Most dividend calendars are a list of every company on the exchange. Yours is not. The FolioBright dividend calendar is built from your own ledger: the payers in your accounts, the payments they have declared, and — where a company has not declared yet — what its record says is coming. It lives beside Income, under the same figures, so what you see on the calendar is what the Income page is counting.
The date that matters is the last day to buy
Every other calendar leads with the ex-dividend date. That is the date the market cares about; it is not the date you can act on. To receive a payment you have to own the shares before the ex-date, which means the last day to buy is the trading day before it. If you reinvest dividends, or you are deciding whether to add to a position this week, the buy-by day is the one that decides whether the next payment is yours.
So FolioBright puts the buy-by day in gold on the calendar and leads with it on the Income page: “Buy VYM by Wednesday · ex Thursday”. Being told a holding goes ex tomorrow, after the last day to buy has passed, is trivia. Being told you have until Wednesday is a decision.
Declared, or estimated — and it says which
A company declares its dividend a few weeks ahead: the amount, the ex-date, the pay date. FolioBright refreshes those declarations every day for every dividend payer in your accounts and keeps them in its own market store, so the calendar opens instantly and the dates are the company’s, not a guess.
Before a declaration, a holding still has a record: it has paid monthly, or quarterly, around the same days, at roughly the same amount. The calendar projects the next payment from that record and marks it as an estimate — a dashed outline, a tilde before the amount — so a projection never reads as a promise. When the company declares, the estimate becomes a declared payment with the real figures. When the pay date passes and no dividend has reached your ledger, the calendar says so, rather than quietly assuming it arrived. A payer that misses three in a row is shown as lapsed, because a fund that stopped paying should not be projected forever.
What this week pays
On the Income page a card reads “Next payments · ~$1,240 this week · 11 payments”, with the nearest buy-by day under it. Open the calendar and the week view lays the same payments out day by day — blue on the pay day, gold on the last day to buy — with a month view for the longer horizon and a list of every payer, its cadence, its last amount and its next date. Press any day and a flyout names what pays, from which account, declared or estimated.
Everything is per account, because dividends are. The same fund held in a Roth and a brokerage shows twice, with each account’s own share count and its own amount, and the filter lets you see one account alone.
Built from your ledger, not a login
There is no brokerage connection to set up. The calendar reads the holdings already in FolioBright — imported from a brokerage CSV or entered by hand — so it covers every account you track, across brokers, including the ones that have no API and the funds a bank holds for you. Option-income funds count as the funds they are. Cash, coins and option contracts are left out, because they are not dividend payers.
The dates come from Twelve Data; the amounts you are owed come from your own share counts; the history that drives every estimate is the dividend record you already keep. The calendar adds nothing you did not tell it, and it tells you where every figure came from.
Questions
What is the difference between the ex-dividend date and the last day to buy?
To receive a dividend you must own the shares before the ex-dividend date; buying on the ex-date itself is too late. The last day to buy is the trading day before the ex-date, and it is the date the calendar is driven by.
Where do the dates come from?
Declared ex-dates and pay dates come from Twelve Data and are refreshed daily for every payer you hold, then kept in FolioBright’s own market store. Where a payer has not declared, the next payment is estimated from its own record and marked as an estimate.
Do I need to connect my brokerage?
No. The calendar is built from the holdings already in your ledger, so it covers every account you track without a login to any broker.
What do Recorded, Declared, Estimated and Not recorded yet mean?
Recorded is a payment already in your ledger. Declared is one the company has announced. Estimated is a projection from the holding’s own cadence and last amount. Not recorded yet marks a projected pay date that has passed with no matching dividend in your ledger — what you have not entered yet, in plain sight.