Astalty Virtual Assistant: a VA who makes sure your coordination hours actually get claimed

Support coordination has a maths problem that nobody warns you about. You sell hours, the NDIA pays for hours, and the only hours that exist are the ones written down in a case note with a support item and a duration attached. Every phone call you took in the car, every email you answered between meetings, every crisis you smoothed over at 4:55 on a Friday: if it never became a case note in Astalty, it never happened, and it will never be paid. You search “astalty virtual assistant” because you are tired of spending your evenings reconstructing your own day, and tired of knowing that the reconstruction misses things.

Astalty was built for exactly this, an Australian CRM made for support coordinators, with case notes, claimable time, support items, service agreements, plan budgets and NDIA bulk payment requests all in one place. But a CRM only holds what someone puts in it. The VA is the someone.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Astalty

The work runs on three clocks: a daily one, a weekly one, and a monthly one.

Daily, the case-note sweep. This is the habit that changes the economics. Through the day you work the way you actually work: calls, emails, a voice note dictated in the car park after a home visit. Your VA turns all of it into the record. Each case note entered against the right participant, written up properly from your dictation or dot points, with the correct support item selected and the claimable time logged. The ten-minute call to a housing provider, the twenty minutes untangling a transport issue, the email thread with an OT: captured, same day, while it is still fresh enough to be accurate. Coordinators who do their own notes at 9pm routinely under-log, not from laziness but from memory; a VA whose job is the sweep does not round your day down.

Alongside the notes, the task list. Astalty’s tasks are where your promises to participants live, and a task list nobody maintains becomes a guilt list. Your VA creates tasks from what came out of the day’s notes and emails, sets due dates, closes what is done, and surfaces the overdue items to you each morning, so the follow-up a participant was promised on Tuesday does not resurface as a complaint in March.

Weekly, the forward-looking pass. Astalty raises alerts as plan end dates approach, and your VA works that list rather than letting the alerts pile up as unread notifications. Plans ending in the next eight to twelve weeks get flagged to you with the record already tidied: notes complete, agreement on file, budget position summarised, so review preparation starts from an organised file instead of an archaeology dig. The same pass covers budget burn. Astalty tracks each participant’s plan budget against time claimed, and the VA flags both directions of trouble: coordination hours burning faster than the plan will last, and funding sitting untouched that the participant is entitled to use. Either way you get numbers, not vibes.

Service agreements ride on the weekly rhythm too. New participant or new plan, the VA prepares the agreement in Astalty from your template, with the coordination hours, support items and dates entered against the plan, sends it for signing, and then does the unglamorous thing that actually gets agreements signed: chases. A weekly pass of everything sent-but-unsigned, followed up politely and persistently, because delivering coordination without a signed agreement is a risk you already know about and keep taking when you are busy.

Monthly, the claim run, which by now should be boring. Because the claims ledger has been kept current all month, preparing the NDIA bulk payment request in Astalty is assembly rather than forensics. Your VA builds the request, checks every claim line traces back to a case note with time and a support item behind it, flags anything that does not reconcile, and hands you a file you can read and recognise your own month in. You approve, and lodgement goes through your PRODA access. The NDIS and medical billing task page covers this claiming admin pattern in more depth.

The honest bit

A few things Astalty will not do, whoever you hire, and you should hear them before a discovery call rather than after.

Astalty does not know about work that was never entered. The claimable-time capture that makes the platform worth its subscription is a discipline, not a feature; the software gives you the fields, and someone still has to fill them within a day or two of the work happening or the detail is gone. That is the whole reason this placement exists, but it is worth being plain: buying Astalty did not fix the problem, and buying a VA only fixes it if the daily sweep actually runs. We build the sweep into the role from day one.

Astalty prepares your bulk payment request; it does not lodge it, and it does not decide it is correct. Submission to the NDIA happens through your PRODA access, which is a provider-controlled credential with its own security for good reason. The VA gets the file ready and reconciled; the send stays yours.

The budget picture is only as live as your own data. Astalty tracks budgets from what has been recorded and claimed inside your Astalty, and it does not pull live balances from the NDIA portal, so spending by other providers against the same plan will not show up on your screen. Your VA can keep your side of the ledger immaculate and flag when the portal should be checked, but the checking happens in the portal, under your login.

And the talent pool, honestly. Astalty is newer and Australia-specific, so a candidate with long Astalty experience is rarer than one with Cliniko or Xero hours. The claiming and case-note logic transfers cleanly from other NDIS systems, and Astalty’s screens are quick to learn, but we would rather tell you the ramp is real than pretend every VA arrives fluent.

What stays with you

Support coordination is regulated, funded work, and the boundary is not negotiable. Your VA does operational and administrative work only.

What stays with you: every support coordination decision and every piece of advice to a participant. Judgements about what is reasonable and necessary, what supports fit the plan, and how a participant’s funding should be used. The substance of case notes, because the VA formats and files the record of your thinking, and never invents it. The decision that a claim is correct and approved to lodge, and the PRODA credential it is lodged under. And anything that touches participant safety, risk or safeguarding escalates to you immediately under a written rule, not a judgement call the VA makes alone. The VA runs the engine; the coordinator remains the coordinator.

What it costs and where to start

Astalty admin sits on our admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, typically 10-15 hours a week, which lands most coordinators around $500-1,100 a month for the daily case-note sweep, claimable-time capture, service agreements, plan alerts and the month-end bulk payment request preparation. If the role grows into reporting or reactivation work, the specialist tier is $18-25, and bookkeeping proper is its own tier at $25-35.

Placement takes 7-10 business days, with 5-7 days supervised inside your Astalty before any solo work, starting with case notes and the task list, then adding claim preparation once the notes are consistently clean. There is 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 have made 87+ Australian placements since 2024, and the coordinators are consistently the ones who feel the change fastest, because the unlogged hours were coming straight out of their revenue.

For the wider sector view, the NDIS plan managers page goes deeper, the CRM hygiene task page covers the record-keeping pattern that keeps a system like Astalty trustworthy, and the VA cost guide has the full pricing picture. Otherwise book a discovery call with Jenn, who takes every one of them.