Case study: Enhancing advice with Class consolidated portfolios

Accounting firm Perks is a longstanding member of the South Australian business community, approaching 30 years old. But a look inside the firm is also a peak into the future of how accountants and financial advisers will increasingly work together to service clients.

And Class is an integral part of that relationship.

Manager of SMSFs Kerry Bosnich says that Class consolidated portfolios, which allow all a client’s portfolios – inside and outside superannuation – to be administered on the one software platform, has made it much easier for the firm’s accountants and planners to share information and collaborate.

Perks has a large number of non-SMSF portfolios being administered by its in-house planners, as well as its SMSF administration business.

“Class provides our advisers a consolidated view of their clients in a more user friendly, visual way than other planning software” Kerry says.

“They can see the SMSF at its true value more constantly, including the value of all the assets they don’t manage. Before they could only see the assets that they directly managed.”

Kerry says consolidated portfolios brings much greater efficiency to the administration of a client’s wealth and contributes towards superior service.

“It helps us get a much better view of their whole wealth position which helps us give better, more timely advice,” she says.

“It also helps us to match transactions. We can see the money going into and out of an SMSF and a non-SMSF portfolio as well as the money that passes between them.”

The ability of Class software to automatically process corporate actions such as share buybacks and dividend payments also saves on manual processing.

“We like the corporate actions, that’s very useful for us in identifying those actions when they come through and pre-empting what we should be looking for on the transaction side and the information we need for clients,” Kerry says.

Easy to Learn

As a growing firm, Perks also appreciates that Class training modules make it easy for new staff members to quickly learn how to use the software and start getting productive as soon as possible.

“We had a new staff member start recently and her feedback on the Class training modules was very positive. The questions at the end of the modules really helped her to assess how well she had learned the material.”

“It was a very good introduction to SMSFs for her.”