Employment Hero Virtual Assistant: a VA for your HR admin

Nobody searches “employment hero virtual assistant” for fun. You search it because the whole team lives in that platform, and the person onboarding new starters, approving leave, chasing timesheets and prepping the pay run is you, at 9pm, the night before pay day.

Employment Hero is built to carry that load. It’s an Australian all-in-one: paperless onboarding, employee records, leave, timesheets and payroll under one login, with everything feeding the pay run so you don’t switch tools. The platform is good. What most owners are missing is a person with the time to drive it every day.

The rhythm a VA runs in your Employment Hero

Onboarding first, because that’s where new starters go cold. The moment you have a hire, your VA sends the onboarding invite and works the flow to completion: tax file declaration, super choice, bank details, emergency contacts and the contract, each step chased until it’s green. By day one the record exists, the team and reporting line are set, and the starter policies have gone out for acknowledgement. Nobody spends a first morning collecting forms.

Then the daily HR queue. Leave requests get worked properly: balances checked, conflicting requests across the team spotted, the straightforward ones approved on the rules you set, and anything borderline pushed to you rather than guessed. Timesheet submissions get reviewed against rostered hours, queried where they don’t line up, and approved individually or in bulk before cut-off, because in Employment Hero an unapproved timesheet or leave request simply doesn’t make it into the pay run.

Then the records nobody keeps current until they’re a problem. Qualifications, licences and certifications kept up to date in the employee file, with expiring ones flagged before they lapse. Reporting lines, start and end dates, terminations actioned cleanly. The quiet data work that keeps the whole platform honest.

The pay run, prepped but not lodged

This is the part owners worry about, so here’s exactly how it works. For each pay run, Employment Hero pulls leave, timesheets, expenses, new hires and terminations from the rest of the platform automatically. Your VA does the assembly: reconciling all of that before you hit Prepare Pay Run, checking the figures line up, and flagging anything that looks off with the context attached.

What they don’t do is lodge it. By default, only platform admins can mark a pay run as processed, and you don’t grant that permission. So the VA hands you a clean, checked pay run and you do the one thing that should stay on your login: approve it. You get the two hours of prep back. You keep the click that moves money.

How the access actually works

Employment Hero is permission-driven, which is the part that makes a VA safe to bring in. You don’t make them an admin. You build a custom security group, name it something like “HR Admin”, define which employee and contractor data it can touch, then set the access level per module: View, Modify, Use or Delete. Search “leave” in permission settings and every leave toggle is right there.

We tell you precisely which modules a placement needs, onboarding, leave, timesheets, employee records, policy distribution, and which to leave switched off, pay-run processing and billing. Platform admins keep the full picture. The VA gets the job, not the keys.

The honest bit

Two things worth knowing before you scope this. First, Employment Hero’s timesheet approval is single-level: a submission needs sign-off from one approver, not two, so if your business runs a two-stage check (manager then payroll) that second pass lives outside the platform and has to be built into the VA’s process by hand, not assumed. Second, an unapproved timesheet or leave request silently drops out of the pay run, it isn’t an error, just an omission, which is exactly why the daily approval sweep matters: miss it and someone is short-paid, and you find out after lodgement, not before. A VA working the queue every day is the difference between a clean pay run and a back-pay correction next cycle.

And one platform reality: Employment Hero has both a classic payroll and a newer intelligent payroll, and the exact screens differ between them. We confirm which one your account is on during the supervised ramp rather than assume, so the VA learns your buttons, not a generic version.

What stays with you

Hiring decisions, contract terms, pay rates, anything that’s an employment call, and final pay-run authorisation. The VA makes onboarding happen on time, keeps the records true and the figures clean, and escalates the judgement calls to you under a written rule. The pay-run wall isn’t a policy we wrote, it’s a permission Employment Hero built. We just don’t grant it.

There’s a related win worth naming: because the VA works inside your existing Employment Hero subscription, you’re not buying an extra software seat to add the hours. The access is a permission group, not a new licence.

What it costs and where to start

Employment Hero admin sits on the admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, typically 10-15 hours a week, more if the VA also covers inbox triage or new-client onboarding emails. Placement takes 7-10 business days, with 5-7 days supervised inside your account before solo work, a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice.

If you run a professional services firm, an accounting or bookkeeping practice, or a hospitality or trades business with a real headcount, this is squarely the profile it works for. The VA cost guide has the full pricing picture and pricing lays out the tiers. Otherwise book a discovery call with Jenn, who will tell you straight if your business isn’t ready for one. Bring your last onboarding and your next pay-run date. We’ll find the hours.