MYOB Virtual Assistant: a VA who knows the In Tray from the Bank transactions page

Nobody searches “myob virtual assistant” with their books up to date. You search it when the Bank transactions page is showing a number in the hundreds, the In Tray has bills in it from March, and your BAS agent’s emails have shifted from friendly to friendly-with-a-deadline.

The software isn’t the problem. MYOB’s bank feeds work, the rules engine is genuinely good once someone builds the rules, and the In Tray reads most bills for you. The problem is that none of it allocates a single transaction on its own, and the person in your business who knows how is you, after dinner.

One fork before we start: if you actually run on Xero, you want our Xero bookkeeping page instead. Same service, same line on BAS, different screens. This page is for MYOB files.

The rhythm a VA runs in your MYOB

Daily, the Bank transactions page goes to zero. The lines your bank rules caught, the ones with the little magic wand icon, get a sanity check rather than blind trust; the rest are matched to open invoices and bills or allocated by hand, and anything genuinely unidentifiable goes onto one tidy query list. One message a day, not forty. The rules get maintained as they go: new regular supplier, new bill rule, one less line to touch next month.

Bills run through the In Tray, which the browser version now calls Uploads, though nobody says that out loud. Suppliers email straight to its unique address, the OCR prefills supplier, dates and amounts, and the VA checks it read the right column, codes the lines, links the source document to the bill so the paper trail survives an audit, and drafts the coding queries that need your call (“is the new trailer repairs, or an asset?”). Peppol eInvoices land in the same queue with the fields already structured. Your whole accounts payable loop runs out of here.

Money in: invoices raised the day the work is done, the Send eInvoice button used where customers are on the network, invoice reminders switched on, and the overdue list worked on a cadence you approve. Friendly at seven days, firm at fourteen, phone call at thirty.

Weekly, payroll prep. Timesheets checked, leave entered, the pay run drafted and put in front of you. You approve, the report goes to the ATO under Single Touch Payroll, and the VA watches the STP reporting centre and chases anything that comes back rejected instead of letting it sit until finalisation.

Month-end: Reconcile accounts run properly, suspense cleared, expense coding made consistent, so when it’s time to open Prepare BAS or IAS, the GST and PAYG fields prefill from a file that’s actually right.

The honest bit

Two things, said plainly. MYOB is really two products wearing one brand: browser-based MYOB Business and the AccountRight desktop software, and they name things differently, In Tray versus Uploads, command centres versus menus. A VA who knows one finds the other familiar, not identical, which is part of why every placement runs 5-7 days supervised in your file before solo work, whatever their history.

Second, the talent pool. Xero is global; MYOB is Australian and New Zealand software, so offshore bookkeepers with deep MYOB hours are rarer than Xero ones. We screen for MYOB specifically, and we’ll tell you on the discovery call what we actually found rather than shipping a Xero person and calling it close enough.

What stays with you, and with your agent

BAS lodgement stays with a registered BAS or tax agent, the same line we draw on the Xero side, because lodging for a fee is a registered service under the Tax Agent Services Act. The VA’s job is to hand your agent a clean file, not to replace them. Pay run approval and the STP declaration stay with you. So do payment decisions: the VA preps the payment run; what actually gets paid, and when, is yours.

One pleasant detail: MYOB Business doesn’t charge per user. Your VA gets their own login, scoped with a role, and the subscription doesn’t move.

What it costs and where to start

Full ownership of the books, daily rec through month-end, sits on the bookkeeping tier at $25-35 AUD an hour excl GST. If you only need the data-entry layer, In Tray processing and invoice sending, that’s admin work at $12-17. Placement takes 7-10 business days, the refundable $500 deposit credits to your first month, the first 30 days carry a recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and there’s no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. The VA cost guide has the full pricing picture.

Or book a discovery call with Jenn, the founder, who has placed 48+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024. Bring the number on your Bank transactions page. If it’s three digits, you already know.