Online bookkeeping services and virtual assistants are an outsourcing strategy that can be used to gain competitive advantage. As a result, they have shot to prominence and firms of various sizes are utilizing them. The most recent recession has made businesses more prudent about how they spend their operating budgets making virtual assistants a hot commodity.
How exactly does using an online bookkeeping service help crush the competition? Paying as low as $5 per hour for online bookkeeping services vs. the typical $30,000 for an in-house bookkeeper yields tremendous cost savings for a small business. A small business owner can use the money saved to (a) beat the competition with lower prices for products and services, (b) invest in additional advertising to outgrow the competition, and (c) prepare better strategic plans.
Small businesses can find it cumbersome to train and retain an in-house assistant or bookkeeper. Further, the effective hourly pay rate for the assistant gets quite high especially if you take into account vacations, health care, sick time, lunch time and bench time. As a result, a in-house assistant is a luxury which small businesses usually cannot afford these days.
Even if a business can afford an in-house assistant, the assistant is usually a jack-of-all trades whose work load can get too much to handle. The in-house assistant can, at that point, off-load work to a virtual assistant who can act as an overflow buffer. A virtual assistant can do just about anything an in-house assistant can do and could be put to good use as an assistant for in-house staff at a fraction of the cost.
On the other end of the spectrum, some small business owners attempt to do everything on their own. Their time could be better spent focusing on business core competency and growing the business. It would be far more efficient to delegate the operational grind to low cost online services which consists of specialists such as bookkeepers, paralegals and administrative assistants. Otherwise, by doing the same tasks that can easily be handled by an online business, the business owner is really working for $5 per hour or less! That doesn’t seem to make good business sense either!
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