There are two ways in which you could track Dividends Paid Per Shareholder: by setting up subaccounts, or by using department masking.
Rather than having a single account for Dividends Paid, you could set up individual accounts for each shareholder. For example, instead of having
39000 Dividends Paid
set up
39001 Dividends Paid--Smith01
39002 Dividends Paid--Harris01
and so on.
For financial statements, you could create a total for these subaccounts, displaying the Total Dividends Paid. How do I design a financial statement?
Sage 50 offers a powerful feature called department masking, which you could use to track dividends paid per shareholder. The benefit of this method over the subaccount method is that you could run balance sheets for individual shareholders, showing only their dividends paid.
To use department masking, set up account numbers using part of the account ID as an identifier for the "department" (in this case, department equals shareholder). For example, 39001 can be used where the last two digits represent a code identifying the shareholder.
In the Financial Statement Design window, you can set a department mask for the column description for Balance, Activity, and Year-to-Date Activity. You would set the mask there as ***01 to show only totals for the shareholder designated as 01. You could save this balance sheet format and modify and save other balance sheets for other shareholders.