What is a Virtual Administrative Assistant?

Being overwhelmed caused by limited time becomes a serious problem. Especially in the business world, many people that are involved confessed that they often find themselves buried under pile up emails, messed up schedules, and such. This is where Virtual Administrative Assistant (VAA) comes in.

VAA helps them to stay focused being professional in handling their daily operations, without need to worry about administrative things. Also, the main point plus is they don’t have to spend too much money, comparable to hiring an on-site full-time employee.

VAA is recommended for start-up founders, freelancers, or even a corporate executive. VAA will help them to handle their struggles by constructing effective workflow and boost their working productivity.

But, what is the real definition of Virtual Administrative Assistant? What does VAA actually do? Let’s find out by scrolling through this article!

What is a Virtual Administrative Assistant?

Virtual Administrative Assistant is included in various types of Virtual Assistant. They assist businesses, entrepreneurs, and corporate executives. As they named it, VAA works from anywhere using digital tools to support their client needs.

Usually, Virtual Administrative Assistant (VAA) helps a lot in maintaining emails, managing schedules, organizing documents, and other administrative tasks. This kind of setup allows businesses to hire skilled professionals without overhead costs of full-time employment.

Hiring VAA remains more flexible than hiring on-site assistants. It is because the clients can decide to use VAA only if needed. They can work full-time, part time, hourly, or even on a project basis. That is the main reason why, economically wise, VAA is way more recommended.

Key Responsibilities of Virtual Administrative Assistant

Virtual Administrative Assistant responsible to make business run smoothly by their help. So, VAA could take a wide range of tasks. VAA exact duties usually depend on how their client requests. However, here are the most common responsibilities:

Email and Calendar Management

Email inboxes that contain too much spam might be overwhelming way too much. Sometimes, handling one email issue could take more than hours. This is the reason why VAA could help to manage this issue.

In this task, VAA could help by filtering email by its importance to ensure that important messages are not missed. VAA also needs to respond to any general inquiries, but it is only done if their clients allow it.

On calendar management, VAA can help by setting up reminders, scheduling meetings, and also managing time zones for smooth coordination.

Data Entry and Document Handling

Administrative works commonly based on a list of datas and archive of documents. This issue might make the workload become slower. So by the help of VAA, both data entry and document handling could be done way more faster and effectively.

Their duties in this section are around updating and managing data in spreadsheets. Then, they are also responsible for creating, organizing reports or presentations. The businesses can focus on the content of their works, but the finalization could be done by VAA.

Moreover, VAA is also responsible for managing document cloud storage systems, like Google Drive and Dropbox. Online document archives could help businesses to get easier access through the documents. Of course, this help could make the work done faster.

Customer Support

Many businesses rely on VAA in this section. It is essential to create a good impression and chemistry with customers, so that, to prevent miscommunication or other mistakes, VAA is needed here.

By this duty, VAA can help with answering calls or emails by clients or customers. This could reduce more pressure in business, because the more communication, the more smooth business processes go.

VAA also helps with scheduling appointments and following up with leads. Moreover, they also can handle basic troubleshooting or even forward direct inquiries to the right team members without bothering the businesses.

Social Media Assistance

Strong impression online is essential to be presented for modern business. VAA can help by scheduling posting in various social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and also LinkedIn.

Not only to post testimonials, current projects, and introducing their services, but also to post any articles that are up-to-date and related with the services that are provided by the companies.

VAA here also needs to be interactive by reply to comments and increase engagement with followers. They are also responsible for always monitoring analytic and reporting insight that are the impact of social media performances.

Bookkeeping and Expenses Tracking

Financial organization is the key to the success of a business. Financials also become the measurement of either profit or not of the related business. And gratefully, many VAAs provide basic bookkeeping services.

Their duties in this part mainly to manage invoices, payments, and billings for the customer. VAA usually needed to help make the recipients, make the payment information to the customers, and also check payments flow from the customer.

VAA is also responsible to track expenses and maintain financial records. However, since taking care of bookkeeping and expenses remains a high risk, VAA needs to have coordination with accountants or financial teams for accurate reporting.

Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Administrative Assistant

Hiring a VAA in your company indirectly offers numerous advantages for business. By handling various responsibilities, of course they can be reliable for companies to reach several benefits that could help to boost and enhance companies’ success.

From cost savings to flexibility, here are the explanation of each points:

Cost Savings

One of the biggest impacts by hiring a Virtual Administrative Assistant to your company is that it reduces unnecessary expenses. However, VAA also counted as a freelance job — so, it’s way more practical to be hired.

Unlike on-site assistants, hiring VAA doesn’t make companies have to provide office equipment since they work remotely. They don’t need to provide health insurance, paid leave, or even retirement plans.

Also comparable to on-site employees, VAA is only hired by need or request. So, the payment is only done one time, without paying monthly. Even so, depending on what was written on work contracts, the salary for VAA is way more cheaper than on-site assistants.

Increased Productivity

Again, comparable to on-site assistant, hiring Virtual Administrative Assistant is way more effective to increase productivity. Since their clients only need to share their job for VAA to work on, they can stay focused on doing their crucial work.

Administrative tasks, while essential, can take up valuable time that could be spent on higher-priority business activities. A VAA helps free up their clients’ schedule by handling tasks such as managing emails, handling files, and also coordinating meetings.

This is also beneficial for VAA, because the work that they do is not heavy. The pressure is not as big as on-site assistants had. Moreover, VAA are professionals, so their clients could rely on VAA because there are minimal probabilities of failure done by them.

Access to Specialized Skills

Virtual Administrative Assistant not only expertise beyond administrative support. Depending on their needs, there are many VAAs that also specialize in other skills. So that they can maximize their help for their clients.

Mostly, VAA also has these skills other than administrative skills. These skills are managing ocial media, bookkeeping and invoicing, social skills so they are professional to interact with customers.

Moreover, some VAA also specialized in writing — so they can post their articles to boost positive impressions of certain companies.

Enhance Your Company’s Productivity by Hiring a Virtual Administrative Assistant now!

Track the finances of your company, increase the positive impressions of your company, keep the customers loyal with your company, reduce unnecessary costs that your company must pay, and also keep your company productivity is essential to achieve.
So, what are you waiting for? Now, hire your VAA to get you out from struggles and overwhelmed! | AGL