Dividend and DRIP Modeling#

Overview#

Cash dividends and dividend reinvestments (DRIPs) are modeled differently from one another — and both differ from ordinary buy/sell trades — using a combination of record type (Trade vs Transaction) and the investment_activity_label field.

Cash Dividends#

Manual Entry#

Dividends entered manually via the trade form are always stored as Trade records, never as Transaction records. The "dividend" form type routes to create_dividend_income in Trade::CreateForm, which calls create_income_trade with:

• qty: 0, price: 0, fee: 0 — no position change 1
• investment_activity_label: "Dividend" 2
• amount negated (amount * -1), representing cash inflow 3
• Security is required — the form enforces this and returns a validation error if no ticker is present 4

The security association links the dividend income to a specific holding without changing its quantity.

Via SnapTrade Sync#

When synced from a brokerage via SnapTrade, DIVIDEND and DIV activity types map to the "Dividend" label 5. Crucially, both are listed in CASH_TYPES 6, so they are processed by process_cash_activity and stored as Transaction records, not Trade records 7.

The amount sign is normalized in normalize_cash_amount: DIVIDEND / DIV amounts are negated (-amount.abs), consistent with the manual-entry convention where cash inflows are negative 8.

Key distinction: A manually-entered cash dividend is a Trade (with qty=0); a SnapTrade-synced cash dividend is a Transaction. Both share the "Dividend" label.

Dividend Reinvestment (DRIP)#

DRIPs come exclusively from brokerage sync via SnapTrade. The REI and REINVEST activity types are listed in TRADE_TYPES 9, so they route through process_trade and create Trade records with a non-zero quantity, representing actual share acquisition 10.

Both map to the "Reinvestment" label via SNAPTRADE_TYPE_TO_LABEL 11.

There is no manual DRIP/reinvestment entry type in the current UI — the trade form only supports: buy, sell, dividend, interest, deposit, withdrawal 12.

Label System and Budget Impact#

"Dividend" and "Reinvestment" are members of the shared ACTIVITY_LABELS constant, defined on Transaction and mirrored on Trade via Trade::ACTIVITY_LABELS = Transaction::ACTIVITY_LABELS.dup.freeze 13. See Investment Activity Labels for the full label set.

Budget exclusion: All Trade records (including qty=0 dividend trades) are unconditionally excluded from expense budgets via excluded_from_budget?. For SnapTrade-synced cash dividends stored as Transaction records, "Dividend" is not in INTERNAL_MOVEMENT_LABELS, so those transactions do flow through to income statement totals 14. This means SnapTrade-synced dividends and manually-entered dividends have different analytics behavior despite sharing the same label.

The income-badge UI marks "Dividend" and "Interest" trades as read-only — the label chevron and click handler are suppressed for these activity types 14.

Key Source Files#