Dear Gritty VA:
I purchased some of your Virtual Assistant forms this week and Love Them. One question, in the price section of services and throughout some of the contracts it states this contract does not include bookeeping. Is it normal to charge more for the bookeeping service? –IK
There’s no “normal” way to do things. The great thing about being in business is that you get to decide whether or not you want to include something in your administrative support.
What I wanted to do by separating it out in the Virtual Assistant contract templates was bring it to the attention of Virtual Assistants that bookkeeping (among other things) is something that can be considered a separate category of support altogether.
You see, a lot of Virtual Assistants (I’m even going to say most Virtual Assistants) struggle to earn well. A lot of times, that’s because they don’t understand what they specialize in.
One of the problems with that is they then lump everything in together with their Virtual Assistance (administrative) support. By not differentiating that administrative support is a skill and value that is separate from other categories of business, they deprive themselves of the opportunity to create another stream of income in their business.
So you can decide whether or not you want to provide bookkeeping in with your administrative support. Maybe you decide that bookkeeping is a category of training and knowledge (and value) that is completely separate from administrative support and therefore warrants a separate charge to clients for that work. You might even decide to offer a completely separate retainer or add-on fee for that work.
On the other hand, you might not be a bookkeeper at all (it does require special knowledge, skills and training) and decide not to provide it whatsoever. In which case, you would simply let clients know that bookkeeping is a separate profession from Virtual Assistance and refer them to some fabulous bookkeeping experts you know of (it’s always a good idea to connect with experts in other fields so that you can refer clients to each other).
Hope that helps!
Thanks for commenting. Yeah, the virtual assistant term is really completely idiotic to...
