Member News - August 2019

Hi and welcome to this month's member news...

It's been a busy few weeks travelling across Australia with the BGL RegTech events and it has been a great opportunity to catch up with many of our members along the way. We've been putting a significant amount of work into the soon-to-be-released embedded integration within both BGL's Simple Fund 360 and CAS 360. We will be providing more details of this next month, but you can take a sneak peak of how this will look in the video here.

Updates, fixes & enhancements

Here's a list of items we've been working on at the moment:

Fund Establishment (new SMSF) - we have now added an establishment date field into the form allowing for the deed and supporting documents to be populated with this date. It is important to note however, that if you include a date in the generated documentation you need to be aware of the prescribed time frames to become regulated with the ATO (60 days) and also for trustee/directors to sign their trustee declaration (21 days).

Simple Fund 360 'one-click' fund establishment - we have just moved into beta for our members to start using the new 'send to SF360' function that will allow you, in one-click, to instantly setup the new fund in Simple Fund 360. This one-click setup will import the fund name, trustee & member information, including addresses, along with deed details provided by Smarter SMSF, saving you significant time with this process. Below is a screenshot of where you can start this action from:

Pension Commencement - we've fixed an error in the maximum pension calculation where you select a purchase price for an Account Based Pension, rather than commencing with the entire member balance.

Updated LRBA documents - We previously mentioned that we have been rebuilding the LRBA order form, splitting the bare trust and LRB Agreement from the related party loan facility agreement. The new LRBA loan facility (related party) order form has now been finalised and includes information to allow for the loan to comply with the safe harbour or alternatively an external arm’s length arrangement. We are currently at internal testing with the new LRBA order form and will share this with a couple of members who regularly use this form for beta testing and feedback before releasing.

Automated Trust Deed Service - we are close to the release of the first version of the automated deed update service (ADUS). This will be put into beta for some initial member feedback shortly before making it available as a new add-on product. This add-on will be priced at $70 + GST per fund p.a. Where more than 25 funds are on the ADUS, this fee can be paid as a monthly subscription - e.g. (50 funds x $77 p/fund / 12 mths = $320.83 p/mth). Similar to our existing create subscriptions, you will be able to adjust the number of activated funds from within your account. A minimum 12 month contract per fund will apply to the monthly subscription. We now have most of the initial features complete, which includes the ability to import fund deed history from Class, BGL or Smarter SMSF. Importantly, you will be able to provide access to other parties, including trustees, auditors, lawyers and more via your subscription.

Below is an updated screenshot of this new service:

If this is something of interest for your practice and would like to test and provide feedback to us as part of the beta testing, simply contact us at team@smartersmsf.com.

Finally, we are continuing work on some subtle changes to the platform that we hope will have a significant impact on site speed and the document ordering process. We expect this to also enhance our training area (learning management system), improving course design and management of courses you have enrolled in and completed.

Upcoming Training

Our next in-house training session will be September's Changing Face of SMSF webinar on 19/09/2019 at 12pm AEST. More details will be provided in early September.

CLASS CONNECT 2019

The countdown to the 5th annual Class Connect conference has started and we are proud to be sponsoring this unique event! Join us for the industry event of the year at the Hilton in Sydney from the 8th to the 10th of September. Be inspired by some of the most successful business leaders in the country and learn from the industries best and brightest thought leaders - plus earn up to 10.25 CPD hours.

Keynote speakers include Mark McCrindle, Social Researcher & Futurist, and Chelsea Pottenger, International Speaker and Ambassador for Mental Health. You'll also hear from industry experts including Meg Heffron, Managing Director Heffron SMSF Solutions; Aaron Dunn CEO & Co-Founder Smarter SMSF; Edward Chung SMSF Future Client Experience, ATO; and Fiona Crawford two-time Olympian and HR Director, InfoTrack.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity - follow this link to purchase your delegate passes and use code BOGOF to buy one get one free full price ticket (normally $990).

As always, if there’s any ideas with feature requests, new or updates to documents, please let us know.

Regards,

Aaron Dunn, CEO & Co-founder