Virtual Assistants (VA's) are instrumental in organizing key components of a client's business.VA's are business owners that have knowledge of how to run their business thereby knowing what and how a business operates and grows.VA's have a true vested interest in the success of their clients businesses; VA's stand to gain in every success they achieve for the client's business.Working with a VA is a Win-Win situation for any business that teams up with a VA based on the saving of time and money to the business owner.VA's are professional office administrators; most VA's come from a background of working in the administrative field and has office skills that they apply to their own businesses. Most if not all of them have continued to build their knowledge and skills base by experience and training to keep them at the forefront of their own business as well as servicing clients via internet, telephone, fax and email.

Working with a VA for small businesses can be the answer to common business tasks such as bookkeeping, document preparation, basic data entry or complex spreadsheets, presentations. VA's can also play a more complex and/or active role by being the office organizer in creating a database for a businesses contacts for clients, vendors, keeping the business owner's schedule and covering their email and telephone messages to free up time for the business owner.

VA's work with cyber technology every day by providing their services over the internet, via telephone, fax and email (and instant messaging). They have secure work environments where a client's email can be sorted, responded to and forwarded; data can be shared with business owners in real time for progress reporting; client input on the project or brainstorming using a multitude of programs that are secure environments and easily accessed and navigate. This makes VA's available to work from distances that span the globe but are in real time.

Customer service and communication is essential to all businesses. There are countless surveys released yearly regarding customers that have to deal with telephone automation, while it's a service that business owners use, it's a system that most customers dread and some avoid. There is no better customer service than a human talking to the customer and being able to resolve an issue or address the customer immediately without going through a menu of automation only to get a recorded message. Automation via telephone and email is a great tool for the business owner, but it is not customer friendly. VA's can be the answer!

The cost of VA's fall in different ranges from $20 per hour to over $100 per hour depending on the VA's specialty and the complexity of the projects that the VA works on for the client. However, the business owner that is considering a VA only needs to remember the benefits and the reduction in the overall costs of the VA versus a brick and mortar office, office equipment, office supplies and employee costs such as government taxes, benefits for sick leave, vacation leave etc to realize the cost for a VA is minimal to the cost of a full time administrative assistant. The cost of a VA is only for the time that the VA is working for your business. That $20 per hour may only mean 5 hours a month to keep your business paperwork or customer follow up on task. A VA does not charge a business for full time work, unless the task calls for full time work. And VA's can concentrate solely on the client's task at hand giving it full attention, providing a time frame for completion, communicating with the client and providing a quality product that the client expects for his money. The client is not paying for vacation and sick time off, break times through out the day, workers compensation or risk of on the job injury, health and dental insurance premiums. The savings for small businesses to use VA's can be a considerable amount of money depending on how many hours and what type of work the business needs the VA to perform.

Larger businesses that have an office set up and employees to perform a multitude of tasks where the office has visitors that frequent the offices is quite different than the small business such as sales agents that work out of their home and travel in their vehicle to complete jobs rather than the customer coming to them.

Small businesses that have a schedule to maintain, customers to follow up with, potential customers to stay in contact with these types of businesses would benefit tremendously from the assistance of a VA.

As the saying goes in the business world, 'The bottom line is…' if you ask yourself how can I use a VA? The question of how you can save money is clear. The bottom line is the business saves money and time.