How & Why to Hire a Virtual Data Entry Assistant

Let’s say you’re new to the process. It can a bit overwhelming at first. There are candidates to choose from, different skills to highlight, and you might not even know the best way to go about it.

For starters, be confident in the fact that hiring a virtual assistant is a good decision. There’s a reason that there are so many administrative assistants in the U.S.—some 3.7 million in 2018. People who run successful offices need to know that there’s someone there who can handle a wide variety of office administrative support tasks. Chief among these? Data entry. There are simply not enough hours in the day for someone who runs a business to handle every manual data entry task themselves. Especially as a business grows.

Delegation is your way out of this cycle.

After all, delegating via outsourcing has reached an industry worth billions upon billions of dollars. There are plenty of people who have tried delegating work and found that not only was it successful, but it became a vital part of their business moving forward.

Here are some essential steps you can tackle to onboard your virtual assistant:

• Create a plan first. Dwight Eisenhower once said that plans may be worthless, but the act of planning is essential. That’s a great summation of how business can work sometimes. Everything might not go according to plan, but the act of planning helps prepare you for the work ahead. Create an onboarding plan and detail the precise data entry tasks that you would like your expert to tackle. 
• Use your list of tasks to gauge which skills would suit your business. Once you reach the planning stage, you’re ready to look at your list of tasks and ask yourself one question: what skills match up with these tasks? For example, do you work primarily with Excel? Good. Then you know that you should use Excel as a guideline for the kinds of skills you should be looking for. The same is true for other types of software, such as customer relationship management platforms.
• Create a document of all relevant information a virtual assistant will need. For example, your document should include login information for your Expensify account, if you have one. Anything that your virtual assistant might need for data entry is relevant here. Make sure to use a password service like LastPass to ensure that you have everything you need to share encrypted passwords with people who are working remotely.

It seems simple, doesn’t it? You simply assign a task and let them go to work. But you’d be surprised. Not everyone is going to get it right the first time. 

You’ll want to avoid a learning curve as much as possible. If there’s a learning curve, then it can be easy to be frustrated as a business owner. You may believe that you’re throwing money down the drain, simply because a virtual assistant hasn’t picked up everything they need to know at first.

Here are some key ways to make sure that your delegation goes smoothly:

• Remember that delegation gives you a competitive advantage. Keep this in mind if you have frustrations. A study found that the majority of business owners believe that they can grow their business by more than 20% if they delegate 10% of their workload. So remember to believe in the process. See the end-game. How much more efficient will your business be once you have an efficient data entry specialist working with you?
• Work through the mistakes, but maintain high standards. You’re going to be tempted to bend your standards just to make the process easier. But make sure that you focus on a high standard of data entry results. You want to set clear expectations off the bat that your data entry has to be pristine and performed in a certain way.
• Allow a period of adjustment. Everyone has to adjust—even skilled, experienced data entry specialists. Allow a period for that adjustment, but don’t let that period become the new norm, either.