Virtual assistants for financial advisers in Australia

Financial advice has spent the years since the Royal Commission absorbing paperwork. Annual fee consents where set-and-forget ongoing fees used to be, heavier review files, file note standards written with the next audit in mind. The industry’s answer was the client services officer, but a good local CSO is expensive, hard to find outside the capitals, and usually the first hire a small practice can’t quite justify. This page covers what a virtual assistant actually does inside an Australian advice practice – and the lines a VA never crosses under your AFSL.

The post-Royal-Commission admin pattern

Talk to any small advice practice and the same five time-sinks come up:

• The annual review cycle runs all year. Every ongoing client needs a review pack: valuations, performance and fee reporting, agenda, supporting documents. Multiply by a 90-client book and it’s a part-time job on its own.
• Fee consent is a deadline treadmill. The old FDS and opt-in cycle has been folded into a single annual fee consent under the Delivering Better Financial Outcomes reforms (in force since January 2025) – a simpler form, the same relentless rhythm of generate, send, chase, file. Miss one and you’re switching off fees you’ve earned.
• Advice documents wait on data entry. Fact finds keyed into Xplan, risk profiles recorded, merges checked, PDSs and FSG assembled behind the SOA. None of it is strategy; all of it delays the strategy.
• Implementation is a chasing game. A signed authority to proceed is where the unbilled work starts: platform applications, rollovers, insurance underwriting requirements, weeks of follow-up.
• File notes slide. You know what your licensee’s audit team expects on file. You also know how far behind your meeting notes are.

A VA scoped properly takes all five.

Practices on Xplan can see exactly what a VA does inside Xplan: fact-find hygiene, Xmerge packs and the implementation chase.

What to delegate first

For the first 30 days, the highest-return scope is the review cycle plus fee consents – high-volume, deadline-driven, entirely procedural.

The review cycle:

• Valuations and performance reports pulled from your platforms ahead of each review
• Review packs assembled to your template in Xplan, AdviserLogic or Midwinter AdviceOS
• Meeting logistics: booking, confirmations, pre-meeting document requests, post-meeting action list
• Your dictated meeting notes typed into the file the same day, while they’re still contemporaneous

Fee consents:

• An anniversary register, so no renewal date arrives as a surprise
• Consents generated from your template, sent, tracked and chased to signature
• Signed consents filed against the client record, renewal register updated

That’s typically 8-12 hours a week back on a full ongoing-service book. Once it’s owned cleanly, layer on advice document support and implementation.

SOA support and the paraplanning line

If you searched “outsourced paraplanning support”, read this closely – the market is sloppy with the term and the line matters.

What a VA does on your SOAs and ROAs:

• Fact find and risk profile data entry into Xplan or AdviserLogic
• Template population and merge-field checking, so the document compiles cleanly first time
• Dropping in the projections, research and comparisons you or your paraplanner produced
• Assembling the appendices: PDSs, FSG, fee tables, authority forms
• Formatting, proofreading, version control and lodgement for your review

What a VA does not do: choose the strategy, run the modelling, build the product-replacement reasoning, or write the basis-of-advice narrative. That’s paraplanning judgement, and it belongs with a qualified paraplanner – and the recommendation itself is personal financial advice, which can only come from you as the authorised adviser. Anyone offering to “do your paraplanning” at admin rates is a file review finding waiting to happen.

Put honestly: a VA makes your existing paraplanning capacity – in-house, outsourced, or you at 9pm – faster, by stripping the data entry and assembly out of it.

Implementation: from authority to in force

The gap between “client signed” and “advice implemented” is where small practices bleed the most unbilled hours, because every step depends on a third party who needs chasing:

• Platform applications and transfers on HUB24, Netwealth, BT Panorama, Macquarie Wrap or CFS: lodged, tracked, requisitions answered
• Rollover paperwork, and the follow-up when the transferring fund sits on it
• Insurance underwriting: applications lodged, the client’s pathology booked, PMARs chased from the GP, underwriter requisitions answered, each policy tracked to in force
• Milestone updates back to the client, so you’re not fielding “what’s happening with my super?” calls

Your VA runs this as a tracked pipeline with a weekly status summary, rather than in your head.

The compliance question

Three things matter, and the placement is built around all three.

• Your AFSL obligations don’t transfer. ASIC’s long-standing position is that a licensee can outsource a function but not the responsibility for it – the general obligations under section 912A of the Corporations Act stay with you. Most licensees run an outsourcing policy or register; this arrangement is designed to slot into it, with you supervising output and signing off anything client-facing. How we vet covers the screening side.
• The no-advice line is hard. Your VA never gives personal financial advice, never answers a client’s “should I” questions, and works to written escalation rules: anything that smells like a recommendation goes to you, every time. Client-facing emails start as drafts for your review and only go out under the practice’s name once your tone and boundaries are documented.
• Data security is engineered, not assumed. Client financials and tax file numbers are about as sensitive as data gets, and TFNs carry their own handling rules under the Privacy (Tax File Number) Rule 2015. Your VA gets a 1Password Teams seat, a signed confidentiality agreement on day one, role-scoped access in your advice software, and an APP-mirroring data addendum on request. Many practices keep TFN fields out of VA view at the start and widen access as trust builds.

What it costs

Practice-admin VAs are $12-17 AUD per hour; specialist advice-process support is $18-25. Most solo and two-adviser practices start at 15-20 hours a week, around $1,000-1,700 a month – and your VA works your Australian business hours, so implementation chasing happens while platforms and insurers are answering their phones. Run your own numbers on the calculator, or see the full cost breakdown.

If advice is one arm of a bigger business

If you also write loans, the mortgage broker VA page covers the loan-processing side; if you write general insurance, see the insurance brokers page; and if you’re an accounting firm with an advice arm, start from the accounting firms page. One VA can often straddle two of these workloads in the same week.

How a placement starts

The first 30 days follow the standard ramp: shadow week with daily 15-minute check-ins, diary and review-pack ownership by week two, fee consent and file note workflows by week three, the implementation pipeline by week four, then the day-30 review with us. Placement takes 7-10 days from your discovery call, and the 30-day guarantee means we recalibrate or replace if it isn’t working.

The fastest way to find out whether this fits your practice is the free discovery call. Thirty minutes, no card, no obligation – bring your messiest workflow and we’ll tell you honestly whether a VA solves it.