Virtual Assistants: Your Secret Weapon This Tax Season

Today's Topic: How to Delegate with Virtual Assistants (VAs)

Last week we talked about the difference of eliminating, automating, and delegating tasks.

If you've made the decision to delegate, one great option is virtual assistants (VAs). I work with my VAs daily. Without them, we couldn't have built CleanUpBuddy.

If you've never worked with a VA before, it can feel daunting, so here's a quick breakdown of my process.

Why use VAs?

1. Very affordable: VAs in countries like the Philippines are more affordable than US-based talent
2. They're humans. Humans can do things computers have trouble with.
3. Easy to get started. No setup. No new tool to learn. Just send an email and get the job done.
4. Flexible.

What can VAs do for me?

Use VAs for important work that you don't want to do yourself and can't automate with tech. See the last post here on deciding when to delegate vs automate.

The magic of VAs is the ease of getting started. With one email containing instructions, they can do all sorts of things to help you. No prompting. No setup. No major investments.

That makes VAs great for tasks that are less common, contain subtasks, or those that require human judgement.

For example:

• Following up with clients to make sure they have all docs in
• Renaming and organizing files
• Data entry
• Building automations for you in your existing tech stack
• Scheduling meetings
• Building lists of potential hires
• Buying conference tickets and organizing travel
• Web research
• Customer support
• Miscellaneous things like sending holiday cards to clients, planning an in person event, managing team retreats or HR things for internal staff, anything for your personal life from making dinner reservations to coordinating with your plumber or de-spamming your inbox

Honestly, the list is endless. You'll soon realize that with ChatGPT and a team of great VAs, you can take most of your work off your hands.

How do I find and manage VAs?

This is how I found my VA and how I manage them. There might be better ways but this has worked for me.

1. Find your VAs on Onlinejobs.ph - the leading marketplace for high quality, affordable Philippine VAs
   1. You can get great VAs for <$5 / hr
   2. You will need to get a subscription in order to hire. So, get a 1-month subscription and do all your hiring in that month, then cancel the subscription. You'll keep your hires.
   3. I use the time tracking feature to count hours worked. This doesn't require a paid subscription.
2. Give them work instructions via email, Slack or whatever your prefer
3. Pay them via the Wise app biweekly based on their hours worked

Over time, you'll build trust with your VAs. They will learn more about you and your practice.

It's best to hire a great VA and work with them for a long time, just like a regular hire.

Over time, you'll feel more comfortable handing over access control, passwords, and other sensitive info. This is the hardest step.

But remember, the more you hand over, the more they can help you. I have friends who have assistants that have everything: house keys, bank access, credit cards, sign ins, etc.

Tip: ask them to use tech & ChatGPT to reduce their billable hours.

Let me know how it goes - we'd love to share your learnings and success stories using VAs with the rest of the community!

P.S. this email series is by CleanUpBuddy.ai, which helps you turn a tangle of bank statements into a clean P&L in under a minute using AI.

It's great for those Schedule C clients without clean books. You know who I'm talking about. Feel free to check out our siteto see how we can help you reclaim hours of manual work this tax rush without outsourcing or hiring.

We also invite you to join our Discourse community for other bookkeepers & tax pros using CleanUpBuddy here. We'll add more content there as well as announce events, special promos, and more.

Thanks for tuning in, happy to help with any questions. Just drop a reply.

Touch base next week,

~Toni, CEO of CleanUpBuddy.ai