The Agreement You Forgot to Send: Why Migration Agents Keep Starting Work Without Signed Contracts

I was on the phone to an agent in Brisbane last year — let’s call her Sarah — when she told me about the worst week of her career. OMARA had selected her practice for a routine audit. She wasn’t worried. She kept good file notes, her client records were mostly up to date, and she’d been registered for nine years without a single complaint. She considered herself one of the diligent ones.

The auditor asked to see her service agreements for three recent matters. A subclass 482 employer-sponsored visa, a partner visa, and a skilled independent application. Sarah pulled up the files in Google Drive. The 482 had an agreement — signed, dated, filed properly. The partner visa had a draft agreement in Google Docs that had never been sent. The skilled independent had no agreement at all. Not a draft, not an unsigned copy, nothing. She had started substantive work on both matters weeks earlier.

Sarah told me she felt the blood drain from her face. She knew what this meant. Two active matters with no written service agreement in place before work commenced. Two breaches of the Code of Conduct. In one case, she’d already lodged a skills assessment application. In the other, she’d provided detailed advice on evidence requirements and drafted statutory declarations. All without the foundational document that authorises the engagement.

The next three days were a scramble. She called both clients and asked them to sign agreements backdated to the start of engagement. The auditor noted this. Retrospective agreements with inconsistent dates are a red flag, not a remedy. The outcome: conditions placed on her registration for twelve months, a requirement to submit quarterly compliance reports, and the professional embarrassment of having to disclose the conditions to prospective clients who checked her registration status on the OMARA register.

Sarah is not incompetent. She’s a good agent who genuinely cares about her clients. Her problem was not knowledge — she knew the Code required written agreements. Her problem was process. And it’s the same process problem I see in almost every small migration practice I’ve worked with.

The Gap Between Knowing and Doing

Every registered migration agent in Australia knows that a written service agreement is mandatory before commencing work. It is one of the first things you learn when you study for the Graduate Diploma in Australian Migration Law and Practice. The Code of Conduct spells it out with unmistakable clarity. The agreement must detail the services to be provided, the fees and charges, the basis for calculating those fees, payment terms, the client’s right to terminate, the agent’s obligation to return documents, and the complaints process.

And yet, starting work before the agreement is signed is one of the most common compliance breaches in the industry. Not because agents don’t know the rule. Because the process of creating, sending, and tracking service agreements is so friction-laden that it becomes the thing that gets pushed to tomorrow. And tomorrow becomes next week. And next week becomes “I’ll sort it out once the initial assessment is done.” And then OMARA calls.

Why the Current Process Fails

Let me walk you through what actually happens when a typical solo agent or small practice needs to generate a service agreement. I mapped this with Sarah’s practice, and I’ve seen the same pattern in dozens of others.

The agent finishes an initial consultation. The client wants to proceed with a subclass 186 employer-sponsored permanent residence visa. The agent needs to send a service agreement before doing anything substantive. Here’s what that looks like:

1. Open Google Docs and find the service agreement template (the agent uses Google Docs because Word formatting breaks across different systems and Google Docs preserves layout consistently)
2. Make a copy of the template for this client
3. Manually type in the client’s full legal name, date of birth, passport number, and contact details
4. Look up the visa subclass to determine which scope of services paragraph to use
5. Check the fee schedule spreadsheet for the correct fee for a 186 visa (is it the standard fee or the complex fee? Does the employer nomination component have a separate charge?)
6. Type the fee details into the agreement, including the instalment schedule
7. Update the payment terms section based on what was discussed in the consultation
8. Review the entire document for errors — a wrong fee, a misspelled name, a reference to the wrong visa subclass from the last agreement
9. Export as PDF from Google Docs
10. Open DocuSign, create a new envelope, upload the PDF
11. Place signature and date fields on the PDF
12. Add the client’s email address and send
13. Hope the client signs promptly, because work cannot commence until they do
14. If the client doesn’t sign within a few days, remember to follow up (there is no system for this — it relies on the agent’s memory or a sticky note)
15. When signed, download the completed document from DocuSign, rename the file, and upload it to the client’s folder in Google Drive
16. Update the Salesforce record to reflect that the agreement is executed

Sixteen steps. Touching five different applications. Taking anywhere from 25 to 45 minutes per agreement, assuming no errors and no interruptions. For an agent handling four or five new matters a week, that’s two to three hours every week just on generating service agreements — before you count the time spent chasing signatures and filing completed documents.

And here is the critical failure point: steps 1 through 12 happen after the consultation, when the agent is already thinking about the client’s case. The natural impulse is to start researching the visa requirements, checking eligibility criteria, maybe sending the client a preliminary document checklist. That’s the substantive work. That’s the work that cannot legally commence without the signed agreement. But it’s also the work that feels urgent and productive, whereas filling in a Google Docs template feels like admin.

So the agent starts the research. Tells themselves the agreement will go out this afternoon. This afternoon becomes tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning becomes “I’ll batch all my agreements on Friday.” Friday comes and two of them get done but the third doesn’t because the fee structure wasn’t clear and the agent needs to think about it. The following Monday, another new client arrives.

This is how Sarah ended up with three unsigned agreements. Not through negligence or indifference, but through a process that makes it easy to defer and hard to track.

The Compliance Architecture You Need

The fix is not about working faster. Sarah was already working fast — she was working sixty-hour weeks. The fix is removing the manual steps between “client agrees to engage” and “signed service agreement filed in the client record.”

Template Logic by Visa Subclass

Different visa subclasses require different service scopes and fee structures. A subclass 820/801 partner visa has a fundamentally different scope of work from a subclass 189 skilled independent visa. The partner visa involves relationship evidence gathering, sponsor statutory declarations, and potentially a two-stage process spanning years. The skilled visa involves skills assessments, points calculations, and EOI management. The fees are different, the payment schedules are different, and the scope inclusions and exclusions are different.

Most agents handle this by keeping multiple Google Docs templates — one per visa subclass or visa family. Sarah had fourteen templates. The problem is not the number of templates. The problem is that selecting the right one, populating it with client data, and ensuring the fee matches the current schedule is entirely manual.

In an automated workflow, the visa subclass recorded in the Salesforce opportunity determines which template is used. The client’s details — name, date of birth, contact information, passport details — are pulled directly from the Salesforce record. The fee is calculated based on the subclass and complexity tier (standard or complex, as determined during the initial consultation and recorded in Salesforce). The agent reviews the populated agreement for accuracy, not creating it from scratch.

The Signature Gate

This is the single most important architectural decision in the entire workflow: work cannot commence until the signed agreement is recorded in the system.

In Sarah’s practice, there was no gate. The agreement was a task on her to-do list, and beginning substantive work was a separate decision that didn’t depend on the agreement’s status. The two activities were decoupled, which meant one could proceed without the other.

In an automated workflow, the Salesforce opportunity stage controls this. When a new client reaches the “engagement” stage in Salesforce, the agreement is generated and sent automatically. But the opportunity cannot progress to “active matter” — the stage where substantive work begins — until DocuSign confirms the agreement has been signed. The system enforces the compliance requirement that the agent’s willpower could not.

This isn’t about trust. I trusted Sarah’s intentions completely. She never intended to breach the Code. But intentions don’t survive the pressure of a full caseload and anxious clients. A system-enforced gate does.

Variation Handling Under Section 44

Scope changes happen constantly in migration work. A client engages for a 482 temporary visa and then asks about the path to permanent residency through a 186 nomination. An employer-sponsored client needs a separate nomination application that wasn’t in the original scope. A partner visa client’s relationship breaks down and they need to explore alternative visa options.

Under Section 44 of the Code of Conduct, any material change to the scope or fees must be documented through a written variation. The client must agree to the variation before the additional work commences. In practice, most agents handle this with a quick email or verbal agreement and never produce a formal variation document. This is another audit finding waiting to happen.

An automated variation workflow mirrors the original agreement workflow. The agent records the scope change in Salesforce — new visa subclass, additional service, revised fee. The system generates a variation document referencing the original agreement, detailing the additional services and fees, and sends it through DocuSign. The variation is filed alongside the original agreement. The audit trail is complete.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let me describe a Monday morning in a practice with this system running.

The agent — let’s call her Priya — had three consultations last week. Each resulted in a new engagement. By Monday morning, without Priya touching a template, three service agreements are sitting in her DocuSign sent folder. Two were signed over the weekend — clients do this because DocuSign sends a clean, mobile-friendly signing experience and people sign things on their phones while watching television on Sunday night. The third was sent on Friday afternoon and hasn’t been signed yet.

Priya opens Salesforce. Two opportunities have automatically moved to “Active Matter” status. She can see the execution dates, the fee amounts, and the signed agreements are already filed in Google Drive. She begins working on both matters immediately, with full confidence that her compliance obligations are met.

The third opportunity is still at “Engagement” stage. Salesforce shows a note: “Agreement sent 2 days ago — awaiting signature.” Priya knows she cannot start substantive work on this matter yet. She can contact the client to discuss the process and answer questions — that’s not substantive work — but she won’t touch eligibility assessments, document preparation, or applications until the agreement is signed. If it’s still unsigned by Wednesday, the system will send a reminder automatically. If it’s still unsigned by the following Monday, Priya will get an alert flagging it as overdue.

No sticky notes. No “I’ll send the agreement this afternoon.” No retrospective signatures. No audit findings.

The Seven-Year Filing Problem

Service agreements must be retained for seven years after the last action on a client’s file. For a solo agent or small practice, that means hundreds of agreements accumulating over the life of the practice, all of which must be locatable and producible if OMARA requests them.

Agents who manage this manually — downloading from DocuSign, renaming files, uploading to Drive — inevitably end up with gaps. A document that was signed but never downloaded. A file that was saved to the agent’s desktop and never moved to the client folder. An agreement that’s in DocuSign’s archive but not in the practice’s filing system.

When every signed agreement is automatically filed in Google Drive with a consistent naming convention (Service Agreement - [Client Name] - [Visa Subclass] - [Date].pdf), accompanied by the DocuSign certificate of completion, and cross-referenced in Salesforce with the execution date, the seven-year retention requirement takes care of itself. There’s nothing to remember, nothing to file manually, and nothing to scramble for when the auditor calls.

The Variation Trap

I want to return to Section 44 because this is where even diligent agents consistently fall down. You’ve got a signed agreement for a 482 visa. Six months later, the client asks about transitioning to a 186 permanent visa. You discuss the options, the additional fees, the new scope of work. The client says “yes, let’s do it.” You begin working on the nomination and the permanent visa application.

Where is the written variation?

In most practices, it doesn’t exist. The agent recorded a file note about the conversation. Maybe they sent an email confirming the additional fees. But a formal variation to the original service agreement, signed by the client, documenting the new scope, the new fees, and the basis for those fees? Almost never produced.

This is a breach. Section 44 is clear: the variation must be in writing and the client must agree before the additional work commences. The same compliance gap that exists for original agreements exists for variations, amplified by the fact that variations feel less formal. The client is already engaged. You already have a relationship. The variation feels like a conversation, not a contract.

An automated system treats variations with the same rigour as original agreements. When the agent updates the Salesforce record to add a new visa subclass or service line, the system generates a variation document referencing the original agreement. The variation goes through DocuSign. The variation is filed alongside the original. The audit trail is complete.

Getting This Built

If you’re reading this and recognising your own practice, here’s the implementation path.

Week one: Standardise your fee schedule and scope definitions. List every visa subclass you regularly handle. For each one, define the standard scope of services (what’s included, what’s explicitly excluded), the fee (standard and complex tiers if applicable), and the payment terms. This is the strategic work that makes everything else possible. You cannot automate a process you haven’t defined.

Week two: Build your Google Docs templates. You likely already have templates — most agents do. The shift is from having templates with placeholder text that you manually replace each time, to having templates with clearly marked merge fields that map to your Salesforce data. Client name here. Visa subclass here. Fee amount here. Payment schedule here. Google Docs makes this straightforward — use placeholder syntax like {client_name} that your automation can find and replace programmatically.

Week three: Connect the workflow. This is where the automation lives. Salesforce opportunity stage triggers agreement generation. Agreement generation pulls data from the Salesforce record and populates the Google Docs template. The populated agreement is exported as PDF and sent through DocuSign. Signed agreement triggers filing and Salesforce update. The compliance gate — no progression to “Active Matter” without a signed agreement — is the architectural decision that prevents the breach.

Week four: Build the variation workflow. Mirror the original agreement workflow for scope changes. When a Salesforce opportunity is updated with a new service line or visa subclass, generate the variation, send for signature, file alongside the original.

Sarah’s practice runs this system now. She hasn’t had an unsigned agreement in fourteen months. When OMARA called for a follow-up review at the end of her conditions period, she produced every requested agreement within minutes, each one with a DocuSign certificate of completion showing the exact date and time it was signed. The conditions were lifted without further action.

The agreement you forgot to send is the one that can end your career. The system that sends it for you is the one that protects it.