HELP
Scope of Advice
How the ten advice areas are classified for a client, what each classification does to the rules engine, the compliance register and the advice document, and why a partly classified scope still runs.
Updated 4 September 2026
What this screen is for
Scope is set per client, not per household. Pick the household, then the client, and classify each of the ten advice areas as In scope, Excluded or Considered only. Nothing downstream reads a classification until you save it.
A couple needs a scope for each member, so when the household has exactly two clients a “Copy scope to” button naming the partner appears in the action bar. It saves the current client’s classifications and reasons, then saves the same set against the partner. A household with one client, or with three or more, does not get the button.
The ten areas
The list and its order are fixed in code. The page cannot add an area, and each area’s description is the one shown on its card.
| Area | Covers |
|---|---|
| Superannuation | Contributions, fund selection, consolidation, pension phase |
| Insurance | Life, TPD, income protection, trauma, inside or outside super |
| Investments | Managed funds, shares, ETFs, platforms, asset allocation |
| Debt management | Mortgage structuring, personal loans, credit cards, debt recycling |
| Estate planning | Wills, powers of attorney, binding nominations, trust structures |
| Tax planning | Tax-effective structuring, franking credits, capital gains management |
| Cashflow and budgeting | Income and expense management, emergency fund, savings strategy |
| Retirement planning | Retirement income strategy, transition to retirement, Age Pension |
| Centrelink and social security | Age Pension eligibility, means testing, concession cards |
| Business planning | Business succession, buy-sell agreements, key person insurance |
Records that arrived with older, shorter area names (business, debt, retirement, tax) are read as the same areas.
The three classifications
In scope lets the engine create recommendations in the area. Considered only means excluded from advice, recorded as considered: you looked at the area, decided it does not need advice in this document, and want that decision on the file. Excluded and Considered only both need a written reason, and the reason box appears as soon as you pick either; the label reads “Reason for exclusion” for Excluded and “Reason / disclosure note” for Considered only. The button was called “Incidental” until 2026-09-05; the stored value is unchanged, so nothing you saved before then has moved. What each does downstream is set out under “Where the classifications are read” below, because the two are not treated the same everywhere.
Clicking the active button a second time clears the area back to unclassified. The reason you typed stays in the box until you save, so switching an area from Excluded to Considered only keeps its text.
A save with an Excluded or Considered-only area and no reason is refused. The page checks first and moves the cursor to the first empty reason; if a request gets past that, the server refuses it and names the area.
Saving
Save scope is available once one area is classified. The save replaces the client’s stored scope with exactly what the page shows: an area you cleared before saving loses its stored row and becomes unclassified, rather than keeping its earlier answer.
Every classification created, changed or removed is written to the change log with its old and new values, and appears in the audit card on the Compliance page.
Save & run rules needs all ten areas classified. It saves, then runs the rules engine for this client. That is the same run the Advice and Tax pages start from their own Run rules buttons: recommendations that already exist are refreshed in place with their accept or decline decisions kept, new ones are added, and the toast reports how many were created. The status card’s wording, “recreate recommendations”, overstates it; the only recommendations removed are those in areas now Excluded.
The toast’s “skipped by scope” figure counts rules from the older rule set that were blocked by scope. No rule from that set is registered today, so the figure reads 0.
Leaving the page with unsaved changes brings up the browser’s leave-page prompt.
Where the classifications are read
This section is worth reading twice, because the effects are quiet: no other screen tells you that a recommendation was withheld because of a decision made here.
The rules engine refuses to run with no classifications at all, reporting that the scope of advice has not been defined, and runs with one or more. This page offers Save & run rules only once all ten areas are classified, but the Run rules buttons on the Advice and Tax pages call the same engine and carry no such check, so a client with three areas classified can be run from there.
For strategies in the registry, an area classified Excluded or Considered only sends every strategy in that area to Outside Scope before any eligibility test runs. An area with no classification is not excluded: its strategies are evaluated normally and can become recommendations.
Before each run, recommendations whose area is now Excluded are deleted, whatever their status, accepted ones included. Considered only does not delete anything; it only stops new recommendations in the area.
The six tax review items on the Tax page follow the same rule as everything else. Until 2026-09-05 they did not: their scope test looked for a key the classifications never produce, so they were generated whether tax planning was In scope, Excluded, Considered only or unclassified, and were never marked Outside Scope.
The Advice page never lists a recommendation whose area is Excluded, and Accept is disabled on any card whose area is not In scope. The status line counts scope as complete at ten classifications.
Pre-vet and the compliance register work from the same rows. The compliance check raises an error for any active strategy whose area is unclassified, worded “has not been classified in the Scoping Tool”, and for any strategy whose area is Excluded. On the register, the Scope of Advice row is Complete at ten classifications, and the Insurance Needs row reads Not applicable only once insurance has been classified as something other than In scope; an unclassified insurance area keeps that row open.
Fact-find readiness counts a topic only when it is In scope for at least one client in the household. A topic that is Considered only for someone and In scope for nobody shows as Considered only, and a client with no classifications reads “Scope not set” rather than zero per cent.
Documents. The Statement of Advice’s scope section lists the areas with the reasons you typed, and names the Considered-only ones as “Considered only (excluded from advice, recorded as considered)”. That section is the only place a Considered-only area appears: its tax strategy summary, accountant handoff and implementation checklist are built only when tax planning is In scope. Documents and the engine now read the classification the same way; until 2026-09-05 the tax summary counted Considered only as in, where the engine counted it as out.
Older scope records
A client migrated in with an old-style scope record is read from that record only until a classification is saved here. From the first save the old record is ignored, and any attempt to write it is refused with “Scope is now controlled by scoping decisions”.