Reckon Virtual Assistant: a VA who keeps the books current in Reckon One or Accounts Hosted

Nobody searches “reckon virtual assistant” for fun. You search it because the bank feed in Reckon hasn’t been matched in three weeks, the debtors report has names on it from two months ago, and the only person who can fix any of it is you, at 9pm, after the actual work of the day is done. Reckon isn’t the problem. The data entry the software needs to stay true is the problem, and that’s the part a VA takes off you.

A quick honesty note up front: Reckon is a smaller player than Xero or MYOB in Australia, so VAs with thousands of Reckon hours are harder to find than Xero ones. What we match you with is a VA who genuinely understands bookkeeping, double-entry, bank reconciliation, GST coding, aged receivables, and who learns your Reckon book under supervision before touching it solo. The bookkeeping knowledge is the years-long part. The Reckon screens are the days-long part.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Reckon

The week has a shape, and a good VA runs it without you having to ask.

Most days start with the bank feed. In Reckon One, your VA opens the Banking screen, works through the imported transactions, and matches them: this deposit to that invoice, this payment to that bill. The clean ones get allocated to the right account straight away. The ones that aren’t obvious, a transfer that looks like income, a payment with no matching bill, a personal expense that snuck onto the business card, go into a query list rather than getting a guessed code. Guessed codes are how a BAS goes wrong, so the rule is simple: if it’s not clear, it gets flagged, not forced.

Then invoicing. As your job sheets or sales come in, the VA raises tax invoices in Reckon, applies the correct GST tax code, and emails them out the same day, because an invoice sent on the day the job finishes gets paid faster than one sent at month end. For your retainer or subscription clients, recurring invoices get set up once and fire automatically, so the first of the month doesn’t become an admin scramble.

Receivables is the part that actually moves your cash position. Once a week, your VA runs the Aged Receivables report, the debtors list, and works the overdue column. Reminder statements go out of Reckon, the friendly nudge at seven days, the firmer one at thirty, and every promised-payment date gets logged so you always know who’s been chased, what they said, and who’s gone quiet. You can read more about how we run a debtor follow-up cadence without it sounding like a debt collector.

On the payables side, supplier bills get entered against the right expense accounts, the Aged Payables report stays current, and the pay run list gets assembled so you approve who gets paid rather than building the list from scratch. Coding the accounts payable properly through the week is what keeps month-end from becoming a fortnight of catch-up.

Payroll runs on its own rhythm. In Reckon One Payroll or Accounts Hosted, your VA enters timesheet hours, sets up new employee records, checks the leave balances, and gets the pay run ready for your review. They prep it. You approve and lodge it. More on that boundary below, because it matters.

And around month-end, the VA pulls the reports your bookkeeper or accountant asks for, flags anything unreconciled, and makes sure the data is in order before BAS or the quarterly review. The goal is that when your registered agent picks up the file, they’re spending their billable hours on judgement, not on cleaning up data entry that should never have been theirs to clean.

The honest bit

There are things Reckon will not do, no matter who you put in front of it, and pretending otherwise just sets you up to be annoyed.

Reckon’s bank feeds are real but they’re not Xero’s. Depending on your bank and which Reckon product you’re on, feeds can be slower to set up and occasionally drop, needing a reconnect. Some smaller banks and certain account types don’t feed cleanly at all, which means a periodic manual statement import. Your VA can handle the import and the reconnect, but it’s honest to say it’s more hands-on than the slickest feeds on the market.

Reckon One and Reckon Accounts Hosted are genuinely two different products, not two views of one. Reckon One is the modern browser-based system with proper per-user roles. Accounts Hosted is the older, deeper desktop software delivered over Citrix, with its own login and its own way of doing things. A VA who knows one is not automatically fluent in the other, so we set the ramp to whichever you actually run. If you’re mid-migration between them, tell us, because that changes the work.

Receipt capture and document management in Reckon are leaner than the third-party apps bolted onto bigger platforms. The VA can attach what the workflow allows and keep a tidy folder structure for the rest, but if you want full automated receipt OCR you may be looking at an add-on tool, and we’ll say so rather than pretend Reckon does it natively.

And Reckon will happily let someone post a transaction to the wrong account. The software doesn’t know your business; the person does. That’s exactly why we place a VA who understands bookkeeping rather than one who just knows where the buttons are.

What stays with you

Bookkeeping in Australia has a hard legal line, and we sit firmly on the right side of it.

Lodging a BAS or GST return for a fee is BAS-agent work under the Tax Agent Services Act. Your VA does not lodge your BAS. They prepare the file so it’s clean, reconciled and coded, and then it goes to you or your registered BAS or tax agent for review and lodgement. Same with payroll: the VA preps the pay run, but approving who gets paid, and lodging the Single Touch Payroll report, is the business owner’s or registered agent’s call, not the VA’s.

Anything that’s an accounting or tax judgement, how to treat a capital purchase, whether something is deductible, how to structure the chart of accounts, what’s GST-free versus input-taxed, stays with your bookkeeper or accountant. The VA flags the question; the licensed person answers it. The line isn’t a policy we invented to cover ourselves. It’s the law, and keeping the VA on the operational side of it protects you as much as it protects them.

What it costs and where to start

Reconciliation, accounts receivable follow-up, accounts payable and payroll prep sit on the bookkeeping tier, $25-35 AUD an hour excl GST. Lighter admin, sending invoices, chasing source documents and receipts, basic data entry, can sit on the admin tier at $12-17 an hour, and for most small-business books we mix the two so you’re not paying bookkeeping rates for envelope-stuffing. Most Reckon books run well on 8-12 hours a week.

Placement takes 7-10 business days, with 3-5 days supervised inside your Reckon book before any solo work, depending on whether you’re on Reckon One or Accounts Hosted. There’s a $500 refundable deposit credited to your first month, a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. We’ve made 87+ Australian placements since 2024, and Jenn takes every discovery call herself.

If you want the bigger picture first, the bookkeeping firms page goes into how this works across a client book, the accounting firms page covers practice-side support, and the VA cost guide lays out the full pricing picture with no surprises. When you’re ready, book a discovery call with Jenn and tell her whether you’re on Reckon One or Accounts Hosted, so we can match the access model from day one.