Member News - June 2019
Hi and welcome to this month's member news...
As the end of the financial year fast approaches, no doubt you are spending time dealing with the last of your lodgements (or hopefully done), ensuring clients are meeting their minimum pensions before 30 June and working through a range of other year-end tax planning opportunities. A reminder for our Learn members that you can access our
SMSF tax planning checklist to assist you through this period before 30 June 2019.
This month's member news is jammed packed with things that we're currently working on to help deliver a smarter member experience, so we hope you enjoy reading more about what's been happening...
Finally, a reminder of our quarterly technical and regulatory update, the
Changing Face of SMSF webinar which is being held this Thursday, 20 June 2019 at 12pm AEST. You will have already received an email to register for this event. If you haven't registered, a reminder email will be sent on Thursday morning to join us, otherwise you can visit the
event landing page to register.
New Resources page
Over the years of providing training and support to our members, we have built up a significant amount of SMSF content, checklists, workbooks and other tools for use. Typically these materials have been delivered through our regular training, without any central repository for members to access on the platform (only through the specific training online). With an expansion of our Learn packages (
see more about this here - you will notice, your existing Learn product is now known as "CPD Regular"), we are looking to add more technical value to support our members by (initially) building flow charts to explain how various super laws work, with a mid-to-long term view to expand these into online tools for workflows and related documents required with these processes.
The resources page is available at this time for all Learn members - to access, you can go to
Learn > Resources. We would appreciate your feedback on this new resources area and what additional tools you see as being beneficial to help in your SMSF business.
Updated webinar & course pages
Following on from the work we did in updating our document list page, we have now expanded this to our webinars page. This page now allows you to search for various topics and provides a detailed explanation of what each webinar session covered, duration and supporting materials available.
As part of this change, we have also made a clear delineation between our webinar training and course-based training. Over the second half of 2019, we will be putting a greater focus into building self-paced course content of SMSF topics - from technical to business-related, and intermediate to specialist level training.
New & Updated Documents
We have recently added or made changes to the following documents within the Smarter SMSF platform:
- Add or remove a fund member - we have now fixed a few of the population errors that were appearing in this process. We are also looking to add a pre-populated copy of the ATO's 'change of details' form into this process to save you time when membership changes occur.
- Satisfy Work Test & Work Test Exemption - we have recently updated this order form to now include circumstances where the member is relying upon the work-test exemption from 1 July 2019. You can view more about these changes here, https://smartersmsf.helpscoutdocs.com/article/158-creating-work-test-exempt-contribution-minutes
- Downsizer Contributions - we have recently added this new document on the platform which includes the member declaration, trustee minutes and a pre-populated copy of the ATO's form, 'downsizer contribution into super' form. You can view more about this new document here, https://smartersmsf.helpscoutdocs.com/article/157-creating-downsizer-contribution-documents
- Lost SMSF Deed - we have nearly finalised the Deed of Confirmation and Substitution of Replacement that will deal with the issue of a missing trust deed or where the ongoing deed that can be found is unsigned and undated. Testing of this document has commenced and will be available in beta shortly.
On 1 July 2019, an updated deed will replace the current version that makes some minor changes, including the removal of the anti-detriment provisions that cease at that time. An updated PDS will also be included as well.
With the certainty of a Coalition Government now having re-formed, we will be spending some time over the coming months revisiting our Limited Recourse Borrowing (LRBA) order form to streamline this documentation, predominantly splitting the related party loan documents into a separate order form, from the bare trust and LRB Agreement. We will provide you with further information in the coming months as this progresses.
As always, if you have any suggestions for future documents, training, features or more, please get in contact with us.
Regards,
Aaron Dunn, CEO & Co-founder