A virtual assistant (VA) is a remote professional who takes on recurring, well-defined work so you can spend your hours on the decisions only you can make. The usual starting tasks are inbox and calendar management, data entry, research, customer support, social media scheduling, bookkeeping prep and basic store operations. The rest of this guide shows you how to pick the right ones, hand them off cleanly, and hire the person who will do them.
TL;DR
- Start with repeatable, documentable work: email sorting, scheduling, data entry, research and appointment confirmations.
- Use a simple filter: does it need your judgment, can you teach it in a short SOP, and does it recur?
- Keep pricing, strategy, payment authorization, tax filing and master passwords with you.
- Write the job description around two core duty areas, not a wish list of 40 tasks.
- Train with recorded walkthroughs, then widen the role in stages.
Table of Contents
- What virtual assistants actually do
- Tasks bloggers, affiliates and online sellers hand off first
- How to decide what to delegate
- What to keep for yourself
- Writing the job description
- Where to find and hire a virtual assistant
- Interview questions that reveal skill
- Training and handing off the work
- Our perspective
- Go deeper with our course
- FAQ
- Sources
What virtual assistants actually do
The specific duties vary with the client and the contract. According to Investopedia, some VAs handle clerical and bookkeeping work, while others post social media updates or write blog articles. A well-rounded one may also arrange travel and appointments, enter data and store files online.
It helps to think in families of work rather than a list of 100 tasks:
| Task family | Typical tasks | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Admin | Inbox triage, calendar, travel, expense tracking, file organization | Every founder |
| Customer support | Email, chat, ticket management, refunds, order tracking | Stores and service businesses |
| Sales and lead support | Lead list building, CRM updates, follow-up scheduling, demo booking | Freelancers, agencies |
| Marketing and content | Social scheduling, newsletter assembly, blog formatting, keyword research | Bloggers, affiliates |
| Finance prep | Invoicing, expense categorization, reconciliation prep | Anyone with messy books |
| E-commerce operations | Listings, orders, inventory, returns | Amazon and Shopify sellers |
The Wise guide to VA tasks groups the work into ten areas, including administrative tasks, customer service, social media, content creation, bookkeeping, marketing support, technical support, research, project management support and personal tasks. Other lists run to 122 or 221 items, but they are all variations on the same few families.
Tasks bloggers, affiliates and online sellers hand off first
We run an online business ourselves, so here is how the work tends to split for the readers we hear from most.
Bloggers and affiliate marketers
- Formatting posts, adding images and internal links
- Keyword and competitor research
- Scheduling social posts and assembling the weekly newsletter
- Checking affiliate links and updating outdated product mentions
- Sorting reader emails and flagging the ones that need you
The inbox deserves its own mention. If email eats your mornings, our guide on hiring an email management virtual assistant covers two affordable ways to outsource it, and our email productivity chapter helps you shrink the load before you hand it off.
Amazon and e-commerce sellers
Shopify describes the e-commerce VA as someone who takes on the daily running of a store: product listing creation and optimization, customer service, inventory management, marketing tasks, marketplace management and general admin. A typical set of eight core functions also includes returns and disputes, ad support and review management, as this breakdown of e-commerce VA work shows.
If you sell on Amazon, read our complete guide to hiring, training and retaining an Amazon product sourcing virtual assistant. It walks through the sourcing side in detail.
Freelancers and consultants
For service providers, the best early wins are scheduling, invoicing support, proposal formatting and follow-up reminders. They are small jobs, but they interrupt billable work all day long. Tools help here too: a good set of management tools for small businesses makes your handoffs easier because tasks, files and deadlines live in one place the VA can see.
How to decide what to delegate
Most owners get this wrong in one of two ways. As HireSava’s DhungJoo Kim observes, founders tend to hand off ambiguous work too early and keep repetitive work that causes constant context switching. The goal is to remove predictable operational noise from your attention, not to dump tasks.
The three-question filter
Ask these about any task, a filter Wishup recommends:
- Does it need your unique judgment, creative vision or key relationships?
- Can you teach it with a clear SOP in under 30 minutes?
- Does it recur at least weekly, or take more than an hour when it lands?
Three answers of no, yes, yes means delegate it now. A yes on the first question means it stays with you, or goes to the VA only with oversight later.
The four buckets
The same source suggests sorting a week’s tasks into four groups: delegate this week (routine, well defined), delegate with a training period (skilled but teachable), delegate gradually with oversight (needs judgment), and keep (strategy, hiring, your best client relationships, high-stakes decisions). It also notes that many owners find 50 to 70 percent of their week is plain delegation material.
Try this today: write down everything you did last week, mark each line with a bucket, and circle the three items in bucket one that cost you the most hours. Those are your first handoffs.
A phased rollout
Don’t hand over the whole list on day one. One phased sequence for e-commerce VAs starts with product listing updates in weeks 1 and 2, adds order processing in weeks 3 and 4, brings in customer email using approved templates in month 2, and moves to competitor research, pricing analysis and vendor communication from month 3. The same shape works for any business: start with output you can check at a glance, then move toward work that needs judgment.
What to keep for yourself
Delegation is not abdication. The rule of thumb for money and legal matters is that the VA does the entry and you keep the controls.
Keep these with you:
- Pricing and strategy. A VA can research what you sell, but you decide it. If you have delegated deciding where the business goes, you have not hired an assistant, as Repricer’s FBA delegation guide puts it.
- Payment authorization and financial decisions. A skilled bookkeeping VA can categorize transactions, send invoices and prepare reconciliations, but you should retain payment authorization, tax filing and master credentials.
- Account access. Give delegated, permission-limited logins with the minimum access the job needs. Never share your primary login.
- Legal and tax advice. A VA can organize your documents. Taxes and legal questions go to a licensed accountant or attorney.
A third category is work to automate rather than delegate. Repricing, reorder alerts, review requests and routine reports are better handled by software, while a VA is the right answer where work needs judgment, such as supplier communication, listing copy and awkward customer emails.
Writing the job description
A job description for a VA works best as a short brief, not a wish list. Here is the structure we recommend:
- Role summary. Two sentences: who you are, what the VA will help with, and the hours or time zone overlap you need.
- Two core duty areas. Pick one or two, such as inbox and calendar, or listings and customer support. Cherry Assistant’s founders make the point that no single VA does every duty area at once. Real engagements start with one or two, then expand.
- Five to seven specific responsibilities. Write them as outcomes with a measure: “Triage the inbox daily and flag anything needing a reply within four hours.”
- Tools. List only the tools you actually use: your email, calendar, project board, CRM, store platform.
- Skills and traits. Written English, reliability, attention to detail, comfort learning new software, and a habit of asking when unsure.
- Working terms. Paid hours or retainer, reporting rhythm, communication channel, and how you will review work in the first month.
A sample responsibilities block for a blogger:
- Format and schedule two posts per week in the CMS
- Research five keyword ideas weekly and add them to the content sheet
- Assemble the Friday newsletter from a template
- Sort the inbox daily and draft replies to common questions for your approval
Notice what the example leaves out: strategy, pricing and anything that moves money. Those stay yours.
Where to find and hire a virtual assistant
You have three broad routes: freelance marketplaces, agencies that supply managed VAs, and direct hiring through referrals or job posts. Marketplaces give you the most choice and the most screening work. Agencies cost more but handle replacement and management. Direct hires take longer and often last longest.
We lay out the options, with how to screen each, in our course lesson on where to find virtual assistants and in the chapter on hiring a virtual assistant. If you want to compare VAs against other ways to scale, our piece on subscription services you can use instead of hiring employees is worth a look.
Run a paid trial
Whatever route you choose, test with a small paid project that mirrors the real job: a week of inbox triage, a batch of ten listings, or a research sheet. You see how the person follows instructions, how they communicate and what quality looks like before you commit to a retainer.
Interview questions that reveal skill
Generic questions get rehearsed answers. Scenario questions about the actual work show how someone thinks. A few that work across roles:
- Walk me through how you would organize an inbox that has 3,000 unread messages.
- A client emails angry about a late order. What do you write?
- Tell me about a process you documented or improved.
- Which tools have you used for [your platform], and what did you use them for?
- If my instructions are unclear, what do you do before you start?
- How do you handle access to passwords and sensitive accounts?
For stores, one e-commerce staffing guide suggests asking how the candidate would optimize a poorly performing listing and how they keep inventory accurate across two sales channels. Ask for a specific example from past work each time, and listen for steps, tools and results, not just adjectives.
Check two references if you can. Ask what the VA did best and what you should set up so they can succeed.
Training and handing off the work
Good handoffs beat good hires. The cheapest training habit is recording yourself doing the task while you talk through it. We cover the method in our lesson on using Loom to train a VA.
A workable handoff checklist:
- Record a screen walkthrough of the task, start to finish.
- Turn it into a one-page SOP with steps, links and a “done looks like” example.
- Have the VA do the first three rounds while you review each one.
- Write down every correction you make and add it to the SOP.
- Move to a weekly spot check once errors drop.
Set one shared place for tasks, such as a project board, and one channel for questions. Ambiguity about where things live causes more friction than the tasks themselves.
Our perspective
We have hired, trained and sometimes lost virtual assistants while building our own online businesses, and the pattern is consistent. The people who get value from a VA are not the ones with the longest task list. They are the ones who document one task well, hand it off, check the result and then add the next.
Our advice is to treat your first VA like a process test. If you cannot explain a task in a short recording, you are not ready to delegate it, and that is useful information about your own business.
We also believe the real return comes from what you do with the hours. Every email-sorting hour you reclaim should go into the work that grows revenue: publishing, partnerships, product, sales. That is why we focus on practical, real-world walkthroughs rather than theory.
Nathaniel
Go deeper with our course
If you want the full process, including how to find, train and manage VAs the way we do, our Instant Course Access for Life is a one-off $97. You get lifetime access to our training, so you can come back as your business grows.
You can also start free with our practical productivity strategies chapter, or browse all of our courses.
FAQ
What tasks can a virtual assistant do?
They commonly handle email and calendar management, data entry, research, customer support, social media scheduling, bookkeeping prep, travel booking and document formatting. Which ones apply to you depends on the contract and the VA’s skills. Start with repeatable work you can document in a short SOP.
What should I not give a virtual assistant?
Keep pricing, strategy, payment authorization, tax filing and your master logins. Give a VA delegated, permission-limited access instead of your primary credentials. For tax or legal questions, see a licensed accountant or attorney.
How many tasks should I give a new VA?
Start with one or two duty areas and a handful of specific tasks. Add more in stages once the first ones run smoothly, for example weekly inbox and calendar work first, then customer email, then research.
What belongs in a VA job description?
Include a short role summary, one or two core duty areas, five to seven measurable responsibilities, the tools you use, the skills you need and the working terms. Keep it to a page so the right candidates can see themselves in it.
Sources
- Investopedia: Virtual Assistant explained
- Wise: Virtual Assistant Tasks
- Shopify: Ecommerce Virtual Assistant
- Catalyst Outsourcing: What an ecommerce VA does
- Relentify: How to Delegate Effectively as a Small Business Owner
- HireSava: Entrepreneur Delegation Operating System
- Dev Partners: Hire an Ecommerce Virtual Assistant
- Repricer: Amazon FBA Virtual Assistant
- Administrative Task: How to Delegate Bookkeeping to a Virtual Assistant
- Cherry Assistant: What Does a Virtual Assistant Do?