7 Must-Have Free Virtual Assistants Tools

Virtual Assistants Tools: As a business or organization, you have so much to do in so little time. Since you can’t add more hours to the day, you have to keep yourself updated with technologies that can save your time and increase your productivity. And what better way than having a virtual assistant?

What is a virtual assistant?

A virtual assistant is not an in-house employee and works from a remote location. He or she is efficient in providing different services to a business by accessing their data and tools to perform the job virtually.

Virtual assistants are specialized in a range of tasks and can help your business with services like,

• Administrative tasks
• Customer support
• Data entry and management
• Social media marketing
• Accounting and bookkeeping,
• And much more 

What is the need of virtual assistant Tools?

Your virtual assistant is a full-time remote employee and a good choice if you don’t have the budget or resources for a dedicated assistant. For being a successful virtual assistant, just having strong skills is not enough.

The main point is to free up your time so that you can focus more on your priorities. And to save your time, you can take the help of the various tools available out there. By using these finest tools, you can step up your professionalism and workflow and streamline your processes.

The right virtual assistant tool can:

• Help in accomplishing tasks more efficiently.
• Help in automating repetitive work.
• Help in tracking your assistant’s work time and activity.
• Help in organizing communication.

If you are keen on the idea of using a virtual assistant tool but don’t exactly know from where to start, this article is for you. Let’s dive into some of the best free tools for virtual assistants available in the market.

We have prepared a categorized list of must-have free tools to make sure you start in the right direction:

1. Communication Tools

Being able to reach your virtual assistants when you need them is important. Of course, an email is an option but it’s not effective always. You need something faster, quicker in replies. The following tools can help:

Slack

Slack is the most commonly used communication tool by businesses. It replaces the time and efforts used in email communication with essential group conversations that revolve around a set topic.

Slack also offers video calls and file sharing.

Zoom

Zoom is a video conferencing tool. The popularity of which boomed in the coronavirus pandemic. Zoom is used worldwide to hold meetings, host virtual events, and collaborate with other people.

Zoom has a lot of features that include group chats, virtual conference rooms, video webinars, HD audio, and video, recording, screen sharing, and enterprise phone systems, and more. This platform is equipped with an enhanced security and privacy features, making it safe for you to discuss confidential things over calls.

Skype

Skype is another video conferencing tool that is free to use. You can do both audio and video calling here. It also supports the feature of one on one chat, group chats, and file sharing.

Google Meet

Google Meet is Google’s video conferencing tool. It was launched to replace Google hangouts. The scheduling and calls are easy here. You can record, share your screen, send files or links when you are connected on a call.

An additional feature here is that it allows you to add real-time captions while on call. This feature makes the conversation even more clear.

2. Graphic Designing tool

As a virtual assistant, one of your work will be to create graphics for your clients, especially for social media. That’s why it’s important to have an efficient graphic designing tool to save your time and increase your creativity.

 Canva

Canva is the most versatile graphic designing tool for virtual assistants. It’s an all-in-one tool that can help you in creating numerous graphics based on thousands of templates and in many formats. Be it an Instagram post, or Facebook post, Logo or Business cards, or Infographics, Canva can easily help you.

The additional benefit is that you don’t have to struggle with choosing the dimensions for different platforms, everything is pre-defined in it. 

3. Time tracking Softwares

If you are paying your clients on an hourly basis, they are going to ask you for the justification of bills. It’s better to stay on the safe side from day one and track your time- You can set up an online time clock to track how much time you are spending on each task. This way you will not just be more productive but also be able to serve more clients, and experience better customer satisfaction.  

Toggl

Toggl is a free online time clock that can easily help you with tracking your time. You can set timers and save your time being spent working on particular tasks, for particular projects, and particular clients. Toggl is free software, super easy to use, and perfect for a self-employed virtual assistant. 

4. Accounting and Bookkeeping Tools

While bookkeeping is not enjoyed by many business owners, but it is an essential part of running a business. The traditional old method of keeping a physical record book might not help. Instead, you can take the help of online accounting and bookkeeping tools to efficiently manage the income and expenses.

Wave Accounting

As a free online accounting tool, Wave accounting allows you to perform multiple activities including, tracking your income and expenses, automatically creating and sending invoices to your saved customers, and even taking credit card payments.

Freshbooks

As your business grows, you might need to take care of few more things such as filing VAT returns. And for that, a more upgraded version of the accounting tool is required. Freshbooks is an online accounting tool that allows time-tracking, with automatic checks and balances to ensure maximum accuracy. 

This tool also provides financial information that helps you in making better business decisions.

5. Project Management Softwares

A good project management tool helps you keep everyone in your team on the same page regarding the deadlines and task allocations.

Your project management tool would help you find the answer to these questions:

• What is the next thing I need to start working on?
• Whom do I assign this task?
• Which projects can go over the budget?
• How can I make my team more productive?

The right project management tool will grow with you as your business grows.

Asana

Asana is a free tool that helps you in assigning and managing tasks of your team members. It lets you easily switch between the tasks, move in the different stages of completion, assign the task to your teammates, monitor their work, send email reminders, set a to-do list, etc.

6. File Sharing and Document Management

Are you still emailing files to your team members? That’s both waste of time and effort. There are plenty of file-sharing options that are free and quick too. You can share large files with ease through these virtual assistant tools.

Google Drive

This is a free online tool that helps in keeping your valuable files in one place. It comes with an easy-to-share option. You just have to log in to it with your Google account and you are ready to utilize its features. 

Your team mates and you can work on the same document or spreadsheet and monitor the changes made by each other. Google Drive can be accessed from both desktop and mobile devices. It includes:

• Docs 
• Sheets
• Slides
• Forms
• Other specialized apps like Classroom, Drawings, etc.

7. Social Media Management

Social media marketing is one of the most common tasks that you will do as a virtual assistant. If you need to post regularly on social media for different clients, it might become impossible to manage. You need something that can automate the whole process of posting for you so that you can perform your work efficiently. This is where a social media management tool comes into play.

Social media tool can help you with:

• Scheduling posts
• Engaging with your followers
• Analyzing the performance of your social media campaigns

Postfity

This is a social media scheduler that allows you to schedule posts for main social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin. You can add up to five social media profiles of your clients and schedule up to ten posts per week with the help of this tool.

Benefits of having a virtual assistant

Here are the top reasons to justify the need of hiring a virtual assistant for your business.

Reducing costs

The main aim to hire a virtual assistant by businesses and entrepreneurs is to reduce their overhead costs. Since the virtual assistants are not full-time employees, so their salary is less. They can be charged on an hourly or work basis.  

Next thing is that you don’t have to spend your time and resources on training them as these virtual assistants are hired for specific tasks that they already excel at.

Increasing your team’s efficiency

There are many non-core activities that a company has to deal with, like:

• Handling queries of customers
• Scheduling the meetings
• Sending emails and newsletters
• Data entry
• Research, etc

When you hire a virtual assistant specifically for these tasks, your team member can focus their time and resources on other things that are the priority of your company.

Scaling of your business operations

Since virtual assistants are hired on a project-to-project basis, you can easily handle the increase in work demands without having to worry about the rush in hiring a member. 

The sudden increase in workload can be easily solved by hiring a virtual assistant.

Offering 24*7 customer service

Your customers can be anywhere. It might be that their time zone doesn’t match yours. In such a case, it can be challenging to be available all the time to solve their queries. But, worry not! Since virtual assistants work remotely, they can easily come to your rescue. 

You can hire virtual assistants across the globe to cater to different time zones and help your customers with their queries at any hour of the day.

Enhancing your chance for strategic thinking

Since virtual assistants are hired to perform the non-core activities, this saves a lot of your time which you can invest in making strategies for the growth of your business.

To wrap up

What is the need for tools for virtual assistants?

To save time and streamline the work processes, these free tools are a must for every virtual assistant to stand out amongst the rest.

If you are looking to get complex tasks done in less time and with more accuracy, take the help of these tools that we talked about. The best part is that these are free to use.

So, what are you waiting for? Hopefully, our guide would have helped you in finding the tool you were looking for.

If there is anything more that you need to add, drop it in the comments section below.