BGL Simple Fund 360 Virtual Assistant: SMSF processing off your accountants' desks

If you administer self-managed super funds, there is a decent chance the whole book runs on BGL Simple Fund 360. Melbourne-built, and now administering over 327,000 SMSFs, more than half of every self-managed fund in the country. The software is not the problem. The problem is who is feeding it. In most firms the answer is a senior accountant, charged out at review rates, spending mornings accepting bank feed matches and afternoons emailing a trustee for the third time about a missing bank statement. That is the gap a Simple Fund 360 VA fills.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Simple Fund 360

The day starts at the Transaction Matching screen, because that is where the backlog breeds. Overnight bank feeds land as unmatched items across the whole book of funds. Your VA works through them: Smart Matching’s AI suggestions get verified against the source rather than rubber-stamped, correct ones accepted, wrong ones fixed so the engine learns your firm’s coding rather than reinforcing its own mistakes, and genuinely new transactions coded properly the first time. Done daily, this screen stays near zero. Left for month end, it becomes the week nobody in your firm wants.

Documents come next. Everything trustees send, dividend statements, bank statements for accounts without feeds, contribution confirmations, signed minutes, goes in through SmartDocs, where the AI reads the document and suggests which fund and document type it belongs to. The VA’s job is the human check: confirm the suggestion, correct the misreads, file it. Six months later, when the auditor asks for the evidence behind a contribution, it is attached to the fund, not buried in a partner’s inbox.

Then the Corporate Actions screen. Simple Fund 360 surfaces announced DRPs, share splits, demergers and takeovers, but every one still needs a person to review the announcement against the fund’s actual holding, apply the right election and process it. Your VA clears the pending list on a set day each week and escalates anything that does not reconcile cleanly, with the working attached.

Around all of that runs the chasing. Every SMSF book has funds stalled on one missing document, and someone has to ask for it, then ask again. The VA keeps a per-fund register of what is outstanding, chases trustees on a cadence you approve, and logs each contact, which is genuinely most of the reason funds miss lodgement deadlines solved by administration rather than heroics.

At period end the cadence shifts. The VA runs Create Entries to allocate income and tax across members, drafts the member statements, Operating Statement and Statement of Financial Position, then builds the year-end workpapers inside Simple Fund 360: checklist items completed, reconciliations noted, source documents linked from SmartDocs, audit queries gathered into one pack. Your accountant opens a fund that is ready to review instead of ready to start. And through the whole year, the Fund Workflow screen gets kept current, so the question “where are we up to on the Hendersons’ fund” has an answer nobody had to go and find.

The honest bit

Simple Fund 360 markets heavily on automation, and the automation is real, but it is automation of suggestion, not of judgement. Smart Matching proposes; it does not decide, and a firm that lets suggestions auto-accept without review will eventually find creatively coded contributions at audit time. SmartDocs reads documents impressively until it meets a scanned statement from a small credit union, and then a human fixes it. The Corporate Actions screen announces events; it does not know which DRP election that particular trustee made in 2019. Every one of those gaps is a person’s job, and the only question is whether that person costs your firm $35 an hour or a senior accountant’s charge-out rate.

Two more things worth saying plainly. Not every bank and platform feeds into BGL cleanly; funds with legacy accounts or obscure wraps will always have a manual statement-entry tail, and that tail is permanent, not a setup problem. And Simple Fund 360 does not chase anyone. There is no button that extracts a missing bank statement from a trustee who is not answering email. The chasing is human work, which is rather the point of this page.

What stays with you

SMSF work is regulated on two fronts, and the line has to be structural, not just cultural. Anything that is financial advice, contribution strategies, pension commencements, investment decisions, anything an AFSL or authorised representative exists for, never comes from the VA, full stop. Tax agent work stays with the tax agent: the SMSF Annual Return and TBAR events are prepared under the VA’s login but reviewed and lodged under your registered agent’s. The independent audit stays exactly as independent as the law requires; the VA’s contribution is a clean workpaper file, not answers on the auditor’s behalf.

Simple Fund 360’s permission model lets you build that boundary into the software. Custom user roles control access screen by screen, so the VA’s role can include transaction matching, documents, reports and workpapers while excluding lodgement and user administration altogether, and you can restrict access to specific funds during the supervised period. Since BGL prices by fund count rather than users, none of this costs you an extra dollar of subscription. Judgement calls, client conversations about anything with an advice flavour, and every signature stay in your office.

What it costs and where to start

Fund accounting work in Simple Fund 360, the matching, Create Entries, member statements and workpapers, sits on DotVA’s bookkeeping tier at $25-35 AUD an hour excl GST. If you only want the document chasing and SmartDocs filing handled, that is admin-tier work at $12-17. Most firms start around 10-15 hours a week and scale up hard through annual return season. Placement takes 7-10 business days, and the first 5-7 days are supervised inside your own BGL account, typically starting on the Transaction Matching screen where errors are cheap and visible, before any solo work. A $500 refundable deposit comes off your first month, there is a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. We have made 87+ Australian placements since 2024, and accounting firms are a meaningful share of them.

The accounting firms page covers the wider practice picture beyond SMSF, the data entry page shows how we run high-accuracy processing work, and the VA cost guide lays out the full pricing model with the on-costs comparison. If your unmatched transactions screen is already a number you would rather not say out loud, book a discovery call with Jenn and bring it anyway.