Agentcis Virtual Assistant: a VA for the enquiry pipeline, the checklists and the commission chasing

The person searching “agentcis virtual assistant” is usually running one of two agencies, and often both at once: an education consultancy sending students to partner colleges and universities, or a migration practice, with the same Agentcis subscription holding the leads, the clients, the applications and the money for either. The software is not the problem. Agentcis was built for the AU and NZ agent market specifically, some 4,000 migration and education consultancy users run on it, and it holds a complete picture of the agency: web enquiry forms feeding a leads pipeline, clients with document checklists, applications stepping through workflow stages, partner institutions with commission rates, agreements, invoices. The problem is that a CRM is a filing system with opinions. Every one of those modules assumes a human is driving it daily, and in most agencies that human is the principal, between counselling sessions, at 9pm.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Agentcis

Leads first, because enquiries in this business have the shelf life of cut fruit. A prospective student comparing agents fills in your web form at 11pm Kathmandu time or 2am Manila time, and by morning it is sitting in your Leads module alongside four others. Your VA opens the pipeline before your first appointment, assigns the new arrivals, and replies the same day: the approved response for that course area, intake dates, what to bring to a counselling session, and a booking link for time with you. Then the part that separates agencies that grow from agencies that plateau: the follow-up task actually gets set, and actually gets worked. Leads who said “after my exams” get contacted after their exams. Your pipeline stages stop being archaeology and start being a forecast. This is CRM hygiene as a revenue activity, not a tidiness one.

Documents fill the middle of the day. Every application runs on a checklist, passport bio page, transcripts, English test results, financial capacity evidence, statement of purpose, and every checklist has one item that will not arrive by itself. The VA requests, chases and files each document against the client record in Agentcis, checks what arrived against what was asked for (the transcript missing its final semester, the passport photographed with a thumb over the expiry date), and keeps the stage checklist true so you can see at a glance which clients are genuinely ready to apply and which just feel ready.

Applications move next. Once you have decided where a client is applying, the VA steps each application through your Agentcis workflow stages: submission to the partner institution confirmed, the offer letter filed against the application the day it lands, the acceptance deadline and tuition deposit date tracked, and enrolment confirmation chased so the file closes properly. The weekly pass matters as much as the daily one: a run over every open application to find the ones that have stopped moving, because an offer that lapses unaccepted is a student lost after all the work was done, and in an education agency it is also a commission that will never be claimed.

Which brings us to money, where Agentcis earns its subscription twice. Client-side, the VA generates fee agreements from your templates, tracks them to signature, raises invoices against the agreement as stages fall due, records payments and works the outstanding balances on an invoice-chasing cadence you have signed off. Partner-side is the quiet leak in most agencies: commission claims. After each intake, the VA reconciles the students who actually enrolled against the Partners module, where the agreed rates and agreement documents live, prepares the claim invoices at the recorded rates, submits them to each institution’s finance contact, and chases the ones that go unpaid past terms. If you keep books in Xero, the VA keeps what Agentcis says you are owed and what your accounting file says you received from drifting apart. Agencies doing their first proper reconciliation almost always find an intake that was never fully claimed; the VA’s job is making sure there is never another one.

There is also the correspondence layer, which decides whether Agentcis is your agency’s memory or just its address book. Every email exchange with a student, every note from a counselling session, every promise made to an institution’s admissions office gets logged against the client, the lead or the partner it belongs to, in the record, not in someone’s inbox. Six months later, when a student disputes what they were told about a refund, or an institution queries why a claim includes a particular enrolment, the answer is on the file in thirty seconds. Agencies that skip this discipline reconstruct history from Gmail searches; agencies that keep it have a defensible file, and in a migration practice the difference is not cosmetic.

And underneath everything, the unglamorous layer: tasks closed instead of snoozed, counselling appointments booked and confirmed through Agentcis’s appointment scheduling, onboarding emails sent the day a client signs rather than the week after, and the dashboard’s pipeline and commission reports given a weekly tidy so Monday’s numbers are numbers, not vibes.

The rhythm changes with the calendar, which is worth naming because intake seasons are why agency principals burn out. In the eight weeks before a February or July intake, the same client list generates triple the chasing: deposits due, medicals booked, defer requests, students who vanish and reappear with a new preferred course. A VA’s hours flex up through the crunch and settle back after census, which is a very different cost shape from a permanent hire sized for the peak.

The honest bit

Three things Agentcis will not do, whoever is logged in.

It captures leads; it does not convert them. The web forms are genuinely useful, and the pipeline is a clear way to see your funnel, but the enquiry that becomes an enrolled student is the one that got a fast, human, specific reply and then three follow-ups over six weeks. An agency that buys Agentcis without allocating follow-up hours has built a beautifully organised list of people it never called.

The commission module reports what you told it. It will show you what each partner owes only if the rates were entered when the agreement was signed and enrolments were recorded when they happened. Feed it late or partial data and it becomes confidently wrong, which is worse than a spreadsheet, because you trust it. The VA’s discipline on partner records and application stages is what makes the commission report an asset rather than a decoration.

And the pricing is per user, so plan for the VA’s own seat rather than sharing yours. That is not just licensing hygiene. Agentcis attributes every action to the login that made it, and in a practice answerable to OMARA, or holding ESOS written agreements with providers, an audit trail that shows the VA doing the admin and you making the decisions is worth far more than the seat costs. A shared login also makes the per-user permission settings useless, and those settings are exactly how you keep the accounts module out of reach if you want it out of reach.

What stays with you

The advice, absolutely and by law. Immigration assistance for a fee is a reserved activity under the Migration Act; only OMARA-registered agents, Australian legal practitioners and exempt persons may provide it. So visa strategy, eligibility assessments, Genuine Student positions, what goes into a lodgement and whether it lodges at all: yours, without exception. On the education side, course counselling and everything your written agreements with CRICOS providers make you responsible for under the ESOS framework, honest recruitment, accurate course information, the integrity of who you put forward, stays with the counsellor. When a lead’s “quick question” turns out to be a question about visas, eligibility or which course to choose, the VA logs it against the record and hands it up. Answering it is your job description, not theirs.

The commercial judgement stays too. You sign the partner agreements and set the commission terms the VA later claims against. You decide fees, discounts and refunds. You resolve the dispute when an institution’s remittance does not match the claim. The VA prepares, reconciles, submits and chases; nothing about the terms themselves is delegated. For the fuller regulatory picture of running offshore support in a migration practice, the migration agents page draws the whole boundary.

What it costs and where to start

Agentcis admin sits on the admin tier at $12-17 AUD an hour excluding GST. Most agencies begin at 10-15 hours a week, around $500-1,100 a month, and flex hours up in the weeks before a major intake when the checklist chasing and acceptance deadlines stack. Placement runs 7-10 business days, and the first 5-7 days are supervised inside your Agentcis, starting on leads and document collection, with agreements, invoicing and commission claims added once the early work has proven accurate. The $500 deposit is refundable and comes off your first month, the first 30 days carry a recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and there is no lock-in past 14 days notice. DotVA has made 87+ Australian placements since 2024.

If you want context first, the education and training page covers how agencies and course providers use VAs, and the VA cost guide sets the three tiers against local hiring costs. Otherwise book a discovery call with Jenn, who takes every call herself. Bring two numbers: open leads never followed up, and last intake’s enrolments versus commission claims lodged. The distance between them is the brief.