If your practice administers self-managed super funds, BGL is probably already doing the heavy lifting. Simple Fund 360 pulls the bank feeds, runs the reconciliations, and produces the financial statements and the annual return. What it does not do is write the client email explaining a contribution cap breach, read a 40-page trust deed to find the pension clause, or turn an auditor's query into a plain answer a trustee will actually understand. That work still lands on a person, and Claude is built to take most of it on.
Claude is the assistant from Anthropic that a growing number of Australian accounting firms are putting next to their existing software rather than in place of it. The goal is not to replace Simple Fund 360. It is to remove the hours that sit around the ledger: the drafting, the summarising, the explaining, and the checklist work that fills an SMSF administrator's week.
Where the SMSF admin hours actually go
Fund administration is not one job. It is a stack of small ones, and most of them involve reading a document or writing to a person. A single fund review can include:
Reading the trust deed and investment strategy to confirm what the fund is allowed to hold
Chasing missing data: contribution records, property valuations and insurance schedules
Explaining compliance points to trustees who are not accountants, such as contribution caps, minimum pension payments and in-house asset limits
Drafting trustee minutes and resolutions for the year's decisions
Responding to the SMSF auditor's queries before the annual audit is signed off
Writing the cover letter and year-end summary the client signs
At a charge-out rate of $180 an hour, a fund carrying six hours of this work costs a little over $1,000 to service before the return is even lodged. Across a book of 120 funds, the reading-and-writing layer alone is worth more than $120,000 of billable time a year. That is the layer Claude works on.
What Claude can take off your plate without touching the ledger
The rule we give every firm is short: Claude drafts, a person posts. Nothing it produces goes into Simple Fund 360 or reaches a trustee without a qualified review. Inside that boundary, here is where it earns its keep:
Client letters and emails: contribution cap warnings, pension minimum reminders and annual return cover notes, written in your firm's tone
Document summaries: point Claude at a trust deed or investment strategy and get the clauses that matter, with references, in a minute or two
Plain-English compliance answers: paste an ATO ruling or a legislative change and ask what it means for a fund with a particular structure
Audit-query responses: turn the auditor's list into drafted replies your administrator only has to check and attach
Trustee minutes: generate the year's resolutions from a short brief of what the fund did during the period
Transaction narration: describe an unusual bank-feed entry so a reviewer can categorise it correctly, with the categorising itself staying in BGL and done by a person
A worked example: the annual cycle
Take a standard accumulation-phase fund at year end. The administrator exports the draft financials from Simple Fund 360, and Claude produces three things at once: a client-facing summary of the fund's position, a draft set of trustee minutes, and a first-pass response to the auditor's standard query list. What used to be half a day of writing becomes twenty minutes of review. For a firm doing 200 funds a year, saving four hours per fund at $180 an hour is roughly $144,000 of capacity handed back to the practice, most of it in the June to October crush.
The same speed shows up in day-to-day questions. When a client asks whether they can still put money in, Claude can lay out the 2024-25 concessional cap of $30,000 and the non-concessional cap of $120,000 in a sentence a trustee understands, with a clear note that the final call is the accountant's. The administrator gets a ready draft instead of a blank page.
Keeping member data where it belongs
SMSF files hold some of the most sensitive data a firm keeps: tax file numbers, member balances, dates of birth and asset registers. That carries real obligations under the Privacy Act, and it shapes how Claude should be used. Three rules keep it clean:
Do not paste raw tax file numbers or full member identifiers into a general chat; redact or reference them instead
Keep BGL as the system of record. Claude drafts and explains, but the ledger, the lodgement and the audit trail live in Simple Fund 360
Use a business-grade Claude plan with proper data controls rather than a personal login, so member information is handled under the terms your firm has signed
Handled this way, Claude sits inside the same compliance posture your firm already runs for its ASIC and ATO obligations. It is a drafting and reading tool, not a decision-maker, and the sign-off stays with the registered people it always did.
How to start
The firms that get value fastest do not change everything at once. Pick one high-volume task, usually the annual client summary, and build a repeatable prompt that matches your house style and compliance language. Run it beside your normal process for a fortnight, compare the drafts, and tighten the prompt. Once that task earns trust, add the next: trustee minutes, then audit responses. Within a quarter most practices have Claude carrying the writing layer across the whole SMSF book.
We help Australian accounting firms set this up: the prompts, the data-handling rules and the review workflow that keeps BGL as the source of truth. If SMSF admin is eating your team's June to October, book a brainstorm and we will map the two or three tasks worth handing to Claude first.
