Case management software for Australian migration agents

How does a visa matter run, and why doesn’t ImmiAccount fix the admin?

A visa matter is a long document project with legal deadlines attached: agree terms, gather evidence, lodge, answer requests, wait, and sometimes seek review. ImmiAccount is where the application lives once lodged, but everything that happens before lodgement, and most client communication after it, happens in the practice’s own systems.

A typical skilled or partner visa matter:

1. Initial consultation and assessment of options.
2. Service agreement signed, consumer guide given, fees and disbursements agreed.
3. Document collection, often across months and countries, with translations.
4. Application prepared, checked and lodged in ImmiAccount.
5. Requests for further information answered within the time stated.
6. Decision, then grant or, if refused, a review application to the Administrative Review Tribunal within a strict time limit.
7. File closed and kept for 7 years.

ImmiAccount handles step 4 and part of step 5. Home Affairs does not publish an API for agents that we could find, so data cannot flow in or out of it automatically. That makes the practice’s own case system, and how well it prepares work for ImmiAccount, the place where hours are won or lost.

Migration Manager, Officio or a general legal practice system?

A dedicated migration practice usually starts with Migration Manager, while law firms with a migration team often keep their existing practice management system. Migration Manager is built for Australian immigration operators, and its site quotes users including BDO’s migration lawyers. Smokeball lists immigration among its practice areas, with matter templates, workflows, automated forms and precedents, alongside trust accounting and time tracking. LEAP is another legal practice system used by Australian firms. Officio is also marketed to immigration practitioners.

What none of them can know is your practice’s way of running each subclass: the evidence you ask for, the order you ask in, the explanations you give clients, and the quality checks you apply before lodging. That knowledge is where most custom work starts.

How do you keep subclass checklists current?

Treat each visa subclass checklist as a versioned document owned by a named agent, reviewed whenever the law, policy or forms change, and linked to every matter that uses it. Checklists drift quietly. A matter opened six months ago may be running against an out of date list.

A checklist system worth building:

Feature	Why it matters
One master checklist per subclass and stream	Everyone works from the same list
Version history with a reason for each change	You can show what the client was asked for and why
Conditional items (married, de facto, children, prior visas, overseas study)	Clients only see what applies to them
Plain English explanations for each item, with examples	Fewer wrong uploads and fewer follow up emails
Alerts when a checklist changes while matters are open	Agents can tell affected clients

The agent decides what goes on the list. The software makes sure the latest version reaches every client and every matter.

What should document intake handle?

Good intake gets the right document, in a usable form, named and filed correctly, the first time, from clients who may be overseas and working in a second language.

A client portal for a migration practice should:

• Show each client their own checklist, with progress.
• Accept phone photos and PDFs, check readability and page count, and reject blank or cropped pages.
• Ask for certified copies and translations where the checklist requires them, and track them separately from the original.
• Flag expiry dates, such as passports, police certificates and English test results, against the expected lodgement date.
• Rename and order files to match how you upload them to ImmiAccount.
• Let family members share a file where the Code allows a single family file, or keep separate files when a client asks.

Identity documents are sensitive, so encryption, access logging and Australian hosting matter. Our guide to notifiable data breaches explains what happens if they leak.

Which deadlines can’t be missed?

Review application deadlines are the most unforgiving: the ART says time limits are strict, depend on the decision type and whether the person is in detention, and cannot be extended by the Tribunal. The ART replaced the Administrative Appeals Tribunal on 14 October 2024. The application fee for review of most migration decisions is $3,727, and for most protection decisions $1,863.50, at the time of writing.

Deadlines a tracker should hold for every matter:

Event	Where the date comes from	Who is alerted
Request for further information response	The Department’s request	Responsible agent, then principal if unacknowledged
Bridging visa conditions and expiry	Grant notice	Agent and client
Visa expiry for applicants onshore	Current visa grant	Agent and client
Review application deadline	Decision letter and notification date	Responsible agent immediately, escalation daily
Document expiry before lodgement	Uploaded documents	Client, then agent

Build the tracker so a deadline is entered once, from the source document, and so nobody can close an alert without recording what was done.

What does the Code of Conduct require of your systems?

The Code of Conduct in the Migration (Migration Agents Code of Conduct) Regulations 2021 sets duties for service agreements, fees, client money, client documents and record keeping that map directly onto software features. The surrounding registration rules moved into the Migration Agents Regulations 2026, which commenced on 1 April 2026 and replaced the 1998 regulations.

Code duty	Section	System feature
Written service agreement, signed by client and agent, with prescribed content, before assistance beyond the initial consultation	42, 43	Agreement templates with required fields, e-signature, block on work until signed
Written notice of variations	44	Variation workflow linked to the agreement
Give the consumer guide	38	Record that it was given, and when
Keep clients informed of progress	39	Client portal status and logged updates
Fees, disbursements, invoices, receipts, client money, refunds	46 to 52	Billing linked to the agreement, client money tracked separately
Keep documents securely and return them	53, 54	Access control, return evidence on the file
Contemporaneous written records of oral instructions and advice	55	Call and meeting notes captured against the matter
Maintain a client file and keep it for 7 years after the last action	56	Complete file structure and retention rules

Section 56 is specific about contents: the application, service agreements and variations, written communications with the client and with others about the client, records of oral communications, invoices and receipts, personal documents, and evidence that originals were returned. A system that files these automatically as work happens makes compliance a by product.

How should client money flow through the system?

Client money must sit in a separate account at a financial institution and leave it only for permitted purposes, and the system should make any other payment impossible. Section 50 of the Code limits payments out of the account to the agent’s fees, amounts owed to the Department or a review authority, disbursements under the agreement, refunds, and transfers to another registered agent at the client’s instruction. Fees for opening or running the account cannot come out of it, and the total paid out for a purpose must never exceed what was paid in for it.

Two related rules shape the billing flow. Section 51 bars taking money for assistance before a service agreement is in force, apart from an initial consultation fee. Section 52 requires every agreement to include a fair and reasonable refund policy. Under section 313 of the Migration Act, an agent is not entitled to be paid without giving a statement of services that itemises each service and its charge.

A billing module that ties each receipt and payment to a matter, a purpose and a signed agreement turns those rules into checks rather than reminders. It also lets the agent show OMARA, on request, that the account has been run correctly.

Where can AI help, with the agent still accountable?

AI is useful for checking document completeness, spotting inconsistencies and drafting plain language updates, while the registered agent remains responsible for every piece of advice and every application.

Sensible uses:

• Completeness checks. Compare uploads against the subclass checklist and flag what is missing, expired or unreadable.
• Consistency checks. Find different spellings of names, conflicting dates of birth or addresses across documents.
• Translation triage. Detect which documents are not in English and need certified translation.
• Client updates. Draft a plain English progress update, in the client’s language if needed, for the agent to approve.
• Meeting notes. Turn a recorded consultation into a draft written record for section 55, which the agent checks and signs off.

Each output is reviewed before it reaches a client or the Department. Our AI document processing service covers extraction and review design, and our Privacy Act and AI guide covers handling identity documents with AI.

What do typical builds cost?

These are indicative AUD market ranges, ex GST, not quotes. Expeed publishes $15,000 to $40,000 for simple internal tools and $40,000 to $150,000 for mid complexity systems such as client portals.

Build	Includes	Indicative range
Client document portal with subclass checklists	Versioned checklists, uploads, quality checks, family files, practice system sync	$25,000 to $60,000
Deadline and RFI tracker	Event capture from source documents, escalation, audit trail	$15,000 to $40,000
AI document completeness checker	Classification, expiry and consistency checks, agent review screen	$25,000 to $60,000

How AWLabs approaches migration practice builds

We start with a Development Consult to hear where matters slow down. If a build is worth doing, a paid Discovery Audit maps your subclasses, your current system and your Code of Conduct records, then you receive a fixed price Schedule of Work with three options: The Minimum, The Recommended and The Complete. Senior engineers lead every build, with updates every Tuesday and Friday, Sydney time.

AWLabs has not yet delivered a project for a migration practice, and we are not registered migration agents. This page is general information, not legal or immigration advice. If your practice sits inside a law firm, see also our page on AI for law firms and our wider AI and automation work.