Planner doing it for himself

Managingdirector of financial planning firm NC Bruining & Associates, Nick Bruining, says that while keeping back-office duties in-house means getting your hands dirty, it may also mean the difference between a clean or muddied practice.

Bruining is the sole planner in his Perth office, which he shares with a full time personal assistant and a part-time work experience staff member. Bruining says with a fairly small client base of about 180 clients, it’s good for his practice to take on its own back-office.

“Between us, everybody mucks in and does the job,” he says.

Bruining doesn’t use master trusts or wrap accounts, preferring to use fund managers’ reports to develop customised reports for his clients.

“We use FPI Navigator as our software platform, so we put in the information ourselves when clients come in for a review. It’s a bit of man-handling but when we’re only seeing one or two clients a day, it’s not an unreasonable thing to do,” Bruining says.

The planner and his staff track the performance of clients’ investments manually, Bruining prepares the plans himself, and also handles compliance issues.

“It’s a small practice, so I look after that kind of thing, but making sure the paper flow is in hand is done by my staff. Audits are conducted by an auditor on an annual basis.

“In terms of paper flow, it’s just a case of following up to make sure instructions have been followed, things have been set up, fund managers have done what they’re supposed to do and whether or not they’ve been done accurately,” he says.

According to Bruining, this extensive checking process is carried out because about 5 per cent of what goes out to clients carries some kind of error, often not of the firm’s making.

“Often people’s addresses are wrong, or names are spelt incorrectly, which are minor issues but nonetheless irritating to a client. We’re also finding increasing confusion over rebates and brokerage. That’s something that seems to have become more prominent over the last 12 months, probably because there’s so much variation now on how you can get paid. Fund managers seem to be having trouble reading their own forms.”

Bruining says life as a one-man back-office genie, however, is not as troublesome when it comes to the software. Although not a technology tyrant himself, Bruining says the wonders of e-mail mean any technology hiccups are usually solved on the spot.

“I’ll contact [the service provider] over the phone and they can usually e-mail me an updated version of the program or update me the patches to fix it. If I’ve got a problem, it’s usually solved within an hour of me making them aware of it.”