StrataMax Virtual Assistant: back office for a portfolio that keeps growing

Nobody searches “stratamax virtual assistant” from a quiet desk. You search it in October, with three AGM packs due this week, a levy run mid-flight, forty unread owner emails, and a contractor who has been sitting on a quote for a fortnight. StrataMax holds the whole portfolio, but somebody still has to work it, and right now that somebody is the same person who is supposed to be managing the buildings. The industry answer has always been “hire an assistant strata manager”, except the market for them is brutal, they cost real money, and half of what fills a portfolio manager’s day does not need a licence. It needs someone reliable, inside your StrataMax, working AU business hours, doing the runs.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your StrataMax

Morning starts in the inbox, because strata always starts in the inbox. Owner emails get triaged: change-of-ownership notices actioned in the Roll the day they arrive, address and managing-agent updates entered, portal login questions answered, maintenance reports converted straight into TaskMax work orders. Anything with a legislative edge, a dispute, or a committee member in CC gets escalated to you with the thread and the relevant DocMax file attached, so you open it with context instead of archaeology.

Then money in. StrataPay does most of the receipting automatically, but every portfolio has the exceptions: a payment with no reference, an owner who paid the old levy amount, a double payment that needs allocating. Your VA works those daily so the ledgers stay true, which matters more than it sounds, because the arrears list is only as honest as the receipting behind it.

Arrears gets a proper weekly pass, not a guilty monthly one. The VA runs the Aged Balance List building by building, issues arrears notices at the escalation steps you have configured for each scheme, logs promised payment plans and checks they were actually kept, and flags anything drifting toward the debt-recovery threshold before it becomes a committee agenda item. You see a short exception list, not a spreadsheet of shame.

Money out runs through Invoice Hub. Creditor invoices are entered and coded to the right building and account, matched against the TaskMax work order and the approved quote, and queued for you to authorise. Duplicates get caught at entry, missing work orders get queried with the contractor, and your approval screen becomes a five-minute daily task instead of a Friday dread.

TaskMax is where a VA earns their keep twice over, because the software raises work orders but does not chase them. Your VA does: quote requested and not returned within your window, follow-up sent; job marked done with no invoice received, contractor prompted; job invoiced but the owner who reported the leak never told it was fixed, closure email sent. Every open work order across the portfolio gets touched on a cycle, so nothing dies quietly in the list.

And underneath all of it, DocMax stays orderly. Certificates of currency, signed minutes, contracts, correspondence, all filed against the right building with consistent naming, so the day someone requests an information certificate or a records inspection, the file is already where it should be, not scattered across three inboxes and a manager’s desktop.

There is a quarterly rhythm on top of the daily one. Levy notice runs are prepared and distributed on schedule for every scheme, which sounds simple until you are doing it across twenty buildings with different due dates, discount periods and special levies in flight. The VA builds the run, checks the Roll is current before anything prints, distributes through your normal channels, and then watches the receipting exceptions that always follow in the fortnight after. Insurance renewals get the same treatment: renewal dates diarised across the whole portfolio, valuations flagged when they are older than the committee would like, broker quotes chased so the renewal decision reaches the committee with time to actually decide, and the new certificates filed in DocMax the day they arrive.

Meeting season without the all-nighters

AGM season is where portfolio managers go under, so it gets its own paragraph. Your VA assembles the packs: notice of meeting, agenda, financial statements, insurance summaries, quotes for the motions, proxy forms, all compiled, filed in DocMax and distributed on the statutory timeline you have set for each state. If you run electronic voting through VoteMax, the VA sets the meeting up and monitors returns. After the meeting, your handwritten or dictated notes come back as formatted draft minutes within 48 hours, ready for your review and signature, and the resolved actions get raised in TaskMax so decisions actually become work orders. You still chair the meeting and make every call in the room. You just stop spending your evenings collating PDFs.

The honest bit

StrataMax is a ledger and a filing system with excellent bones, and it will not chase anyone on your behalf. The Aged Balance List does not send its own arrears notices, TaskMax does not follow up a contractor who ignores a work order, and Invoice Hub does not approve a payment. Every one of those is a human loop, which is exactly why the software alone never fixed your workload.

Second honesty: the Roll is only as good as the discipline behind it. A change of ownership entered late means the next levy notice goes to the wrong person, and now you have an arrears problem that is actually a data problem. A VA fixes this through boring consistency, same-day entry of every roll change, not through any feature.

Third: strata is legislated state by state, and StrataMax will not decide your notice periods or escalation steps for you. NSW strata schemes, Queensland bodies corporate and Victorian owners corporations all run on different timelines. Your VA executes the per-scheme settings you have configured; they do not interpret an Act, and we would not want them to.

And the owner portal, useful as it is, deflects maybe half the correspondence. Owners still email, still ring, and still want a human answer about their levy. Budget for that reality, not the brochure.

One more, because it matters for training expectations: StrataMax is deep, modular software with its own vocabulary, and even an experienced admin needs time inside your specific configuration before they are useful. Your chart of accounts, your merge letter templates, your arrears steps, your DocMax filing conventions, none of that transfers from another agency’s setup. That is why the supervised fortnight exists, and why we start the VA on correspondence and TaskMax before they go anywhere near a levy run.

How the first fortnight runs

Placement takes 7-10 business days, and the first 5-7 working days are supervised inside your own StrataMax before any solo work. Week one is watching and doing under your eye: inbox triage against your escalation rules, roll changes entered and checked, TaskMax work orders raised from real owner reports, DocMax filing to your conventions. Week two adds the financial edges with you reviewing everything: receipting exceptions worked, the Aged Balance List run and the arrears pass drafted for your sign-off, creditor invoices entered in Invoice Hub and left in your approval queue. Nothing goes out under the VA’s hands alone until you have watched it done right at least twice, and the escalation rules get written down as they come up, so by day ten there is a living procedure document instead of tribal knowledge. If you want the longer view of how that ramp works, the onboarding guide walks through it week by week.

What stays with you

Strata management is licensed work in most of the country, and the line here is not negotiable. Every owners corporation and body corporate decision stays with the committee and with you. Trust account authorisations stay with you: the VA’s StrataMax login has no EFT release and no banking authority, so every payment they prepare sits in the queue until the licensed manager approves it. Section and information certificates go out under your sign-off. Levy amounts are set at general meetings, not at a keyboard in Manila. Insurance advice belongs to the broker, and anything that smells like legal or financial advice to an owner gets escalated to you under a written rule, not answered from a template. The VA runs the machinery of the portfolio; the judgement, the licence and the trust money stay exactly where the legislation puts them.

What it costs and where to start

StrataMax back-office work sits on the admin tier: $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, and most portfolio managers land at 10-15 hours a week, roughly $500-1,100 a month, which is a fraction of the assistant strata manager you have been trying to hire for six months. Placement takes 7-10 business days, with 5-7 days supervised inside your own StrataMax before any solo work, starting on the inbox and TaskMax before anything financial. 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.

For the wider industry picture, the strata managers page covers the role beyond the software, the accounts payable page goes deeper on the creditor-invoice workflow, and the VA cost guide has the full pricing breakdown. If AGM season is already circling, book a discovery call with Jenn and bring your building count.