A good virtual assistant can take on more of your week than most founders expect. You've probably already seen the lists that prove it, covering everything from inbox triage to travel booking.

So what can't a virtual assistant do? At Time etc, five things generally sit outside what any of our assistants take on. Knowing what those are up front means everything else on your list is fair game, so it's worth running through them before you sign up.

Here are the five, with the reason behind each and who should be holding that work instead. In almost every case, the task has admin wrapped around it, and that admin is an assistant's job.

1. Bookkeeping and accounting

Your virtual assistant won't keep your books. That covers reconciling accounts, categorizing transactions in your ledger, closing your month, and preparing anything that goes to the IRS.

The main reason is insurance. A bookkeeper or accountant carries professional cover for this work, so if a number goes in wrong and it costs you, there's a route to putting it right. A virtual assistant doesn't carry that cover, which means the exposure would land back on you. Time etc keeps assistants out of that category for exactly that reason.

Who should own it: a qualified bookkeeper, an accountant, or a bookkeeping service. If your business is small enough that you're doing it yourself in a spreadsheet at 11 pm, a bookkeeper on a few hours a month is usually the cheapest problem you'll solve this year.

The financial admin your assistant can take on

• Creating and sending invoices from your templates.
• Chasing late payments on a follow-up schedule you set.
• Paying bills and scheduling supplier payments.
• Tracking expenses and keeping your expense tracker current.
• Organizing, labeling, and filing receipts.
• Pulling together the paperwork your accountant asks for before year-end.

This admin is often where most of the hours go. Plenty of founders pay a bookkeeper's hourly rate for the time it takes to hunt down missing receipts in an inbox and make sense of a shared drive full of unlabeled PDFs. Handing that part to an assistant makes your bookkeeper faster and cheaper, and takes the 11 pm spreadsheet session off you.

See: 5 Financial Admin Tasks To Delegate To A Virtual Assistant

2. Cold outreach and sales calls

Time etc assistants don't do cold calling, cold emailing or sales.

The main reason is targets. Sales work is measured against a number, and a number needs someone who owns it, gets compensated on it, and structures their whole week around it. That doesn't map onto a few hours of support a week. A founder who buys assistant hours hoping for new customers is measuring the service against something it was never built to deliver, and they'll likely be disappointed no matter how good the assistant is.

Who should own it: a salesperson, an SDR, or an agency. If you're too early for a hire, that person is you, and the honest question is what else you could hand over to make room for it.

This question comes up a lot from founders who are stretched and want revenue to start moving without adding a salary. It's a reasonable instinct. The trouble is that outsourced cold outreach with nobody accountable for the number tends to produce activity rather than customers, and you end up paying for both the hours and the silence.

What your assistant can do for your pipeline

• Prospect research and building targeted lead lists.
• Cleaning, deduping, and enriching lists you already have.
• Keeping CRM records current and logging activity after calls.
• Scheduling the follow-ups you've decided to make.
• Preparing outreach lists and loading sequences you've written.
• Booking and confirming meetings once someone has said yes.

Look at that list against your own week and the split usually becomes obvious. The calls take an hour. Everything around them can take up most of the day. An assistant clearing the second part is what gets you back on the phone more often.

3. Live call answering and screening

Your virtual assistant can't be the person who picks up whenever your phone rings.

This comes down to the shape of fractional support. Nobody working a few hours a week can be sitting on the line across a full working day, waiting for a call that may or may not come. That same structure is what lets you scale support up in a busy month and shrink it in a quiet one, so it's a feature you're benefiting from elsewhere.

Who should own it: an answering service or a virtual receptionist if your volume is steady, or an in-house hire once the phone justifies a full-time salary.

The phone work your assistant can take off you

• Returning calls from a list you've flagged.
• Checking your voicemail and triaging what needs you.
• Outbound calls to suppliers, utilities, and providers, including the ones that mean 40 minutes on hold.
• Scheduling and confirming appointments by phone.
• Chasing an order, a delivery, or a refund until it's resolved.
• Calling ahead to confirm details before meetings and travel.

Most founders who ask about phone cover assume the problem is incoming calls. Usually it's the other way round. It's rare to lose a whole afternoon to a customer ringing in. But just think, how many times have you lost it sitting on hold to a supplier, waiting for someone to pick up so you can ask one question?

4. Building your strategy

Strategy of any kind sits outside what your assistant will take on. Marketing and social are the ones founders ask about most, but the same goes for pricing, positioning, your hiring plan, and where you're taking the business next.

This is because strategy runs on a depth of business knowledge that someone working a few hours a week won't have. Which clients you want more of and which ones you'd like to lose. What your margin looks like across your product lines. What you tried in 2023 that flopped and why. Where you want the business to be in three years. Nobody knows your business the way you do, and a part-time assistant is unlikely to get close, no matter how good they are.

Who should own it: you, an in-house team member who knows the business, or a specialist you brief properly and pay for the thinking.

While we can't build any strategies for you, we can help you execute them.

What your assistant can do once the strategy exists

• Executing an agreed plan against a clear brief.
• Working to templates and formats you've approved.
• Scheduling and publishing across your channels.
• Repurposing one piece of content into several formats.
• Keeping the content calendar full and ahead of schedule.
• Reporting on what ran, what landed, and what didn't.

Planning your strategy might take you a good day or two. Executing it might take a day or two each week, every week, forever. Almost every founder who tells us they've stalled already has an idea of what they would do differently. The gap is that nobody is doing the weekly work of putting it out into the world and making it happen.

See: How A Virtual Assistant Can Help With Your Marketing

5. Personal errands that need someone in the room

Anything requiring physical presence is out. Collecting dry cleaning, waiting in for a delivery, doing the weekly shop, letting the plumber in, dropping a package at the post office.

Your assistant works remotely, so the limit here is geography.

Who should own it: a local errand service, a task app, or an in-house team member.

The life admin your assistant can do

• Researching options and booking appointments, from the dentist to the car service.
• Placing the grocery order and setting up recurring household orders.
• Arranging couriers, returns and collections.
• Sourcing, buying and arranging delivery of gifts.
• Chasing refunds, warranty claims and insurance queries.
• Handling calls to providers, including cancellations and renewals.

Notice what those have in common. None of them require you personally. They're the phone calls, the comparisons, the forms and the follow-ups that gather around an errand, and they can take up just as much time, if not more.

What's left is usually just the moment of turning up: the appointment itself, the signature at the door. Your assistant can't do that bit for you, but they can clear everything else out of the way so it's the only thing on your plate.

See: 20 Personal Tasks To Offload To A Virtual Assistant

How to tell what belongs with your virtual assistant

You don't need to memorize a list of exclusions. Take your to-do list and run each item through five questions:

• Does it need a license, or insurance if it goes wrong? Books, tax, legal advice, anything regulated.
• Is it measured against a target? Sales, quota-carrying work, anything where success is a number someone owns.
• Does it need someone available the second it happens? Live phones, live chat, on-call cover.
• Does it need to know your business as well as you do? Strategy, pricing decisions, positioning, hiring calls.
• Does it need a person physically present? Deliveries, collections, anything with an address attached.

If a task clears all five, a virtual assistant can take it. Most of what's on your list will clear all five, which is what many founders underestimate.

When something fails a test, check whether the whole task fails it or only one step. Bookkeeping fails on insurance, but invoicing doesn't. Sales fails on targets, but lead research doesn't. The errand fails on presence, but the booking behind it doesn't. Splitting a task at the point where it fails is how most founders end up offloading far more than they expected to.

What’s the bottom line?

Can a virtual assistant do bookkeeping? No. Bookkeeping and accounting need someone qualified and insured for that work, so a Time etc assistant won't take it on. They can handle the financial admin around it: invoicing, chasing payments, paying bills, expense tracking, and receipt organization.

Can a virtual assistant make cold calls for me? No. Time etc assistants don't do cold calling, cold emailing or sales, because quota-carrying work needs someone who owns the number. You can delegate everything around outreach, including prospect research, list building, CRM upkeep, and scheduling the follow-ups you've decided on.

Can a virtual assistant answer my phone? Not as a live answering service. Someone working a few hours a week can't be on the line all day. For inbound calls, you want an answering service or a virtual receptionist. Your assistant can return calls, clear voicemail, make outbound calls to suppliers, and book and confirm appointments.

Can a virtual assistant create my marketing strategy? No, and we'd recommend against it even where someone offers. Strategy depends on knowing your business, your margins, and your customers as well as you do. Once you've set the direction, an assistant can execute it: scheduling, publishing, repurposing, keeping the calendar full, and reporting on results.

Can a virtual assistant run errands? Not physical ones. Your assistant works remotely, so anything needing a person in the room needs someone local. They can take on the admin wrapped around errands, which is usually the slower half: research, bookings, orders, couriers, gift buying and chasing refunds.

What should I delegate to a virtual assistant first? Start with whatever is recurring, rules-based, and eating hours that are better spent elsewhere. Inbox triage, schedule management, invoicing, and expenses are the usual first four, because they repeat regularly and the instructions only need to be written once.

Ready to hand over the tasks that do fit?

That's where we come in.

At Time etc, we've helped more than 22,000 founders create space in their week by matching them with experienced assistants who take recurring work off their plate for good.

Take five minutes and run your own to-do list through the five questions above, then check what's left against the full list of tasks you can offload.

Here's why founders choose us:

• Get started fast: have a dedicated, professional assistant ready to go in 1-2 days.
• Skip the hassles of hiring: we handle the sourcing, screening, onboarding, and day-to-day HR admin behind the scenes.
• One plan, multiple skill sets: as your needs change, you get access to assistants with different strengths at no extra cost.
• Total flexibility: scale your support up or down as you need it, with no long-term commitments.
• Peace of mind: your success is our success, so every plan comes with our lifetime happiness guarantee.

Ready to see for yourself?

Speak to our expert team and tell us what you need, and we'll handle the rest.

P.S. Want $150 off your first month of virtual assistant support? Answer a few quick questions in our Task Ideas Wizard, and we'll give you a welcome discount.

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