Welcome to another new financial year.
I realised how deeply “financial” rather than “calendar” years are ingrained into my psyche this week when I was talking to a non-finance industry person about our “end of year” party at Heffron. It made absolutely no sense to them that it would be in June / July rather than December / January. But to readers of this newsletter, I expect it feels perfectly logical. And no doubt many of us a breathing a sigh of relief that the inevitable mad rush around pre-30 June planning is over for another year.
July will see the first sitting of the new Parliament. I think it’s safe to say we can expect some changes to superannuation. Exactly what form and how quickly remains to be seen but certainly I think we should expect to see something in the near term. It might just be to legislate Division 296 tax but I suspect the Government will have an even bigger agenda.
July is also an interesting time for Heffron. For some time, we’ve been working on new technology to consolidate all our various services into one place. We’re starting with Education and we’ve now launched “Phase 1” of the new platform. For the first time, our clients can see the events they’re attending (or really should attend!) in the same platform as courses, CPD records etc.
This is just the beginning.
We will expand on this over time and bring other services into the new platform, retiring old systems. Watch this space but for now, bear with us as we migrate over – you’ll receive plenty of communication and help to move your own accounts with us to the new home. There will be a combination of “new” and “old” for a few months, but from August you will start to see the new functionality emerge. You’ll be invited to create teams for your organisation so you can make last minute changes to who attends our events, take advantage of special arrangements you have with Heffron and much more – all in one place.
We will also have a few minor but great changes to some of our services as a result. One in particular that I’m really excited about: we currently have around 50 online learning modules called “Education Bites” (generally around 1hr of structured CPD, including a knowledge test, on specific superannuation topics). Historically, they’ve only been available as part of a monthly subscription or course. We haven’t been able to offer our clients the ability to buy access to just the specific Bites they’re interested in. We will shortly!
Sounds like it’s time for me to hurry up and finish that Division 296 Bite as I expect it will be very popular if the legislation is passed. (Although if you need resources in the meantime, don’t forget our dedicated web page on this.)
Like all fine artists, we also take requests. If you have “Bites” you’d love to see, feel free to drop us a line as I expect our team either have it in the pipeline already or will appreciate your ideas.