A recent poll conducted among SMSF practitioners has revealed the provision of more timely fund data to their clients is still fairly poor, with the majority still offering clients only annual reporting about their funds.
A SuperConcepts technical webinar hosted last month showed nearly two-thirds of accountants and financial planners, 62 per cent, provide their clients with an annual SMSF reporting service.
Conversely, only 6 per cent of those surveyed said they provided daily or regular service to their clients, while another 5 per cent indicated they provided a monthly service. A further 30 per cent of respondents said they provided a service incorporating a mixture of timelines.
“What we can see there is that clearly a number of [service] providers are still using the annual service and that’s fine. We’ve been doing it for so many years as an industry and it’s served us well for so many years,” SuperConcepts Queensland state sales manager Gary Johnston noted.
“I thought it would have been a little bit lower especially with the onset of TBAR (transfer balance account reporting) [and measures like that].”
SuperConcepts SMSF technical support executive manager Nicholas Ali echoed Johnston’s sentiments, saying he also thought more practitioners would have adopted more regular reporting techniques by now.
To this end, Ali expressed his surprise the combination of technological developments and regulation requirements had not accelerated the move to more regular reporting practices.
According to Johnston, providing more up-to-date information on SMSFs has some obvious advantages.
“[It means you can] have more regular revaluation of assets and member balances. That’s very critical especially in this day and age of making sure all of our assets are valued at market value, and the member balance is critical especially when starting pensions and [situations] like that,” he noted.
“[Also] the capacity to provide for real-time compliance monitoring is very critical and a lot of the software [applications] will do that already.”
