Who Pays For What
Sep 28, 2020
When you’re a Virtual Assistant, depending on the type of work you do, you might need a lot of different software tools. The problem is that it’s not always clear whether you should pay for the tools or if it’s your client’s responsibility.
Today we talk about how to decide and what to do.
When figuring out which software you need to invest in and which software your client needs to invest in, ask yourself this simple question: If they stopped being my client, would I still need this?
In other words, is it software needed to run the client’s business, or my own? If it’s the former, they pay. If it’s the latter, I pay.
Here’s a list of things I pay for, as an example:
- Email (Gmail, Office 365, etc.)
- Calendar management (Acuity, Calendly, TimeTrade)
- Project management (Asana, Trello, Teamwork, etc.)
- Note taking (Evernote)
- Microsoft Office – Word, Excel, PowerPoint
- Email newsletter delivery software (MailChimp, Constant Contact) for MY email newsletter
- Social media scheduling for my social media posts
- Password management
Here’s a list of the kinds of things your clients usually pay for, for you to use on their behalf:
- Email accounts for you to use their company email address
- Social media scheduling software (unless you provide this as part of your services)
- Email newsletter delivery software for THEIR newsletter
- CRM software to manage their business
- Project management software if they want to assign you tasks via the software
- Calendar management software that’s connected to their calendar
I think you get the drift.
Sometimes, of course, clients don’t know what software they need. For example, if they’re asking you to help them with their email newsletter, you can ask which software they’re using and get their username and password.
If they don’t have the software yet, you can say “I recommend XYZ for this. You can either give me your credit card number and I’ll set up an account for you, or you can set it up and send me the login credentials.” Easy peasy.
If you’re not already a member of our Facebook Group, The Virtual Assistant Connection, and would like to join, here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/
