Who manages the offshore staff day to day is you, in almost every arrangement sold as managed. The provider runs payroll, the building and the HR file. You set the work, the hours, the priorities and the standard. 24x7 Direct publishes that split on its own site: dedicated team leaders look after HR and infrastructure, “but you train and manage them with regards to your functions.”
Outstaffer sells against providers who bundle that distinction away, so read on with our interest in plain sight, or go straight to how an employer of record carries the liability. It stopped being academic this quarter.
Grievances land where the direction happens
The Australian HR Institute released its Quarterly Australian Work Outlook for the September quarter on 29 September, built on 607 senior decision-makers surveyed in July. Thirty-two per cent of organisations reported a rise in internal grievances over the past twelve months, and 30 per cent a rise in formal complaints and claims. The Net Employment Intentions Index fell to +33, the lowest since the survey began, and 21 per cent of employers expect redundancies, up from 19 per cent.
A grievance follows the person who set the task and the deadline. Not whoever printed the payslip.
The Reserve Bank's Financial Stability Review, published 1 October, supplies the other half. Around 75 per cent of companies entering insolvency in 2024/25 had fewer than 20 full-time employees, and the Bank singles out smaller firms with “fewer cash buffers” as most exposed to cost pressure. That is the buyer a bundled hourly rate is built for.
What an hourly rate card hides about day to day management
24x7 Direct's homepage comparison is “$12 per hour” for its remote staff against “$30 per hour” for local staff. Virtual Coworker publishes a rate card in Australian dollars: $8 an hour for a virtual assistant, $11 for a bookkeeper, $12 for an accountant, under the heading “Inclusive Hourly Rate, No Extra Fees”, with staff working “20 to 40 hours dedicated per week”.
Take the forty-hour version. A bookkeeper at $11 an hour is $440 a week and $22,880 a year. The same seat at 24x7 Direct's $12 is $24,960 against the $62,400 their own page gives a local hire, a published gap of $37,440 a year.
Now find the management component inside any of those figures. You cannot, because none of them separates it.
Does the provider charge for management it does not perform?
MicroSourcing charges for it and says you keep the control. Its published answer is that the fixed monthly service fee “covers our top-notch facilities, support services, IT assistance staff management and client support”, while the client has “direct operational control”. Staff management is in the fee. Control is with you. The amount is published nowhere on the site.
Who manages the offshore staff day to day, in practice
You brief the work. You approve it or send it back. You decide what good looks like on a Tuesday afternoon when the brief was ambiguous. The provider handles the paperwork, the office and the IT, which is real work worth paying for, and which is also the control question that separates the two models.
What can a provider genuinely take off you?
The administration, and nothing above it. A team leader employed by someone else cannot hold a standard inside your business, and what holding that standard across a time zone takes does not delegate.
Related reading
The case for buying managed output
For a bounded, process-driven function with a documented script and a service level, buying managed output is right. An after-hours queue does not need your judgement, and a provider running it to an agreed standard earns the margin. The base rate of disaster is low. Thousands of these run for years and nobody ever files anything.
Decide which one you are actually buying
If you set the work, you are the manager, and the honest structure pays for employment infrastructure in a line you can read, not a management layer folded into an hourly rate you cannot audit. Outstaffer publishes a flat monthly fee per employee with no platform, onboarding or setup fees, which you can check against what you pay now.
So, the question worth arguing about. If your provider's own FAQ says you train and manage the staff, what is their management line paying for?
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