Virtual Assistant Services & Pricing

How to set virtual assistant rates for services

This is such a GREAT and valid question! Especially when you are a new virtual assistant just starting to sign on clients. Pricing your virtual assistant services and exploring options for getting paid are topics I recommend you thoroughly think through ahead of time. I’m sharing my thoughts here, but I suggest you look around for other articles and opinions too.

The topic of getting paid is important enough to gather different perspectives in order to make a decision that best fits your plan, your skills and your goals.

Mistakes I Made

I’m jumping right out of the gate to tell you what I did wrong from the start. When I opened my doors to my first clients, I signed multiple clients on for “as needed” support, with payment after services rendered. I had each client sign my client agreement so they understood my role and my policies, but there was not a lot of discussion of how many hours they might need. I was just so excited to get a few clients that I left it pretty open ended, and this caused several issues.

1. When I sent an invoice at the end of the month with the amount due, I falsely assumed that paying my invoice would be a priority for my clients. Nope. What I should have realized is that a big reason my clients hired me in the first place was because they had too much to do! Paying a small vendor was not exactly a top priority. Even though my payment terms were ‘upon receipt’, it often took a couple of weeks for my clients to mail me a check.

2. That leads me to second issue. I opted to save money anywhere I could, so I started with check payments. Not a great plan. While taking payments via check was technically free, it came at a large cost. As a very small business with only a handful of clients, I relied heavily upon receiving those checks in a timely fashion, and that simply was not happening. This was a true struggle financially and in retrospect, making an investment into a system to accept credit card payments would have saved a lot of anxiety.

3. Problem number three did not develop until I was balancing work for a handful of clients. When I reached that point, I realized that without having a discussion around the estimated number of hours each client needed, I could not efficiently manage my time. Some days my hair was on fire, while other days I barely had any work to complete.

Virtual Assistant Retainer Plans

After I was officially in business for about a year, I decided to shift my payment model. I went to a prepaid retainer plan. Fortunately, the clients I had at that time were receptive and made the adjustment without any issues. I created several retainer plans which they could choose from. With each increase in hours per month, I offered a small discount in the hourly rate. I created my Credit Card Authorization form and requested that each client provide me with credit card details for charging the retainer amount at the start of each month, in addition to any overage from the previous month.

There are downsides to retainer plans, but they solved many of my issues. My clients made their best effort to select a plan that totaled the number of hours they anticipated each week. That is not exactly how it worked out. There are definitely weeks where a client goes over the weekly estimate, by a lot, and vice versa. Managing inconsistent needs week-to-week isn’t easy, but it is certainly manageable.

I’ll point out here that my SLA, or service level agreement as outlined within my client agreement, plays an important role here. My SLA is how I define the response time I hold myself to for requests/emails/messages sent to me by my clients. Establishing a realistic SLA for your client workload will take some of that pressure off during those crazy weeks when every client seems to need something at the same time.

Virtual Assistant Service Packages

Some VAs will offer service package plans. In my opinion, these work great for specific tasks that you are proficient in and that you have a reliable estimate of how long it takes to complete this type of task each and every time. For example, setting up a newsletter once a month. If you are a subject matter expert with this task and you are familiar with several of the services that can be used, there is a good chance you can come up with the time it takes to draft a newsletter. You may want to further define it by how many sections, links, images will be included. Or even better, if your client has an example to share with you, you can use that to estimate the time needed to recreate something new for each month.

Let’s say the client wants to pay you for six newsletters – one per month. You do your research to determine how long it will take to create each newsletter and then you can use your hourly rate (I would suggest you add extra for your expertise), then you can come up with cost per newsletter. That easily translates into a package for six newsletters. From there, you determine with your client the payment terms. Maybe you prefer full payment up front, or you could request 50% up front and 50% after the six editions are completed.

Again, it is my personal opinion that a service package is best utilized for tasks that require some kind of expertise. In other words, not for general virtual support tasks such as email management. Let me explain why. If you create a package for responding to 50 emails, that means you need to track each and every time you send a reply or an email prompts an action of some kind. I don’t think that is the best use of your time, and I can say with confidence that my client’s would not go for it. Often it takes just a minute to reply to an email. It might take more time to open a tracking spreadsheet and mark it down! The bottom line is that packages are an option, and if it works for you, great.

Accepting Virtual Assistant Client Payments

It was not easy to find an affordable Merchant Payment solution in 2009. I needed a service that would allow me to manually enter the credit card details since I would not have the card in hand. I also had no interest in purchasing a credit card terminal, even if it would allow me to punch in the data. I came across a service that enabled me to create an account that I accessed via phone. I would punch in the credit card details and amounts on my keypad. A few days later, and subject to a pretty hefty fee structure, I got paid directly into my bank account.

I used this service for several years. While I considered a few others along the way, I did not make a change until Square came on the scene. YAY for SQUARE! In my opinion, Square is terrific. The app is easy to use, the fees are reasonable (much less than what I had been paying), it’s well-known, I can run reports anytime, they submit my earnings to the IRS and they provide me with a 1099.

I like having control over charging my clients, and over the years I have not had one client question my request for a credit card up front that I will charge automatically each month. Of course, there are options such as Venmo and PayPal that are convenient as well. As long as you are comfortable asking your clients to take the necessary step to pay your invoice on their end.

Selling Virtual Assistant Services by the Hour

UPDATE May 2024: I recently adopted a new payment method. I admit, I was resistant for a while to offer support by the hour because it can make it challenging to plan out your availability from week to week. However, it is a payment model that is attractive to clients so I was willing to give it a try. First and foremost, I was not willing to offer services by the hour without getting paid up front. I had been there and done that, and it was a mess. In order to get paid up front, I send out a timesheet along with a payment link to my hourly clients every other week (some VAs might do this weekly or monthly). The payment link gives them the option to purchase more hours - hopefully before they run out. Of course, some clients will wait until they run out so if that happens, I'll send a quick note letting them know their supports hours have run out and to please purchase more so I can keep providing support. Add the payment link (I use Squareup) and that's it. So far so good! If anything changes, I'll update this post.

Summarizing Solutions for Getting Paid in Virtual Support Roles

It is best to have a plan before you accept your first client, but it might be good to have a couple of options to offer. Also, don’t be afraid to make adjustments as you go. Currently I have one client that I agreed to take on as ‘hourly pay after services rendered’ clients. It is a very small client that only needs support every now and then. Since I have several full-time clients, I felt comfortable taking on this small addition on a pay-as-you-go basis.

As always, I wish you the best of luck as you build and grow your virtual assistant practice.

Katie Bauer started Effective Virtual Assistance, LLC, in 2008. Based out of Northern Virginia, Effective Virtual Assistance, LLC partners with small businesses locally and nationally to give business owners the time they need to focus on core business and revenue generating activities.

With a firm belief that when a client is successful, that reflects on her success, Katie’s goal is to go above and beyond with each and every client task and project.

Over the years Katie has been contacted by aspiring VAs through clients or directly via her website, asking for insight and advice. She realized writing a short eBook to share her experience along with offering some of the documents and tools she uses to run her business could benefit other Virtual Assistants. Click HERE! You definitely want to see all the professional resources & customizable forms available.