When reading through your Statement of Advice (SoA) you will see a section titled 'Scope of Advice'. This should be a concise and important area of your advice document.  The Scope of advice is designed to cover off on two important areas;

1. What products and services your Financial Adviser is authorised to deal in as described in their Financial Services Guide (FSG).  The FSG outlines the advisers education and approved products under RG 146.
2. What advice you require as a client and how the adviser can help you achieve that in relation to the products and services the adviser is authorised to deal in as per their FSG.

In the past, the scope of advice was either documented as either comprehensive advice or limited advice and this lead to many misinterpretations of the actual advice being provided.  The reason being that advisers would often use the word Comprehensive even if they were just providing advice on super and insurance and were not providing any savings outside superannuation, tax minimization or estate planning issues.  With the introduction of the terminology 'Scope of Advice' the document can provide a specific area that is being advised on by the adviser.

The scope of advice should have been determined in the first interview the adviser had with you.  Although you may not know what this is before the initial meeting, by the end of your appointment your adviser should have uncovered specific areas of your situation that need to be addressed to put you in a better financial position in the short, medium or long-term.  These areas are then translated into your scope of advice.

Here is an example of a well detailed and specific Scope of Advice;

As we have agreed, our financial advice and this report specifically address the following areas of advice.

• Personal Risk Insurance – addressing your personal insurance needs including total and permanent disablement, trauma and disability income protection.
• Superannuation Investments – reviewing existing superannuation portfolio in light of current personal and financial details, objectives and research data and recommending appropriate investments and structures for your superannuation benefits.
• Superannuation Investments – implementing an external rollover mechanism to help fund your personal insurances as required.

We have agreed that we will not advise you in the areas listed below.  If you would like advice in any of the below areas, please let us know and we can refer you to a suitable adviser within our Practice.

• Tax planning – investigating ways to effectively manage your tax liabilities.
• Personal Insurance – reviewing your life insurance needs.
• Investment Review – we have not provided advice in relation to personal investment portfolio.
• Wealth creation – implementing a geared investment strategy.
• Retirement planning – making appropriate superannuation contributions to increase your retirement savings.
• Superannuation income streams – drawing income from superannuation assets to meet your regular expenses.
• Centrelink – reasonably estimating and maximising your entitlement to Centrelink benefits.
• Debt management – effectively managing your situation to reduce the negative effects of debt.
• General Insurance – we have not provided advice on insurances such as Home and Contents or Motor vehicle insurance.
• Health Insurance – we have not provided advice on Health Insurance.
• Estate Planning – ensuring that your assets will be distributed in line with your wishes in the event of your death.

 
As our advice is limited to the areas outlined above, we cannot accept responsibility for those aspects of your financial affairs, which are not included in our advice. You should consider our advice with regard to your overall situation.
 
In preparing this SOA we have relied upon the information gathered during our discussions and as recorded in the Fact Find report completed on the xxth of June 2015. This SOA provides our advice after consideration of this information and your goals and objectives. A copy of the Fact Find report is available upon request.

If you are unsure if your Scope of Advice has addressed your specific concerns and areas you were seeking advice it is critical that you discuss this with your adviser and request for them to reassess your needs and prepare a new Statement of Advice document.

We've seen a rise in the amount of highly-skilled paraplanners in Australia, with a large number of paraplanners in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. 

It seems that the increased number of paraplanner training organisations over the past 5 years has led to this increase and we've been welcoming the new paraplanners aboard.

As an update on how we deliver our service, we now offer the option of express Statement of Advice document creation (a next day service) and have built out of provision for using email to manage ongoing paraplanning service relationships.

We look forward to discuss your business needs over the coming months as we move towards to end of year.

We're already seeing an increase in accountants looking for paraplanning services, especially in Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Brisbane. 

If you're an accountant looking to provide advice on SMSFs, you will be aware of the July 2016 deadline for AFSL applications.

Licensing for Accountants has provided a 3-minute video that explains the licensing requirements.

They have also provided step-by-step guide to help you start, transition or stay up-to-date with your licensing requirements.

If you're an accountant looking for someone to help you prepare Statement of Advice documents on the establishment of a SMSF (including property, borrowing etc), we're happy to help.

Financial service apps? You can't go past 51 Top Tools, Apps, Software & Products to Boost Your Marketing Productivity for apps to help your business.

Looking at content marketing? See How IKEA Became Kings of Content Marketing or 10 More Charts That Are Changing Content Marketing

Email marketing for financial services? See 20 Tips for Dramatically Better Emails

Are you looking at how to grow your financial planning business? Find out 9 Growth Hacks Any Small Business Can Implement.

Are you a financial planner doing cold calling? See this cold-calling guide.

Are you planning for your clients to retire at 60? Some may want to work until they are 80.

Financial planning manager looking to improve the culture in your office? See How To Fix and Improve Culture At Your Company

Through our study of hundreds of virtual outsourced paraplanning services, we have noticed some emerging trends that we'd like to share with you.

There has been a growing emergence of single-operator paraplanning businesses that have started in Australia and the UK. The benefit of these services are that you can have budget paraplanning or even specialist paraplanning completed by someone who is able to tailor your documents according to your needs. The downside to using a single paraplanner is that you run the risk of them getting sick, being overloaded by work (often from other businesses as they juggle to try and keep a 40-50 hours work week) or going on holiday.

A less common way of setting up paraplanning from home or from an office, is to set up a partnership. There are several paraplanning companies in Australia who have this structure. These businesses can be similar to a sole operator when one of the paraplanners spends significant time trying to market their business. The benefit of having two paraplanners is that one of the paraplanners can step in when the other is away or too busy. The downside is that the stand-in outsourced paraplanner may not know your business and the way you like your advice documents prepared.

Similar to a call centre, a few in-house paraplanner businesses are set up in a pooled worker structure. All the work comes in to one location and is divided out to available staff. The benefit of this structure is that it is easier to scale for the paraplanning company and appears more stable due to the office location. The downside to this paraplanning company structure is that there are often lower levels of direct communication, less customisation and less pay for paraplanners.

Paraplanner is structured with the lowest amount of excess administration possible. You still have access to an administration team, your own project manager, a friendly payment office whilst getting direct communication with your freelance paraplanner. We use a simple, customised paraplanning process to ensure that you are notified of questions about your paraplanning request and can easily download your completed Statement of Advice document.
Due to our flat management structure, paraplanners enjoy the highest industry pay whilst delivering the lowest price for paraplanning currently on offer - all due to continual efficiency improvements.

Thank you to all the financial advice groups that have been seeking Australian paraplanning services, ended up using one of our paraplanners and have provided generous feedback.

We recently had a group looking for a Charter paraplanner (who potentially had worked as an AMP paraplanner) and they decided to utilise the services on one of our freelance paraplanners. Following introductions via phone, the relationship was established and the first SoA request had been uploaded. It was four days later when they received their completed Xplan Statement of Advice document and the adviser was pleased with the result.

By enabling a collaborative environment where contract paraplanners can speak directly with advisers, both groups benefit from reduced wait times, better customer service and a stronger ongoing relationship.

To find out more about the benefits of contract paraplanning or to get started with a trial, please contact us.

There is an interesting article from IFA today that looks at the current feedback from advisers around paraplanning service costs.
The main points in the article are that:

• Advisers see paraplanners as too expensive...but worth their cost
• Advisers see that regulations have forced them to rely on paraplanners to complete Statement of Advice documents to order to ensure they have compliant documents
• Advisers see additional staff as a burden that pushes them to produce more revenue to support
• The alteration of fee structures makes it harder to take on additional fixed costs and is making advisers look at ways to cost their business costs

After reading all these points, I see this as the perfect advertisement for using a freelance paraplanner as a reliable Australian paraplanning service provides:

• Paraplanners who are worth their cost
• Paraplanners who are used to the compliance requirements needed to meet FOFA and BID standards
• Paraplanning services that are directly linked to output. You only need to pay for the amount of paraplanning work that you require and can often have your client pay a Plan Preparation fee to cover the cost of the paraplanning service
• Cutting business costs is a major benefit for an adviser looking for a paraplanner. Advisers are wanting to spend more time with clients and would like a cost-effective solution to help them grow their financial planning business.

Paraplanner.com.au provides all you need to reduce your costs and have a scalable paraplanning solution available for you. If you're trying to find a paraplanner, let us know.

We get plenty of paraplanners asking about paraplanner training as there isn't any courses that offer specific training to help paraplanners gain experience in applying financial planning strategies to real-life scenarios. There are plenty of institutions offering RG146 training, such as Kaplan, but this training covers the building blocks only.

For paraplanners looking to work from home or build their career in an office, ongoing training and development is a must. It is for this reason that we're excited by a series of events that will be running in the UK. The events are run by PFS and include speakers such as Richard Allum from ParaPlanPlus providing contract paraplanning services to UK advisers.

Their topics will include:

I love the idea of a full day conference that offers training in SoA writing skills, paraplanner careers information and looking at the role of a paraplanner. I would especially like to see the development of sample Statement of Advice document writing skills to meet the growing demand of financial advisers. Keith from PFS has made a good move for the UK paraplanning industry.

Most advisers do a review of paraplanning services and look to mark them off in a few key areas, namely:

• Ability to produce compliant SoAs
• Ability to meet turnaround times
• Cost
• Personable technical paraplanner who is able to give some guidance and provide financial modelling
• Previous groups the paraplanner has worked for and their software experience

You may be looking for an alternative to the AMP Paraplanning Department or your MLC / NAB Paraplanning provider, you may be a PIS adviser looking to outsource your SoAs or a Commonwealth Bank-aligned adviser looking for a para planner to use COIN and complete your Statement of Advice and review SoAs quickly and compliantly. We set ourselves a high standard in terms of compliance, pricing and turnaround times to try to be the best. 

You might be looking for a para planner in Sydney, a Melbourne para planner or a growing number of Perth para planners in demand - come test out one of our para planners today and see if our high standards meet your needs.

What an exciting time to be working on contract paraplanning contracts! We're happy to say that we're getting a large number of advisers each day asking about how they can outsource their paraplanning. I can either see this as a compliment to our business or the building industry-wide acceptance of contract paraplanners working remotely in Australia. The trends that we're seeing are:

The increased pressure to deliver SoAs with a fast turnaround time has been great for our business. With a track record of 10 years of providing Statements of Advice in 5 business days, advisers love being able to get their "financial plan" delivered fast enough that the client remains engaged. Many dealer groups have been struggling to find on-site staff and provide training quickly and this has lead to many Australian financial advisers looking for Australian paraplanning services that can assist on a contract / freelance basis.

It is no secret that our paraplanning service runs lean and this leads to us being able to provide close to the lowest fees in the industry. Advisers aren't paying for excessive administration staff, sales people and other costs. They just pay for experienced paraplanners, working from home or their office, delivering quality Statement of Advice reports. We don't hide our fees or charge for faster turnaround times and have loved adviser feedback on how this is good for their business.

All I keep hearing from advisers is that they have tried outsourcing paraplanning and it didn't go well. Almost always the key factor is under-qualified paraplanners completing SoAs that aren't compliant. I sleep better at night knowing that our paraplanners are qualified, have more than 4 years experience and are experts in Xplan, COIN, Midwinter, Visiplan, ANG and other software programs.

All in all, it's an exciting month for us as we rely on our systems, our referrals from existing advisers and the standards we have in place to keep building quality Statement of Advice documents. Thank you for the support and your valuable feedback!

Rich Peterson