PEXA Virtual Assistant: a VA who builds the workspace so settlement day is boring

Nobody searches “pexa virtual assistant” for fun. You search it because every settlement runs through a PEXA workspace, and the person building each one, creating it, inviting the banks, loading the Transfer, lining up the funds, chasing the other side to match the date, is you, after the contracts are signed and the office is dark. It is hours of platform admin a day that does not need a practising certificate, only a person who knows the platform.

One disambiguation first, because the search is messy. This page is about a human VA working inside your PEXA. It is not PEXA’s own product, not their Settlement Adjustment or Key automations, and not a job at PEXA the company. If you run a conveyancing practice or a property law file load and you want the workspace built for you so settlement day is uneventful, you are in the right place.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your PEXA

Early in the file, before settlement is anywhere near: the workspace gets created. The VA opens it against the correct land title reference, sets your role as incoming or discharging, and invites the other representative plus the incoming and discharging mortgagees. The single biggest cause of a deferral is a workspace where one party still has not joined the morning of settlement. Building it days out, with everyone invited, is how you stop that happening to you.

Then the documents. Depending on the matter the VA loads and prepares the Transfer, the Discharge of Mortgage, a new Mortgage, a Caveat or a Withdrawal of Caveat, pulling the title and party details so the document is clean and consistent before you review it. The VA assembles the instrument; the certification and the signing are yours, because only a certifier can make those representations. The point is that you open a tidy, populated document for review instead of building it from scratch at 8pm.

The funds line is where a good PEXA VA earns the rate. The financial settlement schedule has to balance, and the inputs come from all over: the source funds, the payout figure from the discharging bank, the rates and water adjustments off the adjustment sheet, agent commission, and the surplus owed to your client. The VA pre-fills every line from the matter so the schedule is built and reconciled to a draft, and then you, the practitioner, check each figure and own the balance. The VA does the assembly that takes an hour; you do the verification that takes ten minutes.

Dates are the other relentless job. The VA proposes the settlement date and time in the workspace and then chases it: the other representative, the incoming bank, the discharging bank, all matched to the same time so the workspace is not sitting on conflicting entries the day before. When a date moves, and it always moves, the VA reproposes and re-chases rather than leaving it to surface at settlement. This is the coordination work that quietly decides whether settlements run on time.

In the days before settlement the VA works the workspace through to Ready, clearing the document and funds prompts PEXA flags, confirming the trust account and PEXA Source Account details are loaded correctly, and surfacing anything that will not resolve to you with a couple of days of runway. PEXA tells you when a workspace is not ready, but it does not chase the human who needs to fix it, and that chasing is the job. If the discharging bank has not loaded its payout figure, someone has to ring them. If the other representative has not signed their side, someone has to follow up. That someone has been you; now it is your VA, escalating to you only the things that actually need a practitioner.

After a successful settlement they confirm lodgement went through to the land registry, save the settlement statement and confirmation back to the matter file, and fire off the client and agent notifications so the file closes cleanly instead of staying open in your head. Settlement is not the end of the admin, it is the start of a short tail of it, and that tail is where files quietly stay open for a fortnight because everyone moved on to the next one. A VA closes the loop the same afternoon. The whole conveyancing workflow, contract to lodgement, is on the conveyancers page.

A useful way to picture it: by the time a file reaches the day before settlement, the VA has already done the hours of clicking, inviting, loading and reconciling that the platform demands, and what is left for you is the handful of judgement calls and the signature. The workspace should be boring by then. Boring is the goal. A PEXA workspace that surprises you at 10am on settlement day is a workspace nobody prepared, and preparation is precisely what a VA is for.

The honest bit

A few things PEXA will not do, no matter who you hire, so price them in.

PEXA will not let a non-signing user sign or authorise funds, and that is the point of the role, not a limitation to work around. The workspace can be one hundred per cent built and brought to Ready and it still cannot settle until the authorised Signer signs it. So a VA cannot make settlement happen on their own, by design, and that is exactly the protection you want.

PEXA is the exchange, not your accounting. The funds move through PEXA on settlement, but your office and trust ledgers live in your practice management system, LEAP, Actionstep, Smokeball or similar, and your business books in Xero or MYOB. If you want one person across the bookkeeping side as well as the workspace side, that is our bookkeeping tier at $25-35, not something to quietly load onto the admin VA.

PEXA needs its own named user for the VA under your Subscriber account, with the correct access level set by you. Do not hand over your own login to dodge that. PEXA attributes every action in the audit trail to the user who took it, and the first time anyone asks who loaded a document or changed a figure, a clean per-user trail is worth far more than the few minutes saved by sharing credentials. A shared login also makes it impossible to keep the VA off signing rights, which is the whole safeguard.

PEXA also does not fix a contract problem for you. If the adjustment figures are contested, if a special condition has not been met, if the title has an encumbrance nobody priced in, PEXA will happily let you build a workspace around the wrong assumptions, because the platform processes the settlement, it does not audit your matter. The VA can flag an obvious mismatch, a payout figure that looks off against the contract, a date that contradicts the special conditions, but resolving it is legal work and comes back to you.

And the platform does not verify identity, give advice or make the call on a contentious adjustment. It records and exchanges. The judgement stays human, and it stays yours. The same goes for state-specific quirks: duty handling, the exact land registry instruments and the verification steps differ between New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and the rest, and a VA who has worked your state’s settlements is worth holding out for. We will tell you honestly on the discovery call how close a match’s experience is to the states you settle in, rather than waving it through.

What stays with you

The signature, first and always. Signing a PEXA workspace and authorising the financial settlement require a Signer role with a valid digital signing certificate tied to you personally, and your VA is set up without it. They prepare the entire workspace; the irreversible act of signing and releasing funds is yours, enforced by the platform rather than promised by us.

Certification of the land registry documents stays with the certifier, because those are representations only a qualified person can make. Verification of identity and client authorisation are yours. So is the final balance on the financial settlement schedule: the VA builds it, you confirm every figure before you sign, the same way you would check a junior conveyancer’s draft. Anything that resembles legal advice, any contentious adjustment, and any decision about whether to proceed to settlement, stays with the practitioner. The full regulatory picture, supervision, trust handling and conveyancing duties, is on the law firms page and the conveyancers page.

The rule is simple and it is enforceable: the VA does everything up to the signature, and the signature is the line.

What it costs and where to start

PEXA workspace preparation, document loading, date coordination and post-settlement admin sit on the admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, typically 10-15 hours a week, roughly $500-1,100 a month. Heavier specialist conveyancing admin is $18-25, and full bookkeeping across your ledgers is $25-35 if you want it.

Placement takes 7-10 business days, with 5-7 days supervised inside your PEXA before any solo work, starting with workspace creation and document loading on live matters under your eye. The refundable $500 deposit credits to your first month, the first 30 days carry a recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and there is no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. VAs are Manila-based working Australian business hours, with credentials in 1Password and confidentiality signed before day one.

If you want the industry view, the conveyancers page walks the whole contract-to-lodgement workflow, the data entry task page covers the adjustment and document prep precisely, and the VA cost guide has the full pricing picture. Otherwise book a discovery call with Jenn, who has placed 87+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024 and takes every call herself. Bring a live file and a recent settlement that ran late. We will find the hours.