Most financial data providers offer a single "trailing annual dividend" field per stock. Sanad doesn't use it directly — it computes the figure itself from the real per-payment ledger, and here's why that matters.
The problem with summary fields
A vendor's trailing-dividend field often just reflects the single most recent payment, annualized — which understates the real total for any company that pays an extra interim or special dividend during the year. For a company with irregular payment timing, that can mean showing a real, materially lower dividend-per-share figure than what shareholders actually received.
What Sanad does instead
Sanad sums every real dividend payment with an ex-date in the trailing twelve months, straight from the payment ledger — not a pre-computed summary. The same real ledger also powers the Annual and Semi-Annual dividend history tables, letting you see the actual pattern of payments year over year rather than a single smoothed number. This is also the real figure that feeds the purification calculation.
When the numbers still look off
Sometimes a real, recently announced payment hasn't been ingested by the data provider yet — in which case Sanad shows what the provider currently has, not a guess at what should be there. The figure updates automatically once the provider's own data catches up.