Dividend Data vs Poach

Comprehensive Spreadsheet Functions

Dividend Data provides 16 custom functions tailored for in-depth stock analysis directly within your spreadsheet. Formulas like DIVIDENDDATA_DIVIDENDS, DIVIDENDDATA_RATIOS, and DIVIDENDDATA_QUOTE allow you to retrieve specific data points such as forward yield, ex-dividend dates, P/E ratios, and current stock prices instantly. This transforms static spreadsheets into dynamic, auto-updating financial models, saving hours of manual data collection and ensuring your analysis is always based on the latest available information.

Extensive Historical Data Library

The platform offers an unparalleled depth of historical financial data, covering over 80,000 global tickers with more than 30 years of market history. This allows investors to conduct robust long-term trend analysis, calculate multi-year dividend growth rates, examine financial performance across market cycles, and backtest investment strategies. Having decades of data at your fingertips is foundational for making informed, evidence-based investment decisions rather than relying on short-term trends.

Dual-Platform Compatibility

Dividend Data works seamlessly in both Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel, catering to the preferred workflow of every investor. The Google Sheets add-on is available on the Google Workspace Marketplace, and the Microsoft Excel add-in is listed on Microsoft AppSource. This cross-platform functionality ensures that whether you collaborate in the cloud with Sheets or prefer the advanced capabilities of desktop Excel, your access to live financial data remains consistent and reliable.

Free Tier with Generous Credits

A key differentiator is the accessible free forever plan, which provides 2,500 credits per month without requiring a credit card or facing a trial expiration. This allows new users to thoroughly test the platform's capabilities and individual investors to perform a significant amount of monthly analysis at no cost. It lowers the barrier to entry for high-quality data, aligning with the mission to serve fundamental investors who need professional tools without a professional budget.

Track VCs on Twitter

This feature enables users to monitor the Twitter activity of top-tier venture capitalists. By analyzing who these VCs follow, Poach identifies potential startup founders early on, providing valuable insights into emerging talent that may not yet be on the fundraising radar.

LinkedIn Enrichment

Poach matches Twitter accounts to LinkedIn profiles through its proprietary identity resolution technology. This enrichment process adds depth to the records by including essential details such as work history and educational background, giving users a clearer picture of each individual's professional experience.

AI-Powered Labeling

The platform employs advanced AI algorithms to categorize individuals based on their roles and expertise. This labeling system helps investors quickly identify whether a person is a founder, engineer, or researcher, streamlining the process of finding the right talent for their investment needs.

Raw Data Delivery

Users receive enriched data in various formats, including daily email summaries and CSV exports. This feature allows investors to have immediate access to actionable insights, enabling them to filter and search for specific criteria such as unfunded founders or particular skill sets.

Building a Dividend Growth Screener

Investors can use Dividend Data functions to create a custom stock screening spreadsheet. By pulling data like dividend yield, payout ratio, 5-year dividend growth rate, and PE ratio for a watchlist, you can filter and rank companies based on your specific criteria for quality and value. This automates the initial research phase, allowing you to quickly identify potential investment candidates that meet your disciplined strategy directly within a familiar, customizable environment.

Automating Portfolio Tracking and Analysis

Manually updating a portfolio spreadsheet with current prices, dividend payments, and yield-on-cost is a repetitive task. With Dividend Data, you can link your holdings to live data feeds. Formulas can automatically pull the latest price to calculate current value, fetch declared dividends to forecast income, and update key ratios to monitor the financial health of your holdings, giving you a real-time dashboard of your investment performance.

Conducting Deep Fundamental Research

When analyzing a specific company, you need consolidated access to its financial statements and key metrics. Using Dividend Data, you can build a detailed research model in a spreadsheet that pulls in annual and quarterly income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, and dozens of profitability, liquidity, and leverage ratios. This creates a single source of truth for your analysis, enabling you to evaluate business performance and valuation thoroughly.

Educational Modeling and Backtesting

For investors learning fundamental analysis or testing investment theories, Dividend Data serves as an excellent educational tool. You can build historical models to see how a company's stock price correlated with its earnings growth over time, or reconstruct a dividend aristocrat's payout history to study its consistency. This hands-on access to real data reinforces investment principles and allows for practical, data-driven learning.

Early Talent Identification

Investors can use Poach to discover talented founders before they enter the fundraising process. By tracking social media signals, they gain insights into which individuals are gaining traction in the startup ecosystem.

Enhanced Dealflow Strategies

Venture capital firms can integrate Poach into their dealflow strategies to systematically uncover new investment opportunities. The platform's structured data allows for a more organized approach to sourcing deals based on predefined investment theses.

Competitive Analysis

By monitoring the social media activity of top VCs, investors can gain insights into market trends and competitive dynamics. This information allows them to stay ahead of competitors and make informed investment decisions based on emerging talent.

Networking and Relationship Building

Poach enables users to identify promising founders and connect with them early on. This proactive approach can foster relationships that might lead to successful investments down the line, ultimately enhancing the investor's network in the startup community.

Dividend Data is a powerful financial data platform designed to bring institutional-grade stock market information directly into the tools investors already use every day: Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel. At its core, it eliminates the tedious, error-prone process of manually copying and pasting data from financial websites. Instead, it provides a suite of simple, custom spreadsheet formulas that pull live, accurate data directly into your cells with a single keystroke. Built specifically for dividend and fundamental investors by a fellow investor, the service grants instant access to over 30 years of historical data for more than 80,000 tickers. This includes critical metrics like dividend amounts, yields, payout ratios, growth rates, full financial statements, earnings, valuation ratios, and price history—over 100 data points in total. Its standout value proposition is democratizing high-quality data; it offers a permanently free tier with 2,500 monthly credits, requiring no API keys or coding knowledge. This makes sophisticated stock analysis accessible to individual investors without the complex infrastructure or high costs typically associated with professional financial data feeds.

Poach is a specialized dealflow intelligence platform designed specifically for venture capitalists, angel investors, and other professionals in the investment domain. It tackles a crucial challenge in the venture capital landscape: the early identification of high-potential founders before they officially enter a fundraising process. By systematically monitoring the social media activity of top-tier venture capitalists, particularly their Twitter follows, Poach captures critical signals of interest in emerging talent. This data serves as a bridge between traditional warm introductions and cold outreach, allowing users to access a curated list of promising founders. Furthermore, Poach enhances these insights by integrating professional data from LinkedIn and employing AI to label individuals based on their roles, such as founder, engineer, or researcher. The platform delivers actionable data through daily email summaries and comprehensive CSV exports, enabling investors to filter prospects that align with their investment strategies. Poach thus transforms passive social media observations into a dynamic, structured element of modern sourcing strategies for investors.

How does the free tier work and what are credits?

The free tier provides 2,500 credits each month, which renew automatically. Credits are consumed each time a Dividend Data formula recalculates in your spreadsheet. A simple formula fetching one data point, like a current price, typically uses one credit. More complex historical data requests may use slightly more. This system allows you to perform substantial analysis for free, and you can monitor your usage within your account dashboard.

Do I need to know how to code or set up an API?

No coding or API setup is required. Dividend Data is designed for simplicity. After installing the add-in for Google Sheets or Excel, you simply use the custom formulas like any native spreadsheet function. You type =DIVIDENDDATA_QUOTE("TICKER", "price") and the live data appears. The platform handles all the complex data connections and updates in the background for you.

What kind of data can I access with the spreadsheet functions?

You can access a wide array of data points crucial for fundamental and dividend investing. This includes dividend dates and amounts, forward yield, payout ratios, dividend growth rates, full financial statements (income, balance sheet, cash flow), key ratios (P/E, P/B, Debt/Equity), earnings metrics, real-time and historical prices, market capitalization, and over 100 other specific metrics. The documentation provides a complete list of all available functions and arguments.

Is my data secure and private?

Yes. Dividend Data uses secure, encrypted connections for all data transfers. Importantly, when you use the spreadsheet add-ins, your stock tickers and data requests are processed securely, but your personal portfolio holdings and spreadsheet contents are not stored or accessible on Dividend Data's servers. Your financial models and private data remain within your own spreadsheet files.

How does Poach identify promising founders?

Poach identifies promising founders by tracking the Twitter follows of top-tier venture capitalists. These follows often indicate early interest, allowing investors to discover talent before they actively seek funding.

What types of data does Poach provide?

Poach provides enriched data that includes LinkedIn work history, educational background, and AI-generated labels categorizing individuals based on their professional roles, such as founders, engineers, or investors.

Can users filter the data provided by Poach?

Yes, users can filter the data based on specific criteria such as unfunded founders, particular skill sets, or roles. This capability allows investors to tailor their searches to align with their investment strategies.

How often does Poach deliver updates?

Poach delivers updates daily through email summaries, providing users with the latest insights and enriched data to keep them informed about emerging talent and opportunities in the startup ecosystem.

Dividend Data is a specialized financial data service that provides historical and current stock market information directly within spreadsheet applications like Google Sheets and Excel. It falls into the category of fundamental investment research tools, designed specifically to streamline analysis for income-focused investors. Users often seek alternatives for various reasons, including budget constraints, the need for different feature sets, or compatibility with other platforms like proprietary software or different data visualization tools. When evaluating different services, it's crucial to consider your core investment strategy. A dividend growth investor will prioritize different metrics than a value or technical trader. Key factors include the depth and historical range of the financial data offered, the ease of integration into your existing workflow, and the overall cost structure relative to your usage needs. The goal is to find a tool that provides reliable, actionable data without unnecessary complexity or expense. Ultimately, the right alternative should feel like a natural extension of your research process, delivering the specific metrics you need in a format you can immediately use. It's about finding a balance between comprehensive data access, usability, and value, ensuring the tool saves you time and enhances your decision-making rather than creating more work.

Poach is a specialized dealflow intelligence platform designed for venture capitalists, angel investors, and professionals seeking to discover promising startup talent early in their journey. It operates within the business and finance category, focusing on the challenge of identifying high-potential founders before they enter formal fundraising processes. Users often seek alternatives to Poach due to various reasons, including pricing, specific feature sets, or the need for different platform capabilities that better align with their investment strategies. When choosing an alternative, it’s essential to consider factors such as the comprehensiveness of data tracking, the user interface, integration with existing tools, and the quality of insights provided. Assessing how well the alternative meets your specific sourcing needs and whether it can enhance your dealflow strategy is crucial for making an informed decision.