What Is A Virtual Assistant?
A virtual assistant (typically abbreviated to VA, also called a virtual office assistant) is a self-employed worker who provides professional administrative services to clients from a remote location, usually from a home office. Some virtual assistants also offer technical or creative support to their clients. Typical tasks they can perform include scheduling appointments, making phone calls, setting up travel arrangements, and managing email accounts. Virtual assistants commonly work for other small to medium-sized businesses, but they can also support busy executives.
To be an effective virtual assistant, one needs to have some basic and advanced skills to be able to cater to a wide variety of clients. In this day and age, a VA should have some basic computer skills and knowledge on using a word processor and other office software. They need to be motivated and disciplined as well. And lastly, a virtual assistant should have a love for continuous learning and the ability to grasp new ideas quickly.
Why Hire A Virtual Assistant?
The main objective of clients hiring a remote assistant is to cut overhead costs on their business operation. Virtual assistants are independent contractors rather than employees, and thus, clients are not responsible for any employee-related taxes, like insurance or benefits, except in the context that those indirect expenses are included in the VA’s professional fees. Clients don’t also have to get extra office space, software, or hardware equipment as this is already taken care of by the remote worker. Clients can expect to have 100% productivity output based on their agreement and can hire single or multiple virtual assistants from different VA firms to meet their exact needs.
Virtual assistants have expertise and specialization, just like any other trade professionals. In hiring a general, all-around virtual assistant, you can expect them to perform the following tasks easily and efficiently:
Prepare Reports
Virtual Assistants can create reports based on company data that will be given to them. They can create business presentations and make official company-wide correspondence as well. If you will provide them receipts from the company spending, they can prepare an expense report to track your company’s weekly or monthly expenditures.
Bookkeeping
Many virtual office assistants are ready, willing, and able to manage the bookkeeping tasks for you. They can ensure your bills are always paid on time. They can prepare balance sheets or Profits and Loss (P&L) accounts. They can also prepare invoices and write on general ledgers. A virtual worker who does bookkeeping is most often called an online bookkeeper or remote bookkeeper.
Personal Tasks
Most VA’s you can find offering their services online are focused on managing the tedious, repetitive tasks- and they are more than happy to do it for you for your personal life! Tasks like calling for a reservation on a restaurant or setting up a hotel accommodation, booking an airplane or scheduling a cab going to the airport, even reminding you to pick up your dry cleaning or attend to your furry pet’s veterinary appointment on time.
Simple Computer-Aided Tasks
Since most virtual assistants work in front of their computers, you can rely on them to do simple computer tasks. They can create a word or pdf document for you, enter your shoe list collection in an excel file, or create a PowerPoint presentation for your upcoming business pitch. They can also catalog your vacation photos, arrange your workout music playlist, or keep track of your shopping list and send it to your mobile phone.
Social Media Management
Other Virtual Office Assistants offer services like managing the social media channels of your business or your account. For an Instagram influencer or a YouTube star, VA’s can be proven to be very helpful in making sure posts are set on time or that the thumbnails are cropped properly. They can also make graphics and add descriptions to the post, schedule it for future publishing, answer chat queries and respond to comments.
Website Maintenance
Some Virtual Assistants are knowledgeable in web development and can maintain your website for you. Minor things like keeping the core system updated, changing the contact information or adding social media links, writing and publishing an article to your blog, even up to editing the design of your site. They can also set the renewals of your domain and hosting from your service provider if you will give them access to it.
Event Management
Your Virtual Office Assistant can also double as a Virtual Event Assistant. What they do is to set your events for you. Managing events, for those who are not aware, are not as easy as it sounds. It can be a physical event, or a virtual event (especially now in the time of post-pandemic). Contacting and setting up the venues, inviting and connecting the participants and interested parties, scheduling the suppliers- these are just some of the tasks they have to do to make sure your gathering will be a success.
Manage Calendar And Emails
For busy office executives and company CEOs, their day-to-day activities can easily be messed up with just one wrong integer. Also, going through their emails and answering each one of them can be very time-consuming for them. Enter your dependable VA’s to help manage their monthly calendars and sort their junk emails.
Recruit Staff
Did you know you can hire a virtual recruiter for your business? You can hire a virtual assistant to help you find more qualified freelancers or service providers to staff your virtual office. They can spread the word about your job openings, screen applicants, interview potential candidates, and close contracts. They can also act as an office manager or liaisons and delegate works accordingly.
That concludes our list of what VA’s can offer you. Of course, these are just some of the many, many things they can provide to their clients. They can do so much more for you or your business like cold-calling prospects, provide support to your customers, write sales copies, etc. To have a reliable virtual assistant to aid you on your daily tasks and make sure your business meet its goals, contact us here at Cube&Arrow Inc. so we can discuss with you our wide range of virtual assistant solutions.
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