Delegating Data Entry Services to Your VA

Sharing is caring!

For companies in the early stages and for startups, the industry can be pretty intimating and stressful. Especially as the company is still trying to get off the ground, there are so many things that you have to remember, and as business owners, you might like to think you can do everything on your own. Unfortunately, sometimes this is just not possible.

Although it may be an advantage, and sometimes even necessary, to closely keep an eye on every employee and make sure you’ll be the one to manage all facets of the business, this may lead to burnout and frustration, which consequently make you unproductive. Sometimes, if these cases are left unchecked, these could also cause a business to keel over.

The good news for us today is we don’t need to carry all that burden. As time progresses and your business starts to grow slowly, the best move would be to gradually let go of the steering wheel just a bit and trust another person to help you do the job. This is when you should start thinking of hiring a virtual assistant.

Virtual assistant services are probably one of the most important elements in order to make any business work nowadays, and demand for the offering has considerably grown over the past couple of years with thousands of job postings all over the internet as proof. With countless of duties and responsibilities weighed on business owners, especially for small businesses, it would be a wiser move to hire a VA than to try to take it all up on your own. With this decision, you would be able to concentrate more on the company’s growth, while your VA can handle the mundane tasks that might take too much of your time.

In connection to this, what other mundane task can you think of other than data entry? There are a couple of other ones you can probably think of but this one takes the cake.

Despite being a dull and boring job, data entry is certainly far from irrelevant. All industries require data entry; healthcare, real estate, banking, restaurants, and many others. After all, business transactions and other business goals always depend on data and results. As entrepreneurs, we depend on data to help us run our business in a way that can drive more sales, and help us determine which parts to improve and which parts have worked.

However, it is still a pretty tedious job that can eat up all of your time, and as an entrepreneur, hiring a VA is your best choice to become more productive. In this article, we will be talking about the advantages of outsourcing data entry services to a virtual assistant and what it takes to be good at it.

 

Prevents your employees from getting stuck with a dull task

As an entrepreneur, probably one of the most important things to remember, aside from making sure all of your staff is productive, is to take good care of your employees by increasing their motivation. It’s already a given that once employees are motivated, they also likewise become productive and can help in the development of your business.

In this case, imagine having your employees waste their time due to secondary tasks, such as data entry, instead of dedicating it entirely to their primary roles. This could be demotivating and emotionally-draining, to say the least, and results to unhappy employees. By hiring a VA to do data entry instead, you give your staff freedom to showcase their skills in their designated roles and core functions, leading to a more productive and efficient business with a motivated set of staff.

 

Gives you a strategic advantage

Aside from creating happy and motivated employees, outsourcing data entry tasks to a VA is a good tactic as it can give your office more time to spend for planning and coming up with ideas related to your business’s mission and goals. Your staff gets more productive and creative, which would be otherwise impossible if they’re stuck with doing data entry.

 

Cost-efficient productivity

Hiring a quality Data Entry VA saves you time and cost.

Pixabay.com photo by www_darkworkx_de

Aside from its advantages to your employees, choosing to outsource data entry tasks to a VA is also very cost-efficient. It’s cheaper compared to hiring a full-time employee yet at the same time, you can expect quality work. As these virtual assistants are accustomed to doing data entry tasks, you can be assured of minimal errors. Given the nature of their job and the expertise this implies, they can collate data more accurately than your own staff. In this scenario, you have killed two birds with one stone; your staff being productive in their core duties and a VA focused on a task he or she is more skilled at than the typical workforce.

 

Lets you hire easily

One other advantage of getting a virtual assistant instead of a full-time employee for a data entry job is its simple process; you won’t need to worry about the many requirements and regulations you need to follow nor the limitations required to state in contracts and the anxiety experienced when lecturing or terminating an employee. Furthermore, you have more options to choose from in a pool of candidates that may complement the specific requirements you need, while not being constricted to physical geography and the local state or city you’re in.

 

What makes a good data entry virtual assistant?

Now that we’ve covered the basic advantages of handing over the data entry job to a VA, let’s look at what it takes to actually be a good VA in this facet.

Data entry is basically the process of inputting data to a computer. Despite how seemingly easy data entry could be, don’t be deceived; it is still easily one of the most essential aspect that makes up a business due to the valuable information it holds. It can be taxing and monotonous and because of this, virtual assistants need to be very careful and detail-oriented in order to be capable for this job.

As a general rule, for any task, there should be goals and objectives to define in order to start going through the basics of data entry. Virtual assistants also need to get to know the industry they are working in as there are different kinds of data for each kind of industry.

Once you’ve decided on goals and have done some research on the field, it’s important you start setting up a centralized database with your VA. This means avoiding different databases by different services and instead, bringing the entry of information all under one roof. An example of this could be an online database such as Google Drive. Not only would it be easier for VA and entrepreneur to share and exchange files, it is also highly secure. Utilizing only one database, in turn, can help your company reach optimum efficiency.

Other rules your VA would need to abide in would be to always make sure to check and recheck the consistency of the information. Along with this, there should be a regular cleaning of bases and managing duplicates, which you may have otherwise overlooked during the first time.

 

The bottom line

To sum up this article and all the advantages of hiring a virtual assistant will all come down to probably the most important one: the peace of mind it gives to business owners. As the sole person who runs the whole company, you need to be able to spend some downtime and get some rest in order to keep those brain cells working, and not risk them to a burnout in the long run. You could also use the spare time to unleash some creativity and find inspiration, which would be otherwise impossible if you were held down by time-consuming and stressful tasks.

With a virtual assistant who is qualified in a specific field that is of urgent need in your office, you can rest easy and have more confidence to concentrate on the more crucial tasks needed to be done in order for your business to keep running. Another thing made possible with outsourcing these services is the advantage of work and life balance, which is needed for a happy and emotionally healthy lifestyle for yourself and the people around you.

No matter how data entry can seem stressful, frustrating, and boring, it is a necessary evil for all companies in every industry out there. Without data entry, a business could get lost in where they really want to go as they have no basis of the current situation of their business. Therefore, instead of trying to take everything all on your own or letting other employees do it, learn to let go and accept the help of others outside your office. You would find it works perfectly for you.