Investment platform service provider Praemium is ramping up its SMSF administration offering and will add further reporting functions, including tax and audit, to the service.
Praemium head of distribution Martin Morris said the listed company was building on its strengths in the SMSF administration space and had expanded to include the tax return and audit functions necessary for SMSFs.
“We were already reconciling investments, collecting data and producing reports for advisers and their clients on the managed accounts side of the business and we have extended that work further into the area of SMSFs,” Morris said.
“As part of this expansion, we also provide advisers and accountants with a tax pack with all the relevant documents so they can produce tax returns.”
He said Praemium used a third-party tax and auditing specialist to produce the documentation, and the underlying platform can feed data directly into SMSF tax management tools such as Class Super and BGL where the tax and audit modules are not utilised.
Prices for the SMSF admin service would start at $550 per portfolio for portfolio management, which would take place through Praemium’s investment platform, and from $1500 per portfolio if tax and audit reporting was also required.
Morris said the prices were dependent on a practitioner already using Praemium software and the company would not be looking at picking up end-of-financial-year reporting-style business.
“That type of business is not scalable in our world and is hard to conduct without a daily interaction with a fund’s investments, reporting and data inputs,” he said.
He noted the company’s decision to include tax returns and audit processing as part of its SMSF administration service meant it could provide a more functional service for practitioner clients and an opportunity for them to scale their services for their own clients.
While the SMSF administration service had been part of the Praemium offering for a few years, the expanded SMSF service was relatively new having been offered to existing clients over the past 18 months before being offered to the wider market, he said.
He added the company would continue to offer its managed accounts and SMSF administration as a business-to-business solution and had not considered opening either directly to consumers or SMSF trustees.
