Darren Hosiosky
Most firms respond to lodgement pressure the same way. The backlog builds through the busy period, the admin team starts staying back, someone raises it at the partner meeting, and a new support role gets approved for the new year.
The role gets filled. The next busy period arrives. The backlog builds anyway.
Run the arithmetic first
Take a firm doing 400 lodgements in a season. At roughly 25 minutes of manual admin work per lodgement, that is:
10,000 minutes, or about 167 hours
Roughly 4.5 weeks of one full-time person, doing this and nothing else
Concentrated into the weeks where every other deadline also lands
Hiring one person absorbs that, on paper. In practice the new hire needs three months to learn your templates, your entity structures, and which clients need a phone call instead of an email. By the time they are useful, the season is over and the volume drops to a level the original team could already handle.
So the firm carries a permanent cost to solve a seasonal problem. Then next year the client book grows 15%, and the maths starts again.
The work itself is the problem
Look at what those 25 minutes are actually spent on. For one lodgement, the support team will:
Open the PDFs and find the right cover letter template
Retype client names, entity details, amounts, PRNs, and due dates, which runs about 15 minutes on its own
Merge everything into one binding
Upload to the signing platform, add the signatories, and send
Chase the signatures, one signatory at a time, for anywhere up to a fortnight
Chase the payment once the document is signed, or fix it when it lands against the wrong PRN
Handle the penalty notice weeks later, which means a call to the ATO and a reconciliation afterwards
Very little of that is judgement. It is retyping, uploading, and following up, spread across four tools that were never built to talk to each other. The admin team is the integration layer, and a second admin team member simply becomes a second integration layer.
That is why hiring gives a linear return. Twice the people, twice the throughput, twice the cost. The ratio stays exactly where it was.
Change the minutes instead
Admiin was built for the part of the process that starts after the accounting work is done.
Support drags the tax document into Admiin, imports it from XPM, or forwards it to a custom inbox. From there:
Admiin extracts the client details, entity details, amounts, PRNs, and due dates
It generates the cover letter in the right format, whether that is an ITR, BAS, PAYG, or a grouped lodgement with several signatories across entities
Signature placeholders and payment amounts are set automatically, with the correct PRN attached
The client gets an email and an SMS, and signs on their phone
Reminders escalate on their own, timed to the due date
The client can schedule the payment by card, bank transfer, or PayTo from inside the signing flow, up to two days before the ATO due date
Support watches the whole book on one dashboard, with lodgement, signature, payment, and KYC status in one view
The 25 minutes becomes about 4. Same team, same seats, same payroll.
What that looks like in a real firm
One firm tracked lodgement prep across a full month during beta. Prep dropped from roughly 25 minutes to roughly 4, with the same number of staff clearing far more volume. The admin team came off the back foot, and the partners saw the throughput they had been asking for.
Another firm was spending around $90,000 a year across e-signing, document management, and related tools. They replaced that stack with Admiin on the free tier, and the saving went straight to the bottom line.
Across the platform, more than 75% of documents come back executed within 48 hours, driven mostly by SMS. Around 50 firms are on Admiin, with zero churn to date.
The version of this that scales
The firms buying other practices feel this most sharply. Acquire a book of 300 clients and the compliance work scales predictably. The admin work scales worse, because it grows with the number of documents, signatories, and payment chases rather than with the fee base.
Two ways to absorb that:
Add admin headcount in step with every acquisition, and carry it through the quiet months
Cut the minutes per lodgement so the existing team handles the new book
The second one compounds. The first one just gets more expensive.
Lodgement volume will keep rising. The question worth asking at the next partner meeting is whether the firm needs more hands, or whether the work in front of those hands needs to shrink.
Chase less. Lodge faster. The core product is free. Sign up here or book a walkthrough with the team.
