Xero Virtual Assistant: a VA in your reconcile screen

Nobody searches “xero virtual assistant” because they’re curious about software. You search it because the Reconcile screen has 140 unmatched lines on it, the BAS is due in nine days, and the person who’s supposed to code all of it is you, in the gap between two actual jobs that pay the bills.

Xero is genuinely good at the boring parts. Bank feeds pull your transactions in every day, suggested matches do half the reconciling, bank rules handle the repeat stuff, and the GST tracks itself as you code. What it can’t do is sit down at five o’clock and actually drive it. That’s the job. That’s the whole job.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Xero

Morning or end of day, depending on how you like it: the Reconcile screen gets cleared. Bank feed lines matched to the invoices and bills they belong to, Xero’s suggested matches accepted where they’re right and corrected where they’re lazy, and everything else coded to the proper account and GST treatment. The genuinely unclear ones don’t get a guess, they get flagged to you with a one-line question. By the time you look, the green tick is green.

Then the money in. Sales invoices raised from your jobs or timesheets, sent on your branding theme, and the Awaiting Payment list worked: reminders on, polite follow-ups on a cadence you’ve approved, so the cash comes in without you writing the awkward “just checking in” email for the third time.

Then the money out. Supplier bills captured (through Hubdoc or your email-to-Xero address), checked against the actual invoice, coded, and queued in the Bills to Pay scheduler for you to approve. The VA builds the batch. You release it. That split is on purpose.

And the coding that makes everything downstream true: spend categorised to the right account with the correct GST treatment, GST on Income, GST Free or BAS Excluded, so your Profit and Loss is real and your BAS isn’t built on a pile of guesses. Anything that repeats gets a bank rule set up once and never touched again.

Payroll and BAS, done carefully

If wages are in scope, the VA takes the Payroll Admin permission and drafts the pay runs: hours in, employee records and STP Phase 2 details kept current (income type, tax scale, leave accruals), super readied through the auto super clearing house. Then they stop. You click Post and File. The person preparing a pay run is never the person releasing it, and that’s a line we set in the permissions deliberately, not a thing we hope they remember.

BAS is the one people get nervous about, so let’s be plain. Your VA gets the quarter clean: reconciliation finished, GST coding reviewed, the Activity Statement figures checked against the accounts, and a tidy file handed over. They do not press lodge. Lodging a BAS for a fee is registered BAS agent work under the Tax Agent Services Act, and only a registered BAS or tax agent can do it. So the bookkeeping is the VA’s, and the review and the lodgement are your agent’s. If you don’t have a BAS agent, we’ll tell you on the call before we place anyone.

The bits that quietly eat your evenings

Receipts. Photos of fuel dockets and cafe receipts that need to become coded bills. A Xero VA runs the capture properly: Hubdoc or your email-to-Xero address pulls the document in, the VA reads it, codes it, and publishes it to the right contact, so the shoebox on your passenger seat stops being a March problem. They’ll chase the missing ones too, the supplier statement that doesn’t reconcile because two invoices never arrived.

Then the messy edges of the bank feed. A Stripe or GoCardless payout lands as one lump in the feed and has to be unpacked into the individual invoices and the fee; that’s fiddly, repeatable, and exactly the work that gets skipped when the owner is doing it at 9pm. The VA uses Find and Match to split it correctly, sets up a bank rule for the fee so it never has to be thought about again, and the deposit reconciles cleanly every time.

And the long tail of tidy-up nobody ever schedules: duplicate contacts merged, a year of miscoded entertainment-versus-meals fixed before your accountant finds it, suspense and clearing accounts brought back to zero at month-end, and the unreconciled backlog from the last bookkeeper finally cleared instead of carried.

What stays with you

Approving payments and pay runs, the final BAS lodgement, any decision about how something should be treated for tax, and the subscription itself. The VA runs on Xero’s Standard role, which covers reconciliation, invoicing, bills, contacts and reports but can’t add users or change your plan. Adviser access, the full-access role, stays with your accountant or BAS agent. Never the VA. Xero logs every action against the named user, so there’s an audit trail of exactly who did what, and you can change a role or pull access from Settings in seconds.

One genuinely pleasant detail: Xero charges per organisation, not per user. Adding your VA’s login adds exactly nothing to the software bill.

What it costs and where to start

Xero bookkeeping sits on the bookkeeping tier, $18-25 AUD an hour excl GST, typically 8-15 hours a week for a small business or a growing one, more if the VA also covers AR chasing and month-end reporting. Placement takes 7-10 business days, with 5-7 days supervised in your organisation before solo work, a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. See the full numbers in our VA cost guide or the pricing page.

If you run a bookkeeping firm and want a VA to take the data work across your client files so your registered staff stay on the review and the lodgement, that page goes deeper. Otherwise book a discovery call with Jenn, who has placed 48+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024 and will tell you straight if your books aren’t ready for one. Bring your Reconcile screen and your last BAS. We’ll find the hours.