Why we built Lensfolio: the dividend tracker that compounds DRIP per-payment

I've been a dividend investor for the better part of a decade. My portfolio lives across a taxable brokerage and a Roth IRA, with overlapping holdings between them — SCHD in both, but DRIP on in Roth and cash distributions in taxable, because the tax math points that way.

For years I ran the whole thing out of a Google Sheet. I built columns for cost basis, current value, dividend rate per share, frequency, ex-dividend date, next pay date. I wrote formulas that summed it up across both accounts. It mostly worked.

The problem was that it kept breaking.

Three things every dividend tracker gets wrong

Every quarter, one of three things would happen and the sheet would silently drift out of sync with reality:

1. A company would hike its dividend. JNJ would announce a 4% raise. SCHD's quarterly distribution would come in $0.05 higher than the last one. My forward 12-month income number would now be wrong until I went and manually updated the rate. Multiply that by 25 holdings and 4 quarterly announcements a year — that's 100 manual updates I was never quite caught up on.

2. DRIP would buy fractional shares, and my share count was always rounded. The brokerage statement said I now owned 200.3471 shares of O. My sheet said 200. The drift was small for one quarter; meaningful by the end of the year.

3. The big one: standard projections assume a flat year. The math most trackers do — including the spreadsheets I built and the SaaS tools I tried — looks like this: "You earned $11,000 in dividends last year. You have 5% more shares now. So you'll earn $11,550 next year."

That's wrong on two fronts. It ignores DRIP-purchased shares from the FIRST quarter when calculating the SECOND quarter's payment. And it ignores rate hikes that come during the year.

The hidden math: DRIP compounds within the year

Here's what actually happens when you reinvest dividends:

SCHD pays you $200 in March. You reinvest at $28.50. That's 7 new shares. In June, the next quarterly payment, those 7 new shares ALSO get a dividend — about $5.88 extra. By September, you have even more shares than you had in June, because June's dividend bought more shares too.

Over a year, the difference between projecting a flat $11,000 and accurately modeling the per-payment compounding is around $847. Roughly 7-8% additional yield that standard projections miss.

That's small in isolation. Over a 10-year accumulation phase compounding annually on the wrong base, it's the difference between hitting your FIRE number on schedule and missing it by 18 months.

Most trackers were built for the question "what is my portfolio worth right now?" That's the wrong question for dividend investors. The right question is: "what is this portfolio going to pay me over the next 12 months — and how does that compound?"

What I built

Lensfolio is the tracker I wished existed. The thing that matters most: it compounds DRIP at the per-payment level, not the per-year level. Every confirmed dividend updates the next payment's projection because the share count grew. Every detected rate change updates the forecast in dollars, not just percentages.

Three other things I wanted that no tool I tried gave me:

Multi-account DRIP control. The same stock in Roth and Taxable can have different DRIP settings — reinvest in tax-advantaged, take cash in taxable to avoid the wash-sale headache when you rebalance. Lensfolio is the only tracker I've seen built around this from the start.

Tiered employer match modeling. Real 401(k) matches aren't simple percentages. They have per-period caps ("100% of first 3%, 50% of next 2%"), annual caps, and YTD-already-received tracking. Lensfolio models all three so your FIRE projection includes the full contribution stack — yours plus your employer's — accelerating realistically.

NAV-priced fund tracking. If your 401(k) has institutional-class funds (SP 500 INDEX PL CL D, BlackRock LifePath series, stable value funds — anything without a public ticker), most trackers can't handle them. Lensfolio tracks them from your statements, with full price history, slotting alongside the rest of your portfolio.

What it isn't

This isn't a robo-advisor. It doesn't pick stocks or rebalance for you. It's not a brokerage — there's no connection to your accounts; you enter transactions manually or via CSV import. It doesn't argue that dividend investing is the right strategy for you. If you're in the total-return / index-fund camp, this tool isn't for you and that's totally fine.

If you've already chosen the dividend approach — for whatever reason, FIRE planning or income generation or just because compounding cash is more emotionally satisfying than watching paper gains — then Lensfolio is a tool that handles the math correctly so you stop guessing.

Where it goes from here

This blog is mostly going to be honest notes from the build. Math posts when the math is interesting. Product updates when we ship something worth talking about. Occasional thoughts on the dividend / FIRE community when I notice something useful.

No SEO fluff, no "Top 5 Dividend Stocks for 2027" listicles, no AI-generated filler. If a post isn't worth reading, I'd rather not publish it.

Try Lensfolio free. If you have feedback, send a support ticket from inside the app — every one gets read.