Your fee earners are doing work you can't bill at their rate. Onboarding packs, document collation, data entry, workflow chasing and WIP cleanup all land on people whose hours are the product.
A professional services virtual assistant handles client onboarding, document collation, data entry, workflow tracking, billing preparation and diary management inside your practice management system. They prepare the file so your accountants, lawyers or consultants spend their billable hours on advice rather than administration.
Engagement letter, ID verification, authority forms, portal setup, prior year documents. Every step waits on someone senior to notice it's stalled. The client's first experience of your firm is a series of chasing emails they have to answer twice.
Nothing moves until the client sends the thing. So a senior person writes the reminder, then writes it again, then rings. It's low-skill work that only gets done when someone expensive remembers to do it, which means it often doesn't.
Work gets done, then sits unbilled because nobody's driving the billing cycle. By the time it's raised, the client has forgotten the context and queries the invoice. Your cashflow problem started as an admin problem.
Jobs sit in the wrong status. Deadlines look fine until the week they don't. Partners spend Monday reconstructing where everything actually is, because the system only reflects reality when someone keeps it honest.
Professional services covers accounting, legal and consulting practices, and no firm runs all of these. We hire against the two or three you actually use and test candidates on them before you meet anyone.
Xero Practice Manager
Keeps jobs, deadlines and WIP current, and prepares billing drafts for partner review.
Karbon
Drives workflow status, client tasks and email triage so nothing stalls waiting on a reminder.
Actionstep
Maintains matter records, document assembly and billing steps across the life of a matter.
Smokeball
Handles document preparation, matter file organisation and automatic time capture support.
LEAP
Keeps matter details, forms and precedents organised and filed correctly for the acting practitioner.
HubSpot
Tracks enquiries, proposals and referral relationships, and keeps pipeline reporting honest.
Microsoft 365
Runs shared mailboxes, document libraries, templates and calendar coordination across the firm.
Support work and professional work are different things. We're clear about which side of that line the role sits on.
Drawing that line tightly is what makes the rest of the role safe to delegate.
Your team member is employed through our Philippines entity under Employer of Record. The employment relationship, statutory obligations and local requirements sit with us. You direct the work day to day without setting up an entity or engaging an individual offshore under an arrangement that may not hold up.
Professional firms ask harder questions than most, and they should. Client confidentiality is the first one. Every person we place signs a confidentiality agreement, works on a managed device, connects through VPN, and has system access scoped to the role rather than the firm. Privileged and sensitive client material should sit behind access controls that reflect the role, and we'll help you set those up during onboarding rather than after.
We won't tell you what your professional body permits. That's your call and your regulator, and any provider claiming certainty there is guessing. What we can do is answer the questions your firm needs answered: where the data is stored, who can reach it, what device it's touched on, what happens when someone leaves, and what the audit trail looks like. Australian Privacy Act obligations for your client information stay with the firm as the entity holding it, and our structure is built so you can meet them rather than work around them.
See the EOR and COR page for how the employment structure works, and the offshore staffing risk and compliance guide for the questions worth putting to any provider.
Named firm case studies are being written up. If you'd like to hear it from a practice already running this, ask on your strategy call and we'll arrange a conversation with a current client. See our client reviews.
Yes, when access is scoped properly. We place people on managed devices with VPN access, signed confidentiality agreements and permissions set to the role rather than the whole system. Most firms give their VA access to workflow, documents and correspondence for their client group, and keep trust accounting and approvals restricted to internal authorised staff.
Firms outsource administrative support offshore routinely, but the rules that apply to your practice are set by your regulator and your professional body, and we won't interpret those for you. Bring the question to your association or your risk adviser. We'll give you the detail on structure, data location, access controls and agreements so you can answer it properly.
That's your disclosure decision, and firms handle it differently. Some name it in their engagement terms, some address it only if asked. We'll give you an accurate description of what the role does and doesn't touch so whatever you tell clients is true. We don't advise firms to hide it.
They can prepare, collate and draft to your templates and standards. What they can't do is form the professional judgement or sign it off. Practically that means a VA assembles the file, drafts the standard sections and flags gaps, and your qualified person reviews, decides and signs. The prep time saved is where the value sits.
Contributing in the first fortnight, running defined processes unsupervised by around day 30. That's only true because the prep happens before they start. We document the workflows, access, templates and escalation rules first, and a senior expert reviews output through the first month rather than leaving your partners to train from scratch.
Meaningfully less than an equivalent local salary once on-costs are counted, but the honest answer is it depends on the role and hours. We publish our pricing rather than hiding it behind a call, so have a look at the pricing page and we'll scope your actual numbers together.
Book a call and we'll map the non-billable work leaving your firm first, and how the file stays secure while it does.