Member News - February 2020

Welcome to our February 2020 edition of our member news.

It has been a busy start to the new decade, including a successful launch of our SMSF day events around Australia between 24 March - 7 April 2020. In addition, we are super proud to be appointed one of three inaugural Accredited Educators with The SMSF Association. Internally, we have bolstered our web-development team by adding another full-time member with a key focus on accelerating development on our smarter platform and with the work we have been doing with the team at BGL

Below is a summary of what's been happening at Smarter SMSF over the past couple of months and what we currently have in the pipeline:

Updates, fixes and enhancements

Apply stored credit card - we have recently rolled out the ability to apply a stored credit card for a range of forms, including company incorporations. Rather than having to submit credit card details each time, you can simply apply the card on file. We've added more information about this in the knowledge base, https://smartersmsf.helpscoutdocs.com/article/184-applying-a-credit-card-to-orders
Company order integration - we are starting the process of migrating away from our eCompanies API integration for all company incorporations. This change in process will be finalised before the end of March. The updated forms and process will provide a range of additional validations including company name check before you start the order process. This is in addition to the current work to be able to incorporate a company within CAS 360 and then automatically generate a constitution from Smarter SMSF.
New SMSF & Corporate Trustee - we will be rolling out this combined form as part of the above company incorporation change, by using a single form will complete the company incorporation and prepare the fund establishment documentation. We expect this to save you significant time in the ordering process. We have also started work on building an action process post order which will allow for the ABN/TFN application which is currently in process (early Q2, 2020), followed by the ability to open a bank account (late Q2, 2020).
Tool tips for pension commencement - we have recently added tool tips into the pension commencement order form to help explain particular questions, along with providing some valuable tips as part of looking to generate these documents.
Automated Trust Deed Service (ADUS) - with our focus recently on other projects, the completion of the deed update service has taken longer than expected. However, we do 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 are finalising the integrations to import a fund's deed history from Class or BGL. You can also upload information via CSV/XML. Importantly, you will be able to provide access to other parties, including trustees, auditors, lawyers and more via your subscription.

BGL document platform

Major system update - We will be rolling out a significant platform upgrade to our BGL docs integration that will allow for staff to be linked to the primary account holder for the purpose of managing orders and subscriptions. Using the firm 'shortname', we will link the primary account holder to all staff members that will order documents online. You can determine from within Simple Fund which staff will have access to order documents.
Additional documents - over the past couple of months we have been working on a more efficient way to bring in documents from the Smarter platform into Simple Fund 360. Having successfully built a migration tool, we are now accelerating the importing of order forms to have available for use. Having recently released the investment strategy, we will shortly be releasing death benefit nominations and pension commencement. Before the end of March, we are aiming for 10 or more documents to be available for use with the ability to populate the form from data inside Simple Fund 360 and CAS 360.
Improved navigation - we are migrating our document list within Simple Fund 360 to replicate our Smarter SMSF platform.

CPD Training

We have finalised our training calendar through to 30 June, with all information about the topics and dates on the Smarter SMSF website, https://smartersmsf.com/events/

An additional feature to our training in 2020 are 2 x webinars called 'super unpacked', which Aaron will be conducting with Kath Bowler, General Manager of HN Law. These sessions take a look at a range of technical topics impacting SMSFs in recent times, but apply an 'advice' and 'unlicensed accountant' overlay to the topics to ensure that practitioners understand where they stand and how to manage their own risk.

Details of our upcoming training is as follows:

Super unpacked - 28 February 2020 @ 11am AEDST
Changing Face of SMSF - 5 March 2020 @ 12pm AEDST
SMSF Tax Planning - 22 April 2020 @ 12pm AEST

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

SMSF Day 2020

A reminder that members can access the member only price of $330 (incl. GST) at anytime to register for an SMSF Day event. We are already well over 50% capacity at all locations, so we encourage you to register before some of these events sell out. The member coupon code has been previously emailed. If you can't find this, please contact us on 1300 95 94 76 or team@smartersmsf.com.

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