Welcome to the Mclowd Practitioner Update.
Simple Fund 5, 25 and 50 fund levels will be discontinued. All subscribers with these products will be moved to a Simple Fund 100 fund subscription.
BGL announcement, August 23rd 2019
Introduction
Our August Team Meeting was recently held in Brisbane and included a range of Practitioner briefings.
Like many firms still using BGL Desktop, SMSF administration firm Super Plus has been in close contact with the Mclowd Team on the improvements required for them to move their SMSF accounting to the cloud, but at a fraction of the cost of BGL and Class.
(Firms currently using BGL Desktop face a per unit increase in software licence costs of between 6 to 16 times – vis-a-vis BGL360 and Class respectively – at a time when the cost of many other technologies are falling).
A summary of the meeting can be downloaded here, and over the next few months we will make reference to the FY20 migration of this and other firms as part of our regular Practitioner Updates.
Year End Processing
The recent simplification of year end processing has laid the foundation for further improvements to this workflow.
We can now target default, firm-level settings which will support single touch, multi-Fund processing (particularly for Simple Funds).
Suspense Allocations
As per the most recent Newsletter, the immediate priority is to deliver further improvements to the suspense allocations screen, including splitting, bulk coding and allocation rules. (Automation via rules-based allocation will in the short term reduce the impact of the current level of editability).
These deployments – which will take place over the coming weeks – will also lay the foundation for the full rebuild of the transactions screen, since the underlying functionality is very similar.
Balance of 2019 Targets
The bulk of the other current targets revolve around improved support for the following asset classes:
- Custom assets
- Bonds
- Managed funds
Details are set out in the above Team Meeting summary.
Conclusion
In addition to ramping up prices for some of their most long-standing customers, BGL also recently announced that they are moving away from in-house machine learning models in favour of off-the-shelf AI solutions from Amazon Web Services.
AWS is the same cloud hosting platform on which Mclowd has been built since inception, and as such we have access to precisely the same models on precisely the same commercial terms.
This announcement is important, because along with the upcoming launch of Open Banking, it reflects a simple reality:
While the Mclowd journey has taken longer than planned, it is now clear that the delays have only served to amplify the deflationary consequences of Mclowd’s capital-light structure.
To the benefit of all SMSF professionals.
Regards
Ashley Porter
Managing Director
Mclowd Pty Ltd