Meg's Musings – July 2023

And just like that it’s 2023/24.

To those of us in the financial world, 1 July is the real New Year’s Day. And like most New Years it’s a good time for resolutions. Of course, these need to be about work things rather than getting healthy and reading uplifting books. In fact work resolutions usually revolve around getting more organized, doing things better for clients, learning a new skill and improving productivity.

One of my 2023/24 resolutions is to expand our suite of education services. Now that we have Lyn Formica largely focused on everything to do with superannuation education, we can do it much more quickly.

We’ve already got a successful course for true beginners when it comes to super (Heffron Super Foundations). We’re using this right across our business for new people who want to learn a bit about the environment they work in – not just our new accounting graduates but also people from many and varied backgrounds elsewhere in the business.

At the other end of the spectrum we have our Super Intensive Day (we’re currently taking registrations for our live and virtual events in August / September 2023) designed for more experienced professionals. This is a full day of SMSF strategies and technical updates where we share all our latest thinking and ideas for helping clients. The Super Intensive Day supplements our regular webinars that are designed to help keep you up to date – our quarterly webinar series (catch the latest changes as they happen), our annual Accountants and Auditors Update (each July, find out what’s changed for the next reporting season – as you can imagine, the 25 July 2023 session is filling up quickly) and masterclasses, clinics and more.

But a focus for this year will be filling the space in the middle.

What if you’ve got a staff member who has completed Super Foundations but doesn’t yet feel ready for the specialist events. How can we help you to continue their development? Or perhaps super is only a small part of your work and you need something that just keeps you up to date without the time commitment of our quarterly webinars? Or perhaps you need something for your non-SMSF colleagues – they need to know what to watch out for as they’re often the ones talking to clients first and in the best position to spot opportunities or risks?

It seems to me there are two needs there.

First, we need something to take a rising star from foundational knowledge in SMSFs to being an expert. This is where Lyn’s efforts are focused – she’s expanding out our Education Bites range to include specific learning pathways on the various key topics in super (starting with contributions). We’ll keep you updated on progress there as we feel it’s an exciting new step in helping to create the next generation of SMSF specialists.

Secondly, there is clearly a need for education options that support those who want “just enough” super knowledge to spot where they need to call in their super specialists. We’re launching a new webinar series this year (starting in October) to fill that gap. Watch this space for more details as we release them in the next few months.

So getting major milestones met on both these fronts are my resolutions for 2023/24. I hope you’re as excited about yours as I am about mine.