Member News - October 2019

Welcome to this month's member news...

It's been a busy, challenging, but enjoyable past couple of months that have included BGL RegTech events around Australia, Class Connect in Sydney, the initial launch of document ordering within Simple Fund 360 and heightened training activities as a result of key issues from the Regulator regarding investment strategy requirements and non-arm's length income (NALI).

As a business, we pride ourselves in being able to respond in a timely way to help you stay up-to-date with your clients, but to also be nimble enough in our own product development to build, or add to existing documents that deal with key issues facing you in practice today. By us being at the forefront of these issues, it helps you to focus on your clients and eliminates the stress of remaining compliant.

To that extent, here's what's been happening at Smarter SMSF over the past month or so:Here's what's been happening at Smarter SMSF over the past month or so:

Updates, fixes & enhancements

New SMSF & Corporate Trustee - we have started the build process to incorporate the fund establishment and special purpose incorporation into a single form to save you significant time in the ordering process. The data within our platform and that more broadly within the ATO statistics support a large majority of funds being established with corporate trustees. We have started engaging with members regarding the design of the order form and the document generation, including an improved actions page to undertake key tasks including setting up the new fund within Simple Fund 360, CAS 360 and Class. This will also expand into the ABN/TFN application which will be available early next year.

Updated LRBA documents - we are pleased to advise that later this week we will be migrating across to our new LRBA forms, separating the related party loan facility agreement to streamline the process for orders requiring the bare trust and LRB Agreement only (i.e. bank loans). We will update both within the document orders page and the integrations page where you can 'pull' data from within your SMSF software. For the related party loan we have expanded the 'smarts' within this form to confirm compliance with the safe harbour requirements in PCG 2016/5, where it will pre-populate the terms to ensure an arm's length dealing.

Investment Strategy - we have had a huge amount of interest in our investment strategy documents on the platform over the past couple of months since the ATO issued letters to trustees about meeting the diversification requirements in SISR 4.09. If you recently attended our webinar on this topic you will have seen that we have added some additional trustee minutes regarding the trustee response to the ATO letter and adoption of the investment strategy that is to be completed by the trustee. With a significant number of practices looking to remedy the investment strategy documentation within their practice, we are currently working on a 'bulk' creator to select the fund's you wish to generate this document for using the integration with your SMSF software.

Automated Trust Deed Service - with our focus recently on the launch of our BGL documents offering, the completion of the deed update service has taken a back seat. However, we intend to shortly release the first version of this service that will allow you to activate your SMSF clients and take away the stress of whether your client's deed's are up-to-date. As previously indicated, this will be offered as an add-on product and is to be priced at approx. $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. You will be able to activate (add) and remove funds at anytime with the fee adjusting accordingly. We now have most of the initial features complete, which includes the ability to import fund deed history from Class, BGL or Smarter SMSF, or alternatively upload this information via CSV/XML. Importantly, you will be able to provide access to other parties, including trustees, auditors, lawyers and more via your subscription.

CPD Training

The following training has recently been uploaded within the Smarter smsf platform for members to view and obtain CPD:

Changing Face of SMSF (September 2019) - CPD quarterly & CPD regular members
Investment Strategy requirements.... what you need to know (CPD regular members only)
How gnarly is NALI? (CPD Regular members only)

Details of our upcoming training is as follows:

BGL docs update - 24 October 2019 @ 3:00pm AEDST
Building a SMSF pension plan - 19 November 2019 @ 12:00pm AEDST
Changing Face of SMSF - 11 December 2019 @ 12:00pm AEDST

Learn (CPD) members will receive a 'one click' registration to register for all upcoming training before the events, plus you can register anytime via the platform on the upcoming webinars page.

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