In this article, I’d like to highlight the information available that can assist with pension planning for your clients, and consider some actions you can take to speed up payments of PCLS and taxable income.

For most planning considerations, I recommend using our Pension Summary report, which can be found via the ‘Reporting Services’ section of our website. It includes lots of really useful information for all clients with pension assets on the platform and can be downloaded at any time. 

The Pension Summary report provides information such as:

• The current and previous tax year contributions for clients. This is based on the pension input for the tax year and therefore provides all the relevant information for carry forward calculations.
• Those clients who have triggered the money purchase annual allowance and, importantly, when this was trigged.
• It also contains information relating to income, including the tax code we have from HMRC, and GAD limits for Capped Drawdown accounts.
• If you are reviewing death benefit nominations, it gives you a list of clients who haven’t yet set up an Expression of Wish. For those that have, you can see the date the nomination was made and who the beneficiaries and nominees are.

Almost all of this information is repeated at account level online (the exception is we don’t provide the split of contributions over the previous three tax years and the contribution amount shown may not be based on the pension input year). So, the Pension Summary report can save you lots of time.

There are times when you may need to organise a one-off payment of PCLS or taxable income quickly, such as in the run up to the tax year end. The best way to achieve this is by having money available in the client’s Product Cash Account, as we can generally pay this within a day. All payments are made by CHAPS.

When crystallising assets on a one-off basis, you can target which assets are moved from the Pension Savings Account into Drawdown. Targeting the Product Cash Account means we won’t need to sell funds and wait for settlement, as we always draw upon Product Cash first before disinvesting.  If you know a client will need money quickly, you can sell to Product Cash in advance. You can target specific funds or sell proportionally across the portfolio. You don’t need to unlink model portfolios to do this.

Where a client requires PCLS and taxable income, I would recommend submitting two separate instructions – one for the crystallisation and PCLS and a separate instruction for taxable income from the Drawdown Account – as this speeds up the payment process.

If a Discretionary Fund Manager is managing the assets within the account, you need to be mindful of any model portfolio rebalances outside of your control. This is because, depending on the DFM’s process, cash may be swept up as part of the rebalance. If selling to cash isn’t viable, we will place an auto disinvestment instruction and make the payments upon settlement of all funds.

That just leaves me to say you may find the other articles in this series helpful when administering client accounts – these touch upon practical capital gains management, tax-efficient fee funding, tax planning using a Bed & ISA and using the ISA allowance in uncertain times.