Welcome to the Mclowd Trustee User Update.
Introduction
Our August Team Meeting was recently held in the offices of a large administration firm.
Like many of their peers, this firm has been working closely with Mclowd on the improvements required for them to move their operations to the cloud, but at a fraction of the cost of incumbent providers BGL and Class.
This is just as relevant to Trustee users as it is Practitioners, because virtually all of the targeted functionality will find its was into the Free Forever / Pro versions, and hence will be available to all users.
Year End Processing
The recent simplification of year end processing is a classic example of the above process, and has laid the foundation for further improvements to this workflow.
In particular we can now target default, fund-level settings which will support single touch processing.
Please note Pro version users can now access FY19 lodgement via our Partner LodgeIT, which was enabled as part of this release.
Managed Funds
Until recently our use of managed fund data was restricted to Practitioner users.
We have now reached agreement with the licensor to make this data available to Trustee users.
As a consequence we will be able to leverage this information as part of end of year processing, in a manner similar to listed securities.
We will provide a further update when this functionality has been deployed.
Suspense Allocations
As per the most recent Newsletter, our 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 also reduce the impact of the current level of editability).
These deployments – which will take place over the coming weeks – will also take us closer to the full rebuild of the transactions screen, since the underlying functionality is very similar.
Marketplace
As was always the intention, the Marketplace is becoming a more important element of the Community.
This is reflected in the number of reviews being left. Just like platforms such as Airbnb and Uber, this level of transparency (as to customer experience / satisfaction), builds trust in the network, which will support continued growth in activity.
Trustees who haven’t done so are encouraged to click on the Marketplace tab and check out the dozens of qualified SMSF professionals across various service lines – including audit, accounting, tax, ad hoc administration and support – all of whom are familiar with the software.
Conclusion
While it will take some time for the full import to be felt, the recent passage of the Open Banking legislation was a critical juncture in the evolution of the Mclowd Community.
Once Mclowd becomes an Accredited Data Recipient, access to data from all 100+ banks in Australia will become free (and the process of enabling bank data feeds will be much easier).
Access to this service will form part of the Pro version (rather than Premium), further reducing costs for all users.
As such 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 stakeholders.
Regards
Ashley Porter
Managing Director
Mclowd Pty Ltd