two fields: Payment Date and Shares Held. Neither of them starts empty. Payment Date opens on today's date, and Shares Held is pre-filled with the quantity you hold right now — 30 on this CBA position.

Neither default is the answer, though. Nothing here is guesswork: both figures come straight off the dividend statement the company or your share registry sent you. Work top to bottom and the rest of the form fills in around them.

Step 3 — Set the date and shares held

Click Payment Date and the calendar opens on the month the button is already showing, which is the current one. Step back with the previous-month arrow until you reach March 2024 and choose the 28th, the day the dividend was actually paid. The popover closes and the button reads March 28th, 2024. Because you pick from a calendar, there is no date format to guess at.

Shares Held already reads 30, carried across from the holding, so on this dividend there is nothing to type.

That convenience is also the trap. Shares Held means the shares you held on the payment date, not the number you hold today. If you have bought or sold since, those two numbers are different, and the pre-filled figure will quietly inflate or shrink every number that follows. This is the single field most worth double-checking.

Step 4 — Enter the dividend split

Move down to Dividend Details. There are three fields, and all three are per share, not totals.

They start empty, behind grey placeholder amounts. Type 2.10 into Dividend per Share, 2.10 into Franked, and 0.00 into Unfranked. That is a fully franked dividend: the whole payment carries franking.

The rule is that Franked plus Unfranked must equal Dividend per Share. If they do not, the form tells you so with "Franked + Unfranked must equal dividend per share" and waits for you to fix it. For a partly franked payment, split the per-share amount across the two fields in the proportion shown on your statement. For an unfranked one, put the whole amount in Unfranked and leave Franked empty.

Step 5 — Watch the franking credits calculate

Down in Tax & Credits, Franking Credits has already filled itself with 27.00. You do not type in that field, and you cannot. It is read-only, calculated from the split you just entered: $2.10 franked, across 30 shares, grossed up at the 30% company tax rate gives $2.10 × 30 × 30/70 = $27.00.

Tax Withheld starts at 0 and stays there unless your statement shows tax was withheld, which usually only happens where the registry has no tax file number on record for you.

The summary strip at the bottom does the multiplication for you: Total Dividend: $63.00 and Total Franking Credits: $27.00. Those are dollar totals, while the three fields above them are per-share figures.

Step 6 — Click "Add Dividend"

The last section is Treatment & Notes, holding a Dividend Treatment radio with Cash and Reinvested. Leave it on Cash unless the payment went through a dividend reinvestment plan and you received extra shares instead of money.

Click Add Dividend. The modal closes, a toast confirms Dividend added with CBA - $63.00, and the new row lands in your dividend history table.

That is the whole job. Repeat it for each payment you received during the financial year, for each holding that paid one. Interim and final dividends are separate payments, so each one gets its own row.

What you should see

Your dividend history table now has a row for the 28 March 2024 CBA payment, and the empty "No dividend history yet" state is gone.

The recorded figures are $63.00 of dividend income and $27.00 of franking credits, from 30 shares at $2.10 per share, fully franked. Those two numbers travel through to the Dividend income section of your CGT report, where they appear as Total Dividends $63.00, Franked Amount $63.00, Unfranked Amount $0.00 and Franking Credits $27.00.

Your assessable income from that dividend is the grossed-up figure, $63.00 plus $27.00, and the $27.00 comes back as a tax offset. How that lands on your return depends on your circumstances, so check it with a registered tax agent.

Common gotchas

• All three split fields are per share. Dividend per Share, Franked and Unfranked are per-share amounts. Franking Credits and the summary strip are dollar totals. Typing $63.00 into Dividend per Share instead of $2.10 gives you a dividend thirty times too large.
• Franked plus Unfranked must equal Dividend per Share. Get it wrong and the form shows "Franked + Unfranked must equal dividend per share" rather than saving something incorrect.
• Shares Held is the count on payment day. Not today's holding. If you traded between the ex-dividend date and payment, take the number off the statement.
• You cannot edit Franking Credits directly. If it looks wrong, the cause is the split or Shares Held. The credit only recalculates when you type in Franked, so if you correct Shares Held after entering the split, go back and re-enter the franked amount to make the credit catch up.
• Automatic dividend imports are a Pro feature. On the free plan you record dividends by hand, exactly as above. The calculation, the storage and the year-end dividend income report are all free.

What's next

You now have both halves of a tax return in the app: capital gains events from your buys and sells, and dividend income with its franking credits. The last post in this series, How to get your CGT report ready for tax time, pulls all of it onto one page organised by financial year.

If you want to understand what the ATO actually does with the $27.00 before you get there, Franking Credits Explained works through the grossing-up arithmetic at several marginal rates.