If SMSF advisers wanted to benefit from technology, they had to stop working for the systems and begin making the systems work for them, according to a senior administration specialist.
“That’s a very important distinction. [With] all technology in your business today, you work for it. It’s not working for you,” Super IQ chief executive Andrew Bloore told a recent SPAA Sydney Chapter breakfast briefing.
“You’ve got to punch information into it and make it work in a way that suits your business, so you’re working for it.
“The really valuable bit is where it starts to work for you.”
Bloore said in order to make that transition, advisers needed to treat technology like human beings, that is, to train it so it could link things together in a meaningful way.
He explained the formulation of rules was critical and used the current thought process around the administration of a property held in an SMSF as an example of how far the implementation and use of technology could and needed to go.
“Let’s say you’ve got a property and the argument is everything is manual [when accounting for] a property. That’s not right. Only the purchase is manual; everything else is electronic,” he said.
“It happens from a bank account. The rent goes in somewhere, the expenses go out somewhere and it all happens through a bank account. So only one part of that transaction is a manual process; everything else is automated.
“Think about it from the point of [view of] the trustee. Say you were supposed to get $2400 worth of rent and you only got $2000 worth of rent. The system should tell the client you only got $2000 worth of rent [and] where’d the rest go.
“So that’s using [technology] now to actually create value to the individual.”
He said the key was integrating the information from the source rather than at the source.
“The starting point is to say ‘this is the thing that’s important, how do I put that into a form that anyone can use at any point, and we don’t need human interaction’.”
