Frequently Asked Questions
(FAQs)
What does a Virtual Assistant do?
Well, there are endless ways this can be answered, but in short, a Virtual Assistant does the majority of things that a personal assistant or office administrator does without physically being in your office. Anything you can do online, your Virtual Assistant can help you with.
Advancing technology means that you don’t need to hire an administration professional to sit in your office. Below is a tiny list of tasks that VAs regularly carry out for clients:
- Schedule appointments/meetings
- Reply to your client’s enquiries via email
- Bookkeeping – send out invoices, pay bills, payroll preparation, petty cash reconciliation
- Data entry and database management
- Calendar management
- Travel planning with itineraries
- Internet Research
- Project Support / Project Management
- Specialist help with Bids/Proposals to make you stand out from the crowd
- Word Processing – business letters, technical manuals, reports, presentations, proofreading
- and much, much more!
We’ll be honest; sometimes we won’t be cost effective when it comes to answering phones for you – especially if you only get a couple of calls a day. However, there are many excellent VA businesses that specialize in taking phone calls. We would be happy to recommend one which we feel provides amazing customer service.
Our core hours are 9 am to 4 pm Monday – Thursday but we would be happy to discuss your needs.
We love living in this era of technology! There are so many tools available to us online to make working remotely easy for everyone. We love Dropbox for file sharing, we use Google Apps for our email, calendar and contacts, we use Zoom or Microsoft Teams for communicating and, of course, we use the industry standard Microsoft Office Suite – just to name a few. Obviously, you may recommend preferred technologies that you use in your business and we are more than happy to use these as well.
With the use of Dropbox you can share the files that you want to share with us, so that we work in real-time on the same documents. There is no need to send files via email and there will be no chance of duplicate documents. It works just like a normal server, just in the cloud. We also use Google Drive if that’s your preference. It’s up to you!
We would certainly be happy to sign a confidentiality agreement.
There are a number of ways to set up the technical side: by diverting your number through to us for instance, but we work that out after having a chat to you to find out what you need. And yes – we can do it from home and your clients won’t know the difference!
If you want us to manage your email inbox, it’s easy. We simply set up a copy of your email account on our desktop and manage it from there. Or, if you’re already in the cloud i.e. Gmail, we can simply log on intermittently throughout the day to check and respond to your e-mails and alert you to anything important.
A lot of our clients are already in the cloud and use services such as Google Apps or iCloud for their email, contacts and calendar. If you aren’t setup in the cloud and would like to be, we can offer this service to you. Or, we can recommend someone that can help.
Typically we invoice at the end of each month, however, some of our clients prefer a two week payment cycle. We will certainly agree terms before we commence work. If you purchase a pre-paid package we request that the money reaches our account before we begin.
We have a strict 7 day payment term.
- Electronic Bank Transfer
All the details you need will be on your invoice.
Taking on a Virtual Assistant is like inducting a new employee into your business, so you will need to spend some time at the beginning coaching your Virtual Assistant in how you like your work. This may be as simple as a document with instructions, an in-depth Teams or Zoom conversation, or a productive chat over coffee. Most clients find they spend around an hour or so on coaching, and then provide ongoing feedback.
Just ask! E-mail your question and contact details to info@abalonevirtualbusiness.solutions and we will be happy to answer it for you!
