Renewal should be a straightforward process.
Individual PPSR Brokers will probably have different approaches to the activity but the following shows the step by step process involved in renewing your registrations directly on the PPSR website.
In order to attempt this, you will need to have already established an account with the PPSR – this is a requirement for setting up an SPG but might have been avoided if the supplier’s SPG was set up for them by an intermediary that already had a PPSR account.
The following steps show the process once you have navigated to the PPSR and logged into your account.
Access your Secured Party Group (SPG) and click on the Group Registrations tab:
Use the 'Other filter options' to select a suitable range of expiry dates:
This will generate a screen showing all registrations due to expire within the selected time frame.
Select the registration you want to renew and click on the renew button:
Unfortunately, for reasons that are not entirely clear, if you make multiple selections, ie, you have a number of registrations that need to be renewed, the ‘Renew’ button becomes greyed out and unavailable! In other words, registrations can only be renewed one-by-one, so it could be a bit of a slog if you have a lot of registrations expiring at the same time.
Once the Renew button is clicked you’ll be asked to choose a new expiry date and be given the opportunity to review the details of the registration being renewed:
It’s a little annoying that while the PPSR allows for simple selections for 25 year and indefinite registrations, it doesn’t allow for a simple 7-year registration – instead, the PPSR requires the user to manually enter a 7-year expiry.
You should also note that, when setting the expiry date for, say, 7 years, the 7 year period counts from the current day’s date and NOT the original expiry date.
After that, it’s a simple matter of confirming the renewal and paying the renewal fee (which will be exactly the same as if a new registration were being lodged):
While it should only take a minute to renew a registration, make sure you don’t cut things too fine and miss the expiry date. Registrations that have already expired cannot be renewed!
Obviously, a third party PPSR Services provider should be able to provide bulk renewal facilities along with an alert process warning of impending expiries and their own renewal processes are likely to work quite differently.
UPDATE: AFSA has now told me that, following my whinge suggestion that a simple 7-year expiry selection should be available for renewals, they have implemented that change. Renewals will now be a little bit easier... which is nice.
