They work an ordinary eight-hour day on your business, usually 7am to 4pm Manila time, which is 9am to 6pm in Brisbane all year and 7am to 4pm in Perth. The morning goes on clearing what came in after you logged off and asking you the questions that need answering while you are both awake. The middle of their day, when your office is at lunch, is the uninterrupted block where the volume gets done. The last hour is a short handover plus a list of the things only you can decide, and it reaches you late in your afternoon while you are still at your desk.
The question underneath this one is usually blunter: is there really a full day of work there, or am I paying someone to sit and wait for me. Fair enough. So here is an ordinary Tuesday, hour by hour, on the shift most Australian briefs settle on — 7am to 4pm in Manila — with your own clock running alongside it.
Manila sits two hours behind Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, three behind Sydney and Melbourne once the southern states put the clocks forward, and on exactly the same time as Perth. If you want the full offset table, the changeover dates and how to settle October before it arrives, that is covered separately. This page is about what fills the hours. The Australian times below are Brisbane times, because Brisbane never moves; add an hour for Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Hobart and Canberra between October and April.
7am in Manila, 9am on your side
There is no overnight pile to clear, because you were asleep too. What there is instead is the tail of your evening: the emails you fired off at half past seven, the customer who filled in the contact form at ten, the invoice that landed after you shut the laptop. The first half hour goes on sorting that — actioning whatever is routine, and putting the two or three things that genuinely need you into one place rather than six.
The other thing that happens in that half hour is that yesterday's list gets picked back up. Someone a month into the role does not wait to be told. They know that Tuesday is when the supplier statements come in, that Wednesday's report needs Tuesday's numbers, and that the recurring job nobody enjoys is theirs.
By 7.30 their time — 9.30 in Brisbane, 9am in Adelaide, 7.30 in Perth — the shape of the day is settled.
8am to 10am: the two hours that make the whole thing work
Ten until midday in Brisbane. This is the overlap doing its actual job. You are at your desk, they are at theirs, and a question costs one exchange instead of one day.
What gets asked in it is small and unglamorous. Is this the right cost code. This client's address has changed in two systems and matches in neither, so which one is right. The supplier has invoiced differently to the purchase order, do I query it or pay it. Someone settled into the role saves these up and asks them together rather than pinging you one at a time, because the answer window is generous.
It matters more than it sounds. A twenty-minute job that waits four hours for an answer stops being a twenty-minute job and becomes a two-day job with a handover in the middle. It is not the main reason offshore arrangements come apart — those causes are set out separately — but it is the one you design out before day one, by putting the shift where the questions can be answered.
10am to noon Manila, while your phone goes quiet
Midday to 2pm in Brisbane. Your office breaks for lunch, the phone stops, the questions stop with it, and that is the most productive stretch of the day at the Manila end.
This is where the volume lives. Invoices coded and pushed into the approval queue. A bank reconciliation taken from wherever you abandoned it to finished. Duplicate records cleaned out of the customer database. Product listings written and uploaded. Whatever the repetitive core of the role is, it gets done in a run of uninterrupted hours with nobody tapping on the glass.
Their own lunch sits at noon their time and runs a full hour, because Philippine law requires at least sixty minutes off for a meal. That is why a full-time day there spans nine hours at the desk for eight hours of work, and why 7am to 4pm is the sensible pairing rather than 7am to 3pm.
The afternoon, and the list that reaches you at 6pm
One until three in Manila is three until five for you. The morning's batch has thrown up exceptions and this is when they get chased: the supplier who has to be rung, the client who never replied, the invoices that will not match. It is also when whatever you asked for at ten actually turns up.
The last hour, three to four their time, is the one people skip and then miss. Part of it is a short written handover. The more valuable part is the exceptions list — the handful of items in a day that only you can decide. A refund outside policy. A discount someone has asked for. A supplier chasing payment early. Those do not belong in your afternoon one at a time; they belong in one list at the end of the day.
That list reaches Perth at 4pm, Brisbane at 6pm and Melbourne at 7pm in summer, while you are still at your desk. Ten minutes on it and tomorrow starts already sorted.
What dedicated means once you have watched the day
Every hour above belongs to one business. That is the difference between a dedicated full-time person and the two things most people weigh them against.
Shared or pooled help means whoever is free picks up your work. It is cheaper and it is genuinely fine for volume that does not need memory. But your urgent thing queues behind somebody else's urgent thing, and nobody learns that this particular customer always disputes the freight line.
Task-based help resets every time. You write the brief again, you check the work again, you pay for the doing and you keep the thinking, which is the expensive half. That comparison is set out in full elsewhere.
What a dedicated day buys is accumulation. In month one they ask you about the recurring exception. By month three they handle it and mention it in the note. That is not a service level anyone can write into a contract; it happens because the same person sat in the same systems for eight hours a day and noticed. From A$14 an hour plus GST for Australian clients and from US$9 for American ones, with no placement, setup or exit fees, you are buying the day rather than the deliverable, and the pricing page sets out how that works. Which is precisely why it only makes sense when there is a day's work to fill.
The part that catches people out: at first the day is not full
In week one there are not eight hours of work, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Week one is one task, done under correction, taking far longer than it will ever take again. The rest goes on reading your process notes, sitting in on calls, and rewriting your instructions into something that will still make sense in October.
The day fills as jobs get added, and the pace is set by you rather than by them. The businesses that reach a full day inside a month are the ones that decided before day one which three or four jobs were going across, and in what order. The ones still at half a day in month two usually never made that list. There is a framework for choosing what goes first and a week-by-week account of the first month, and between them they are more useful than the rest of this page.
If you reach the end of a month and honestly cannot fill the hours, that is information rather than failure. It usually means the role was scoped as a pile of chores instead of a function. Better to learn that in month one, on an initial three-month contract that then runs month to month with no exit penalty, than in year two.
How to check this against your own week
Write out your own working day in your own time — the real one, including when you answer email and when you stop. Take two hours off it if you are on the east coast, three in a southern summer, and nothing at all in Perth. Then look at which of the blocks above land somewhere useful to you, and which of your recurring jobs would fit into the quiet stretch in the middle of their day.
If you can see two or three things straight away and are unsure about the rest, that is normal and it is enough to start with. Book a discovery call and we will map a day against your clock, your city and the jobs you actually want off your desk. It is roughly a fortnight from that call to someone's first morning.
Who actually sits in that 7am to 4pm shift
The day above is not a template we hand out; it is roughly how a dedicated administration assistant's week runs once the role has settled. We hire that person in the Philippines on your behalf, brief them to your systems, and stay on the account afterwards.
- Clears the tail of your evening each morning — overnight enquiries, form fills, invoices — and puts the two or three items that genuinely need you into one place
- Uses the mid-morning overlap on your clock to ask questions in a batch rather than one at a time
- Runs the repetitive core of the role in the uninterrupted block while your office is at lunch: coding, reconciling, cleaning up duplicate records, listing products
- Chases the afternoon exceptions — the supplier who has to be rung, the client who never replied, the invoices that will not match
- Closes the day with a short handover and an exceptions list that reaches your desk while you are still working
- Every decision on the exceptions list: refunds outside policy, discounts, early payment, anything commercial
- Choosing which three or four jobs go across first, and in what order
- The correction in the first fortnight — a few minutes a day, and nobody else can teach your standard
- Any approval, authorisation or sign-off your licence, your bank or your regulator requires
Frequently asked questions
How many hours a day does a full-time Philippines-based team member actually work?
Can my offshore team member start earlier so they cover my 7am?
What if I don't have eight hours of work to give someone?
Can I share one full-time offshore team member with another business?
How do I know what they did all day without watching over them?
Do Philippine public holidays mean I lose working days?
- Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) — Philippine Standard Time — The Philippines is UTC+8 and does not observe daylight saving, so Manila's clock is fixed year-round.
- Australian Government — time zones and daylight saving by state and territory — Queensland and Western Australia do not observe daylight saving; New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory do.
- Philippine Labor Code — meal periods — A full-time Philippine working day includes a meal break of not less than sixty minutes, so a nine-hour shift is eight worked hours.
- Philippine national public holiday proclamations — Maundy Thursday and All Saints' Day are Philippine public holidays and are ordinary working days in Australia.
- StaffingSolutions.io — pricing, how it works and frequently asked questions — Rates, the absence of placement, setup and exit fees, the three-month then month-to-month term, forty-hour full-time engagements, included time tracking, and the roughly two-week lead time.
Alfie is a natural facilitator with a passion for building meaningful relationships. A true people person, he thrives on creating genuine connections and bringing people and businesses together, and he excels at fostering collaboration and teamwork. At StaffingSolutions.io he is usually the first person you speak to: he maps the role, writes the brief the recruiters work from, and stays on the account long after the placement.
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