Welcome to WebmasterWorld Guest from 54.156.37.174
Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
Things I need done:
1) pay bills - I give them a list of bills I need to pay and they pay them whatever amount is due that month, without me giving it one thought after telling them I have an account somewhere. Electricity, cell phone, cable, internet, server hosting, garbage, etc.
this will require trust because they'll have access to my checkbook. how do you find someone like this?
2) contact buffer - this person will be the main source of contact for things like my outsourced call center to the resolve problems or escalate them to me.
3) customer service -Possibly receive phone calls during business hours to resolve customer issues or escalate. Around 200 minutes per month.
4) concierge type services - ie, give a list of people i need gifts for, they send me ideas and prices and can have them purchased and delivered. this obviously would need a feminine touch although maybe not.
So basically how do I find someone or organization that can do this for me, that is trustworthy enough to give them access to my checkbook. Should I go virtual? Should I go traditional? I have an office, but would prefer to outsource.
I have way too much paperwork to handle bills any more, so that is really priority number one. Finding a trustworthy assistant service of some kind that can i trust to give my accounts and they will pay my bills and not steal my money.
Any tips? Is this what bookkeepers do? I have an office full of ladys who do my taxes, and they offer "Monthly Accounting and Bookkeeping." I'd rather them not actually go into my accounts, but just pay bills. I would ask them about this, but don't want to seem like an idiot. So maybe if bookkeeping is paying bills and making sure accounts are current, I would still need an assistant for the other tasks, and at least they would most likely not need my checking account information, but I'd still like to trust them. There are just too many things that come up when I google for virtual assistant to make any sort of sense of who the real firms are and who can be trusted.
Rule number one is never, ever let just one person have control over it, it must be a two person operation with one person checking the other. Collusion between two people to defraud does happen but it is much less likely.
Rule number two is frequent audit checks, best of all by you.
Rule number three is never let them have access to any substantial amount. Set up a separate check account which has sufficient money transferred into it to just cover the bills. If they need more they ask you for it.
But best of all, why not simply use direct debits (or the US equivalent) to pay the majority of those bills?
Electricity, cell phone, cable, internet, server hosting, garbage, etc.
[edited by: eelixduppy at 2:30 pm (utc) on Apr 26, 2010]
[edit reason] linked up url [/edit]