Virtual assistants for accounting firms
Onboarding packs, reconciliation prep and the document chase that sits between a client and a finished set of accounts — handled by somebody who already knows what a working paper is and does not need the vocabulary explained twice.
- From $10/hour
- Both sides of every match vetted
- Member of VAASA
The work
What lands on the desk here.
- Bank and account reconciliation prep, queried and ready for review
- Client onboarding pack assembly and document collection
- Invoice processing and accounts payable data entry
- Expense categorization and receipt matching
- Bookkeeping data entry across client ledgers
- Month-end statement collation and file preparation
- Chasing outstanding client documents ahead of a deadline
- Practice management hygiene — client records, engagement letters, deadlines
- Diary control across partners and managers
- Year-end working paper collation
- VAT and tax return document assembly
Where the line is
No sign-off, no filing, and nothing presented as a qualified accountant's work.
A Nira professional prepares. They do not review, sign off, file a return in the firm's name, or give advice to a client — those stay with a qualified accountant, every time, with no exception for a quiet week. Work is queried and ready for a professional to check, not submitted on their behalf. Anything your professional body ties to a named, licensed individual stays inside that individual's hands — a remote administrator is not a route around a supervision requirement, and we would rather turn down the enquiry than let a client assume otherwise.
In practice
How this tends to go.
Accounting firms run on a calendar that does not move — a filing date is a filing date — and on a volume of small, repeatable preparation work that has nothing to do with the judgement the qualification exists for. Onboarding a client, chasing a bank statement, matching a receipt to a line in the ledger: none of it requires an accountant, and all of it currently eats an accountant’s week.
The onboarding pack is usually where the delay lives. A new client promises documents, half of them arrive in the wrong format, and somebody has to chase the rest before any real work can start. A professional whose job that week is the chase — not the accounts — gets a client file open faster than a partner fitting it between reviews.
Reconciliation prep is the highest-leverage handover, because it is mechanical until it is not. Transactions matched, discrepancies flagged and queried, the file left in a state where a qualified reviewer is checking work rather than doing it from scratch. The boundary is exact: preparation moves, sign-off does not, and it does not move on a deadline either.
Ledger hygiene compounds the same way a CRM does at an agency. Categories drift, receipts sit unmatched, and a bookkeeping file that looked clean in January is a mess by October unless somebody owns it every week rather than catching up on it every quarter. That is a maintenance job, not a project, and it is the kind of work covered on the administrative support page.
Document chasing through to a filing deadline is the least glamorous part and the one clients notice most. A missing invoice or an unsigned engagement letter sitting in someone’s inbox for three weeks is not a skill problem, it is a persistence problem, and persistence is easier to buy as a role than to find room for in a partner’s diary. The same discipline applies to practice management hygiene generally — engagement letters filed against the right client, deadlines set against the right entity, nothing relying on someone’s memory of a conversation from March.
Support is arranged at fifteen, thirty or forty hours a week and starts from $10 an hour — see pricing for what each level covers. If the firm’s need runs closer to a practice manager’s job than to bookkeeping support specifically, operations support is worth reading alongside this page, and hire a virtual assistant covers the role from that angle.
Support levels
Fifteen, thirty or forty hours a week.
15 hrs / week
Nira Focus
Focused support. More time for what matters.
Founders and professionals who need consistent administrative support without a full-time commitment.
30 hrs / week
Nira Elevate
More support. More capacity to grow.
Growing businesses that need deeper support across administration, clients, systems and daily operations.
40 hrs / week
Nira Signature
Dedicated support. Seamlessly integrated.
Executives and established businesses requiring a dedicated professional who becomes an extension of the team.
From $10/hour. Accounting support is delivered at one of three levels, and a business can move between them as the work grows.
Questions
Before you enquire.
Can a virtual assistant prepare a bank reconciliation?
They can do the preparation — matching transactions, flagging what does not tie out, and getting the file to a state where a review takes minutes instead of an afternoon. The review and sign-off stay with a qualified person in your firm, every time, regardless of how routine the account looks. What moves is the mechanical matching and the querying of discrepancies; the judgement call on what a discrepancy actually means, and whether the accounts are right, never does.
Will they have access to client financial data?
Only what the role needs, and that is a decision you make on the first call rather than a default we arrive with. Access is scoped per client and per system rather than granted across the whole practice, confidentiality terms sit in the service agreement, and we will not push for wider access than the specific task in front of them requires — if a client's file is off-limits, it stays off-limits.
Is this useful outside of busy season?
More useful, usually, even though it is the opposite of when most firms think to ask. Onboarding packs, ledger hygiene and document chasing are exactly the work that gets deferred in a quiet month and then collides with everything else the moment a deadline approaches. Firms that hand this over year-round tend to arrive at busy season with a shorter backlog rather than a longer one, because nothing has been sitting untouched since spring.
We use a practice management tool most people have not heard of. Is that a problem?
Rarely. Karbon, TaxDome and the rest share more structure than their interfaces suggest, and someone who has run client records, engagement letters and deadlines in one platform learns another quickly. Where the tool is genuinely unfamiliar, the first couple of weeks are spent learning it against your actual process rather than treated as a separate, billable onboarding project.
Where this goes next
Related pages.
Get started
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A short call if you would rather talk it through, or a short form if you would rather write it down.