Deconstructing Admin

You may have heard us say “we take on our clients admin”. But what does this actually mean?

Admin is such a broad, umbrella term for multiple tasks and each business will have a different variety of administrative tasks they complete, and no two businesses will be the same. It can be overwhelming if you’re searching for a Virtual Assistant but don’t know what ‘admin’ or ‘administrative duties’ actually covers.

So let’s break it down!

Inbox & Diary Management 

Inbox and diary management are often the first tasks that our clients come to us for, as it can just be so overwhelming; especially if you spend hours sorting out your inbox and diary, only for it to be full of unread emails and overlapping meetings when you open your laptop the next day. 

How we tackle these tasks will vary for each client, depending on what will help them the most. 

For some clients, we may be logging into their emails and checking for any urgent tasks for that day, creating a to-do list from the emails to make sure that nothing gets missed. For others, we may be responding to any emails that we can on their behalf, leaving them time to focus on client work. Some clients ask us to go through and delegate to the relevant team members, and some ask us to organise the opened emails into the correct folders, leaving only unread emails with labels on for what action is needed by the client. 

Some clients ask us to monitor their diary each day, to check for any upcoming meetings, anything that has been rescheduled and to book in calls with team members and other clients. Our VA’s can look at the agenda for each day and let our client know any tasks that need to be completed for each meeting, or attend any meetings to take minutes. Some of our VA’s organise our clients' diaries into segments - slots for sales calls, client calls, focus time, CEO time. Some clients like us to be very involved, and some just want us to find slots for new calls; our level of involvement really depends on what each client wants. 

Financial Organisation

Many of our clients are business owners or freelancers, in which case they will be collecting invoices for their book keepers or accountants for VAT. Whilst some clients take us on for book keeping as well, some just need us to help find the invoices and receipts to pass along to the book keeper, as time can quickly add up when you are looking for them. This can involve going through their inbox to find invoices and uploading them somewhere like Hubdoc or Apron, or they may give us their login details for their monthly subscriptions and we can go into each program and download the invoices. 

Some of our clients simply just need help organising their finances - creating spreadsheets to track the ins and outs of their bank account, organising the invoices into different folders in their storage such as OneDrive, Google Drive etc. Splitting the invoices into different folders based on which of their companies it is for, is it a personal purchase or a business expense? Sometimes an extra pair of eyes can make the task seem much less overwhelming. 

Onboarding Clients

For many of our clients, we take care of onboarding. This can entail a multitude of things including liaising with their potential clients to book initial meetings, sending them information and documents, updating their contact information onto the CRM, updating their status on the sales pipelines within the CRM, sending their contracts via docusign or similar apps and creating or arranging other onboarding documents, setting up a shared folder in the clients online drive e.g. onedrive or google drive. We can organise welcome gifts and set up automations for a birthday card to go out via moonpig in time for their birthday. 

Processing Student Rents and Property Management

Some of the people that we work with own student housing and need our support to track the rents, ensuring that each month has been paid fully by all of their tenants. We look at the bank statements, update the spreadsheets with each month paid, process any payments and chase any missing payments. We also arrange sending them their contracts and other important documents. We send and collect their keys ahead of move in and move out days. 

On the property management side we work on service charges, pay invoices, raise invoices where necessary, action reconciliations and work with suppliers and contractors on their behalf.

Travel Management

We support our clients with travel management, for some clients this is booking their travel and accommodation for conferences, business meetings and networking events. For other clients we may be booking them a holiday with their family, so that they can actually take a break instead of it just being an idea. We have discussions with our clients before booking anything to understand what they need, what type of accommodation they want to stay in and their budget, and for holidays we determine what activities they would like to take part in and we create them an itinerary for each day, including travel times and meal times. 

Automations

Automations are a huge time saver when it comes to working within different softwares and CRM’s and a great way to streamline processes within your business. This can be as simple as automating an email to go out when somebody signs up to something on your website, or setting automatic reminders to check back in with leads. We recently created an automation on PowerAutomate to update calendar call bookings within Outlook to automatically send out a Teams link to the other attendee, as until then our client had been manually sending them out. When you have multiple sales calls a day, this can become really time consuming! 

Event Management 

We love helping our clients plan events, whether these are virtual conferences or in person events! We can take on all of the admin for these events - creating the invitations, sending them out to guests, monitoring RSVP’s and requesting dietary requirements, liaising with the venue, caterers and entertainment. We create an event itinerary with the guest list, menu options, timeline and contact details for all vendors to ensure the event runs smoothly. We attend the event to ensure everything is set up correctly and to greet guests on arrival. For virtual events, we can create breakout rooms and assign guests to the correct rooms for networking slots and break times whilst monitoring the chats for questions etc. 

Creative Support

Whilst this may not technically be covered under ‘admin’, we do help our clients with creative tasks as well, such as podcast editing and promotion. Our clients simply have to record the episode and then we will go in and edit the transcript, the timeline and create social media clips for each episode. We will create shownotes, chapter headings and episode titles, and publish the episode on your chosen streaming sites. Many of our clients publish to Buzzsprout which is a podcast distribution system, where you can choose which streaming services to publish to, such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts etc. Many clients also publish to YouTube if they have recorded video for their episode. We have used a variety of podcast editing softwares, however most of our clients use Descript or Riverside. 

Ad Hoc Tasks

Now, let’s not forget that an important part of each business will be the random, ad hoc tasks that nobody thinks about when writing a process manual. These can pop up at different times and will vary from client to client. When we work with you, we take time to understand your business inside and out, so that we can answer any customer queries and keep the business ticking over when any issues arise. 

Whilst we have touched on a variety of topics here, the reality is that our main interest is to support you and take on any administrative tasks that will benefit your business, making your day to day life easier and ensuring that you can focus your time on client work and the work that you enjoy doing.