CAS 360 Virtual Assistant: a VA who runs your annual review production line

Nobody outside an accounting firm has ever heard of CAS 360, so if you searched “cas 360 virtual assistant” you are almost certainly the person a few hundred annual reviews land on. The firm is registered agent for the lot, ASIC issues each company’s statement on its review date, and those dates are scattered across all twelve months. Which means the annual review is not a season. It is a production line that never stops, and right now it is being run by a senior accountant between BAS lodgements, or by you.

The work itself is genuinely delegable, and that is rare in an accounting firm. Generating a statement package, chasing a solvency signature, drafting a 484 from a client’s email, running an ASIC fee reminder: none of it needs a CA, none of it needs the agent’s judgement until the final review, and all of it punishes delay with statutory late fees. That combination, procedural work with hard deadlines and no professional judgement until the last step, is exactly what a trained VA inside your CAS 360 is for.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your CAS 360

Morning, first pass: the agent feed. CAS 360 pulls annual statements from ASIC automatically for every company under your registered agent number, so each morning there is a short list of companies whose review date just ticked over. For each one the VA checks the company’s data against the statement, generates the package (annual statement, solvency resolution or minutes, payment advice for the review fee), drops it into your Corporate Messenger cover template, and sends it for signing through FuseSign or DocuSign the same day. Same-day matters here. The directors have two months from the review date to pass the solvency resolution and the company has the same window to pay the review fee, so every day a package sits ungenerated is runway burned off the statutory clock.

Second pass: the signing dashboard. Digital signing is the best and worst thing about the modern annual review. Best, because the VA can see exactly which packages are signed, opened-but-ignored, or never opened. Worst, because visibility is not action, and a firm with 400 companies always has a tail of directors who treat a solvency minute the way they treat a dentist reminder. The VA works that tail on a cadence you approve: resend at day 10, an SMS nudge through Corporate Messenger at day 21, escalation to the partner at day 30 with the full history attached so the partner’s phone call takes ninety seconds instead of ten minutes of archaeology.

Third pass: ASIC money. The company debt screen shows every client carrying an unpaid ASIC amount, and this is invoice chasing with a legislated deadline. Pay the review fee late and ASIC adds a late fee; leave it more than a month and the late fee steps up to the second, much less pleasant tier. The VA runs a weekly reminder pass before fees go overdue and a firmer one before the second tier bites. Firms underestimate this job because each individual reminder is trivial. Across a full company book it is the difference between clients quietly paying ASIC on time and a steady drip of penalty notices that all become angry phone calls to you.

Then changes, as they arrive. A client emails that they have moved office, appointed a director, or transferred shares between spouses. The VA drafts the Form 484 in CAS 360 from the instruction, files the source email against the company so the paper trail exists, flags the 28-day lodgement window, and queues the form as ready for review. New client coming across from another accountant? The Form 362 gets prepared as part of onboarding, the signed authority chased back, and the company confirmed under your agent number so its next annual statement flows into your CAS 360 instead of the old firm’s.

Weekly, the data hygiene layer underneath all of it. CAS 360’s data comparison flags every company where its records disagree with ASIC’s, and each flag is a small investigation: is the register wrong, or is ASIC? The VA works the list, keeps the members and officers registers true, and keeps director contact details current, because a reminder sent to a dead inbox is not a reminder and a package generated off a stale register is a correction lodgement waiting to happen.

The honest bit

CAS 360 automates documents, not directors. The package that used to take twenty minutes now generates in about one, and BGL deserves the credit for that. But the software does not get a solvency minute signed. A director who ignores three FuseSign emails is a human problem, and the only fix is a human working the list, which is precisely the job description here. If you bought CAS 360 expecting the annual review to run itself and found the firm still drowning, this is why: the automation compressed the document work and left all the chasing.

Second: migrated data keeps its sins. If your company book came across from another register system, or from years of paper, the data comparison screen will light up, and CAS 360 flags mismatches without resolving them. Somebody works them one at a time. That somebody should cost $12-17 an hour, not a senior’s charge-out rate.

Third: CAS 360 does not make you anyone’s agent. Until the Form 362 is lodged, the new client’s statements keep flowing to their old accountant, and the number of “new” clients whose first annual review surprises everyone because the 362 never went in is higher than any firm admits.

Fourth: reminders reduce late fees, they do not abolish them. A client determined to ignore ASIC will still ignore ASIC. What the reminder run changes is the firm’s position, because when the penalty notice arrives there is a documented trail of every nudge, and the conversation is about the client’s inaction rather than the firm’s.

What stays with you

This is registered agent territory, so the line is not negotiable and CAS 360’s structure makes it easy to hold. Everything lodges with ASIC under the firm’s registered agent number, and the VA’s scoped login prepares documents without authorising anything. The VA takes each 484, each annual review package, each 362 to ready-for-review; an authorised person at the firm reviews and lodges. Your name is on the agent registration, so your eyes go on the lodgement.

Solvency is the sharpest edge. The resolution is a directors’ judgement about the company’s ability to pay its debts, and any advice around it is the accountant’s professional work. The VA chases the signature and never, in any wording, advises anyone to sign. Beyond that: corporate structure advice, the tax and duty consequences of share transfers, deregistration decisions, and anything that constitutes financial or legal advice stay with the firm. The escalation rule is written down during onboarding, and the test is simple: the moment a client’s reply shifts from “where do I sign” to “should we”, it comes to you.

What it costs and where to start

CAS 360 work sits on the admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST. Most placements run 10-15 hours a week, roughly $500-1,100 a month; a firm acting for several hundred companies will fill that on the annual review line alone, while smaller books usually bundle CAS 360 into a broader practice admin role so the hours are full. Placement takes 7-10 business days, with 5-7 days supervised inside your own CAS 360 before any solo work, starting with statement packages and signature chasing. A $500 refundable deposit credits to your first month, there is a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. We have made 87+ Australian placements since 2024, a good number of them into firms exactly like yours.

If you want the wider picture first, the accounting firms page covers what VAs do across a practice beyond the corporate register, and the VA cost guide has the full pricing breakdown. Otherwise book a discovery call with Jenn and bring your company count; sizing the hours takes about two minutes from there.