Meg's Musings – July 2024

Happy new financial year and I hope your run up to 30 June was as uneventful as possible. I always find a new financial year quite invigorating and certainly we’re starting this one with a bang. We launched our next course 'Super Specialist – Contributions' on 1 July.

This is particularly exciting for us because it’s our first “Specialist” course.

If you follow our education programs you might know that we’re working on two learning streams at the moment that are designed to equip our learners with a whole new level of super and SMSF knowledge.

Our Super Extension and Super Specialist series work together to give accountants and advisers all the knowledge they need to genuinely call themselves a superannuation specialist. Each course covers 7 topic areas (Contributions, Benefits, Investments, Death & Insurance, Fund & other taxes, In Practice and other Super / SMSFs issues). We’ve already released two of these at the “Extension” level (Contributions & Benefits) with a third (Investments) coming soon. But on 1 July we launched our first Specialist topic (Contributions).

The Extension and Specialist courses on this topic work together – think of them as Part 1 and Part 2 of becoming an expert in super contributions. They cover different topics (ie, Specialist isn’t just a ‘repeat-but-harder’ version of Extension, it includes a deep dive into a number of topics that aren't dealt with in any detail in Extension). Together, they make up the learning we believe is needed to cover all the key issues about contributions (read more about our Extension courses here and our Specialist courses here).

We’ve split them because we’re conscious not everyone wants to be a specialist (not something I understand myself). For example, we’ve deliberately structured the Extension – Contributions program so that it’s relevant even for people working in, say, business services or broad advice roles. It covers things they’ll bump into (claiming personal tax deductions for super contributions) but not the inner workings of things they probably won’t (for example, bring forward rules in more complex cases has been left for the people who want to specialise).

We’ll keep launching the Specialist courses as we complete Extension as we know everyone learns in different ways. Some of our clients will want to complete the whole Extension course (all 7 topic areas) before starting on Specialist. Others will want to know everything about Contributions right now and do both Extension and Specialist on that topic immediately.

We’ll have the full Extension course available during the second half of 2025. Certainly I can see that our technical support & education team will have plenty to do this year.

But more immediately – we have our Super Intensive Day kicking off on 21 August. As you can imagine, work is underway for that already. There is never a dull moment in superannuation. Select the image below to register.