Welcome to the Mclowd Practitioner Update for March.

Introduction

Every week dozens of SMSF practitioners use Mclowd to manage Funds on behalf of their clients.

Speaking of his participation in the Community, Sohail Merchant of Alavia Financial Services had this to say: “I recently re-engaged with Mclowd, having first looked at the software some years ago. I was impressed by the extent of the improvements that have occurred in the interim, and am now able to manage multiple client files with relative ease. The software is quickly becoming a realistic alternative to the existing solutions in the market, but at a fraction of the cost.”

Pensions

Following on from the initial upgrade that was released back in January, we have now enabled the rollback function.

Internal transfers will be the next cab off the rank, and we are conscious that there are numerous other (but less common) scenarios that will also need to be supported. We will work through these steadily over the next few months.

Beta Environment

As we flagged in the last Practitioner Update, Mclowd Beta is now live.

We have established this sandbox-style environment so that practitioners considering migration to Mclowd for FY19 can engage with new functionality well in advance of its production release.

Active users can login with their existing credentials, and we will provide updates as to the new features as they become available.

Beta targets for this month will focus on the new asset maintenance functionality, including the following:

  • Price history for listed securities
  • Unit price history for managed funds
  • Dividend & distribution history
  • Asset allocation data for managed funds

We will then do our best to incorporate your feedback into the final release (and any subsequent versions).

Practitioner User Manual

We have now published a version of the User Manual dedicated to practitioners.

We will also be developing video tutorials and a more formal, self-paced learning environment.

User Administration

A quick reminder to active users that they can manage client (or staff) access to files via the Settings > Manage Users tab, including the ability to grant read, or read / write access.

For more details simply click on the relevant section of the User Manual.

lmport Tools

In the context of the above it is obvious that we need to build an Excel loader to increase the speed with which large scale migrations can be undertaken.

In the interim there are numerous migration resources available via the Marketplace at very competitive hourly / per unit rates.

User Interface Refresh

We are also undertaking a refresh of the user interface. For a sneak peak simply click here.

Conclusion

It must be acknowledged that for the last few years Mclowd has been more ‘journey’ than ‘destination’.

However for a growing body of SMSF professionals Mclowd is now both journey and destination, and when the final destination is reached there will be only one feature that sets Mclowd apart from the incumbent vendors:

Price.

Regards

Graeme McGuire
Product Manager
Mclowd Pty Ltd