FYI Virtual Assistant: a VA who files every client email where your firm can actually find it

Firms don’t buy FYI on a whim. Somebody sat through the demo, saw every client email filed against the right job and year, and signed up to end a decade of “check my sent items” archaeology. Then reality: AutoFile catches what it recognises, the In Tray grows a few hundred deep, and the person clearing it is a partner at 7pm or a senior accountant who bills at $250 an hour. You searched “fyi virtual assistant” because the firm bought the filing cabinet and nobody got hired to do the filing.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your FYI

Morning, before the team opens their first workpaper: the In Tray gets cleared. FYI’s AutoFile handles emails from addresses already on the client record, synced across from Xero Practice Manager, but every new contact, every client emailing from their personal Gmail, every ATO notice forwarded by a bookkeeper lands unfiled. Your VA works the list, filing each item against client, Cabinet, job, year and category, and where a new address keeps appearing, flags it for the XPM client record so AutoFile picks it up next time. That last habit is the difference between a VA who files and a VA who makes the filing shrink.

Then the Jobs Board. Most firms run their workflow through FYI’s job states, and the states that rot are the waiting-on-client ones. Your VA pulls every job parked there, sends the chase email from your approved template, logs it against the job, and updates the state when the documents arrive. Your Monday WIP meeting runs off a board that reflects this morning, not last month.

Correspondence is the third block. FYI’s document templates carry merge fields fed by the XPM sync, so an engagement letter, an ethical letter to a predecessor accountant, or a year-end records request comes out with the client name, entity and job details already correct. Your VA drafts them, files them in Draft against the client, and nothing leaves the firm until a partner flicks it to approved. When the whole client base needs the same letter, the annual fee increase, the pre-30-June checklist, the VA builds the list and runs it as a bulk merge instead of 400 individual copies.

Signatures round out the day. Documents shared through FYI Collaborate get tracked, signing requests pushed through your e-signature integration (FuseSign and Annature are the common ones in AU firms) get chased twice a week, and the standing list of unsigned engagement letters, the one every firm has and every firm ignores, actually gets worked. The inbox management discipline underneath all of this is the same one our VAs run in any shared practice mailbox; FYI just gives it a much better home.

Filing doesn’t stop at email, either. Phone calls become a file note created against the client, so the conversation exists somewhere other than one accountant’s memory. Meeting notes get filed to the job they belong to. When two people need to work the same letter, FYI’s co-edit opens the document in Microsoft 365 online and keeps the version history itself, which is the end of “engagement letter FINAL v3 (2).docx” as a genre. And the firm’s own how-we-do-things material, filing conventions, job state definitions, the template register, lives in a Knowledge Cabinet your VA keeps current. That sounds dull right up until your next graduate starts and onboards themselves from it.

If your plan includes FYI’s Custom Processes, the VA doesn’t build the automations; process design sits behind FYI Admin rights and stays with you. But they feed them. A scheduled chase sequence only fires at the right clients if the job states underneath it are true, and an auto-created task only lands with the right person if the client’s partner and manager fields in XPM are current. The unglamorous data hygiene the VA does daily is exactly what makes the automation layer trustworthy instead of noisy.

Weekly, there’s a hygiene pass: duplicates merged or flagged, documents filed to the wrong year moved, tasks swept so nothing sits assigned to someone who was on leave when it landed, and a short note to you on anything that looked like it needed an accountant and got escalated rather than touched.

The honest bit

Four things FYI will not do, whoever you hire. First, AutoFile is only as clever as your XPM contact data. It matches on email addresses held against the client record, so a firm with stale XPM contacts gets a permanently fat unfiled list, and no automation setting fixes that; a human keeping the records current does. Second, FYI is a document and practice layer, not an accounting engine. It files, templates, tracks and automates around the work, but ledgers live in Xero, returns live in Xero Tax, and client and job data is mastered in XPM and synced across. When something looks wrong in FYI, the fix is often one system upstream. Third, the Custom Processes automations that make FYI demos look magical, auto-created tasks when a job changes state, scheduled email sequences, are gated to the higher plans. On the Intermediate plan your VA does those steps by hand, which is less elegant and works fine.

Fourth, and this is the quiet one: FYI’s Content Search reads the text of emails, phone calls, file notes and meetings, but not the Word files and PDFs themselves, so for documents, search runs on filing metadata. Filter by client, year, cabinet and category and it’s genuinely superb, provided the document was filed with those attributes in the first place. If you migrated ten years of network-drive documents into FYI in a hurry, the loosely-filed backlog doesn’t fix itself through better searching. It gets fixed by someone refiling it, client by client, year by year, and that clean-up is honest, boring VA work most firms budget as a one-off project in the first month or two before the daily rhythm takes over.

One shape-of-the-product note as well. FYI started life as the document layer on top of Xero Practice Manager and has since grown a full practice management side of its own, time, invoicing, capacity planning, and plenty of AU firms are mid-migration between the two. Where your firm sits on that journey changes what the VA touches day to day, so it’s one of the first things we map on the discovery call rather than assume.

One more cost truth, because it surprises people coming from tools with free reception seats: every FYI user is a paid licence, from about AUD $30 a month. Adding a VA means adding a seat. Against 10-15 hours a week of a partner’s reclaimed time it’s a rounding error, but it belongs in the budget line, not in the fine print.

What stays with you

Accounting is regulated work, and the boundary here is not a courtesy, it’s the Tax Agent Services Act. Your VA never gives tax or BAS advice, never decides what a letter to a client should say about their position, never accepts an engagement, sets a fee, or authorises a lodgement, and never corresponds with the ATO beyond filing what arrives and flagging the deadline. The workflow that makes this safe is one FYI already ships: everything the VA produces sits in Draft against the client until a partner or manager approves it, and the approval is yours, every time. Cabinet security draws the other line, keeping HR, practice financials and partner-only material invisible to the VA’s login by permission rather than by promise. The VA runs the machinery of the practice; the judgement that makes it a practice stays with the people whose names are on the letterhead.

What it costs and where to start

FYI admin sits on our admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST. Most firms land at 10-15 hours a week, around $500-1,100 a month, enough to own the In Tray, the Jobs Board chase list, template correspondence and signature follow-up. If the same person also carries bookkeeping work in Xero, that portion prices on the bookkeeping tier at $25-35; we split the invoice honestly rather than blend it. A legacy refiling project prices on the admin tier too, it’s data entry with a filing convention attached.

Placement runs 7-10 business days. The first 5-7 days are supervised inside your FYI and XPM, learning your Cabinet structure and filing conventions before touching anything solo, and you sign off on the move to independent work. The $500 deposit is refundable and credits to your first month, the 30-day guarantee means we recalibrate or replace if the fit is wrong, and there’s no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. We’ve made 87+ Australian placements since 2024, and accounting firms are one of the verticals where the same VA compounds in value every month the filing conventions bed in.

For the wider picture of what a VA does inside a practice beyond the DMS, the accounting firms page covers the full role, and the VA cost guide breaks down pricing against hiring locally. If your In Tray count made you wince just now, book a discovery call with Jenn and bring the number.