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Virtual assistant invoice template for R&D

if you are looking for the best tools for virtual assistance especially tools for beginners and free tools you are in the right place in today's video I'm going to be sharing with you the very best tools that you can use to get started in your VA business now these are not just tools that I prefer but we do have a community of over a 100,000 virtual assistants and we have asked what are the very best tools what did you wish you knew about when you got started in your VA business and these are the tools that they shared so I'll be dropping those in today's [Music] video my name is Abby Ashley I am the founder of the virtual Savvy here on my YouTube channel we talk all about virtual assistance all things working from home and making money with your vaide hustle so if that's something that you are interested in learning more about make sure that you subscribe to my channel and don't forget to click that Bell that makes sure that you are notified every time I release new content here on this channel one of the things that drew me to Virtual assistance in the first place was the fact that it was a business that you didn't have to have a lot of startup costs for so many other types of businesses require you to have startup costs maybe you have to find a building or you have to buy product before you even can open the doors whereas with virtual assistance you literally can get started with the skills you already have and a computer so that was one of the things that Drew me to it in doing that though I wanted to make sure that I was using really great software that would help me be more efficient and help my client and so I started the hunt for free software and you might be in that very same place where you're thinking okay I want to do this but I don't want to invest a ton of money up front before I even get any clients that's why I'm sharing this list with you here today because every piece of software I'm sharing with you has a free version or a free trial associated with it so you can go ahead and start using it in your business today before you have even started making money with that let's jump behind my screen and I'm going to actually be showing you on my computer these different softwares and what they can be used for the first type of software that I would recommend is a Time tracking software now toggle is my favorite for this I've actually been using toggle since 2015 when I started my own virtual assistant business and what I love about it is that it makes time tracking really really easy and that you can do these beautiful reports inside of toggle so let me show you inside of toggle this is what it actually looks like whenever you start to Time Track and so you can just go over to the timer and I can hit play and I can just say I am working working on sending contract to client and hit the play button and it will go ahead and start tracking this time now there are so many different Cool Tools with it you can add tags you can add folders so you could have a different folder for every single client and what's great about this as well is you can go back and retroactively if you forget to track your time you can put that in retroactively or if you forget to turn the timer off you can go and change that on the back end and then one of the things I really love as well I'll stop this timer is that I can actually go in and run reports and look at the analytics on my time there's different insights that they provide but these reports are really great because I can actually export these and send them to my clients and I think that this is a really really good way to just show your clients in a really professional way where the time is being spent that you're using to do client work for them as far as costs are concerned toggle is awesome because most of what you'll need can really be done on the free plan I mean you can do unlimited time tracking unlimited projects and you can export those reports so really the only reason that you would need starter or premium is if you want some of the extras like once you start building a team for yourself if you want them to be able to do this but I literally since 2015 have only been on the free plan and so I just think that this is a big win for toggle now the second typ of tool that you're going to want to have in your virtual assistant business is some kind of invoicing software and the two that I'm going to show you here today are my very favorite and what's so cool about these is they actually do a lot more than just invoicing so I'll go through some of the ins and outs of those so the two pieces of software I'm going to show to you today are dubsado and honeybook we're going to take a look first at dubsado dubsado is not only a place to invoice clients and collect payments but you can actually use dubsado to upload a contract to have your contracts signed and it's a project management tool as well you can have forms that your client can fill out you can have client schedule meetings with you using their built-in scheduler there are so many things that you can do with dub AO now when it comes to pricing there actually is I always show you the monthly options because most of us are going to go month-to month and $20 a month might seem like a lot but here's the cool thing whenever you see this start for free button Deo actually allows you to use their software for up to three clients completely for free so you could literally start using debado for free and then once you have three clients that should be enough income to be able to pay for the $20 a month I just think that this is such a cool feature that they have built in and it really brings in that loyalty right from the beginning so uh highly recommend dubsado now when it comes to dubsado versus honeybook there are some differences in pricing which we will talk about there's some differences in features as well and so these two platforms are really really similar if I'm being honest in their functionality what they can do for you and so what I normally recommend people do is to try both them honeybook has the ability to do a free trial so you can do seven days entirely for free so you can test it out and you may fall in love with honeybook and say I can't use dubsado because I just love honeybook you may fall in love with dubsado and say nope I'm choosing it I really found that it's more of a personality thing I don't have a loyalty toward one or the other I think that both of them can be really really great for VAs and again honeybook allows you to do all those same things sending invoices signing contracts doing that calendar management Etc and so this is a project management tool it is a calendar management tool and it is a payment system and I definitely recommend that you use one of them inside of your VA business which one you choose is up to you now what I mentioned earlier there is a little bit of a difference in pricing but not much you can see here that honeybook has 950 a month for your first three months this might be a special going on right now so I can't guarantee this will be the same by the time you're watching this video they're doing a 50% off sale right now and then it is $19 a month after that so again month-to month it really is similar so if you love honeybook and you think this is the system for me I think it would be worth it to go ahead and go with honeybook and go ahead and do that expense but if you are just trying to do a completely free system until you have paying clients stado would probably be the better choice the number three type of tool that you'll need for your virtual assistant business is a graphic design tool now you don't have to be a graphic designer to be a virtual assistant that's where canva comes in if you haven't discovered canva yet you definitely need to do so even again if you're not going to be doing social social media or logo creation or any type of graphics for your clients still you will need those things likely for your own business so when it comes to designing your business cards even designing merch doing a webinar platform doing social media posts for your business all of that can be done inside of canva so canva makes it easy to create so many different types of creative assets whether it's social media presentations business cards I'm going to click on social media here and you can see I can create Instagram posts or an Instagram story or a Facebook post whenever I go and click on it I can just start totally from scratch or they have tons and tons of templates that I could use as well so I could you know fill this out with my own information drop a picture here I could upload my own pictures and put those in here brand it with my own colors or with my own fonts and it just makes it super super easy to do social media and make it look beautiful even if you're not a creative person one of the other benefits to canva is that it is free yes I absolutely love canva now I am such a huge canva user my team uses it so much that we did go ahead and invest in canva Pro which is about $15 a month you can see if we're paying month to month not bad especially if you are really really using this all the time but for most people again you should be able to get started on the free version there are so many things you can do there's just a few like templates or maybe sounds if you were doing like a reel that you wouldn't be able to use because they consider it premium but even their free assets are really really great and a good place to get started in your business if you don't have any clients yet again you could choose later on if you think that investing in the monthly option would be good but for a very long time you should be able to get by with the free version if not forever all right the fourth type of tool I would recommend that you have is a project management tool now I did mention that honeybook and Abado have some project management features so you might find that that suffices for your needs but you might find that you need a more robust project man management tool I know that very quickly in my business I needed something else and I also started using these project management Tools in my own personal life so I'll show you a little bit of those now there's three that I'm going to share with you today there are tons more I will say there are a lot of project management tools out there so you might find one that is not included here and all power to if you find one that you like more these are just the ones that I have found to be the best for our students what we recommend now I'm going to break them apart into beginner intermediate and advanced and you can decide what works best for you a beginner project management tool that you could start using right away for free is Trello I love Trello Trello was the very first introduction to project management that I ever had and I actually still use Trello sometimes for my own personal things just because it's so so so user friendly how trailer works is that you have different boards and so every single board can have a various different methods this one in particular is a way to organize your leads so you could list all of your potential clients which we have here so the whole thing is a board these are each individual lists and under each list you have different cards and so those cards can include photos they can include deadlines they could include details they can include checklists of what else you want to do you can see here like here's my Discovery call and I click on it and here's notes about that right and then I could actually even go on and I could add like a checklist to that if I wanted to check that off and so it is really really simple but also has a lot of functionality there are some additional features like they have a calendar that you can Implement inside of Trello and so it's a really really great beginner tool so if you're just getting started with project management I actually would recommend Trello especially if you're not a super techy person because of its Simplicity and because it is free right and so you can literally have 10 boards per workspace you can have unlimited cards inside of those boards a lot of storage if it's just you and your team there's really a lot you can do just right there in the free version right if you want to have more boards and advanced checklist if you really get into Trello and decide that the $5 a month is worth it for you I mean that's still a really lowcost investment but again I have never actually had to pay for Trello anytime I've used it I've always been able to do it entirely for free all right the intermediate tool is Asana Asana is similar to Trello but a lot more robust and there's just a lot more functionality that you have as far as project managing especially if you are wanting to scale into a team so I think Trello is really great for personal project management but Asana is probably a better fit if you do plan to bring in a team or if you plan to add your clients to your assana boards I think that that is probably a better option and again Asana has a free forever plan which is so great unlimited tasks unlimited projects Etc there are some more advanced things that you can do with the premium like having unlimited free guests so again I think that that is really really great if you're wanting to invite your clients into your boards but even with the basic free version you can have 15 team members so if you're building out a subcontracting team you can literally do all of that inside of the basic free version which is just awesome and then the last tool would be the advanced tool and that is clickup now clickup is what we use personally at the virtual Savvy but I will say we started with Trello and then we jumped to clickup and it was a very hard learning for me because a part of what makes clickup so difficult is that you can literally do anything I mean it is so robust they have so many features but with all of those features means it's a little more complex right so task management whiteboards dashboards goals I mean there's chat functionality we don't even use that functionality yet inside of clickup and so there's just so much that you can do inside of it that it can be a little overwhelming because there's almost unlimited possibilities so if you are super techy you might be out over clickup and love it if you are scared of tech or if it intimidates you I definitely would start with either Trello or AAA and then maybe someday Advance up to clickup but I do really really suggest it again it's what we use at the virtual Savvy for all of our team and project management again if you are using this just for your personal use it's totally free which is awesome as well right so that wouldn't give you the ability to add clients to it it wouldn't give you the ability to share with a team but again if you're just looking for your own personal project management and you can use clickup entirely for free and there's actually quite a few features included just in their free version the real benefit to upgrading to that $10 a month version is really the fact that you can now add team members so I would definitely check out clickup if you are technically inclined you might love all the functionality if it scares you go ahead and try Trello or ass first all right it's comment time I love to hear in the comments feedback from you so let me know is there a piece of software I've listed so far that you didn't previously know about have you learned anything new from today's video If so make sure that you comment below and let me know the next type of tools we're going to talk about are communication tools now yes you can email your clients and there's a lot of things that you'll want to email to your clients however I have found that emails get lost really really easy people forget to respond to them some people do not have a clean email which they might be hiring you if that is the case it might be beneficial to find some additional forms of communication so I'm going to show you some of our team's favorites the first is slack if you haven't used slack man slack is awesome slack is just such a great way especially if you're working as a team so your team members can communicate with one another if you have a client and you want to be able to quickly just shoot messages back and forth without things getting lost slack is just a really really great way to do that you can have different channels inside of slack so you can have one just for questions you can have one for celebrating you can have one to talk about billing questions you can have one to talk about customer concerns you can have different slack channels between different types of team members so you could talk to leadership if there's a leadership team you can talk to just individual team members and so that is really really nice and it really just brings the whole team together to be able to communicate super efficiently another thing I love about slack is that you can use it mostly for free so I'll actually come back to the pricing but I'll show you that as long as you don't want to keep access to your messages for more than 90 days then the free should be beneficial to you you can still send audio and video clips you can still huddle one-on-one which that means that you get in like a little private room with your voice back and forth and so you can do all of that on the free version really I think the biggest benefit to upgrading to Pro is if you want more than 90-day access to your history and so that does become beneficial if there's like oh we were talking about this a few months ago you can search your past conversations so that is the one benefit to going to Pro but again if you're just starting out let's start with the free version right and then you can later on decide if Pro is right for you what's nice too is that if you're in the free version and then you find that you need to go back to a conversation you could upgrade to the pro and it will actually go back and keep it so it's like that information is there it's just being stored and so you access it and you unlock it if you upgrade to Pro so that is something that I would recommend and again if you decide to go eventually to Pro it is pretty inexpensive $725 per person per month that's on the team if you decide to go that route the next tool is not one that I use personally but I have so many people that Rave about it that I had to talk about it which is Voxer the reason I don't use it is because it's literally just another app for me I use slack and I use email and really that's all I use like if somebody even calls me and leaves a voice message I am really really bad about checking my voicemail it's almost always full so this doesn't work for me but if you love the idea of just kind of being able to walkie-talkie voice chat back and forth with each other this could be really really great and so you may find with your your client that this is the best way to communicate back and forth with each other it literally is like a walkie-talkie but it keeps the message so you don't have to listen to it right away the personal version is free which is amazing and I've actually known very few people that ever have to upgrade to Pro or business but if for some reason you did you found that as to be an integral part of your business that you needed it's only $3.99 a month for the pro so definitely affordable and then the last tool that we're going to talk about is zoom you likely already know what Zoom is the world found out what Zoom was in 2020 during the pandemic but if you haven't used Zoom before it's a great way to do video meetings I've done video meetings in Zoom versus Google Hangouts and I just like Zoom better I find that Google Hangouts is really glitchy and zoom for the most part runs fairly simply and so if you're going to be doing a one-on-one video meeting a discovery call Zoom would be your best bet I don't know very many people who need to upgrade to anything beyond just using the basic free fre version the main thing that you'll have to be aware of is that 40 minute per meeting cap you likely aren't going to be having webinars with a hundred or more people in them when you're first starting out and so really that 40-minute cap is the biggest downfall you definitely if you're starting to reach that and know that you need to go on you can close the meeting and start again which is a little bit of a pain but I will say this like there is something about the accountability that you book 30 minute calls and only 30 minute calls with your clients and then you have a little bit of wiggle room to go over but it really will help you keep accountable to not having 1 hour 2our long meetings if you don't really need to so again for most of us the free basic version capped at 40 minutes is perfect all right tool type number six are appointment scheduling tools now I already mentioned that honeybook and debado have their own calendar system and so you may not need these at all but I mention them just in case you find that neither of those systems work for you sometimes you do need an external scheduling tool and so I'm going to share with you my two favorites the first is calendly it's the one that I use again I don't currently have clients that I need dubsado or honeybook for and so calendly is a really great option for just that scheduling and they do scheduling really really well and so you can see that you can set up different types of scheduling you can customize your availability you can share that scheduling link you can actually embed this on your website which is really nice and again if you are just using this for Discovery calls then you could use the free version Unlimited meetings with one event type so it's once you're getting into different types of events right so if you want a 30- minute call and an hour call and a 2-hour call that's when you would need more the standard or the teams version but if you're just doing that one type then calendly free is perfect I've never personally use acity but I know a lot of people who do so that's why I go ahead and mention it from my understanding it is very very similar to calendly but it does cost more so again that monthly version $20 a month and you may find after a 7-Day free trial that you just love it that much more that it's worth it to you but that is why I've always gone with calendly because hey I love free the next tool I'm sharing with you really deserves a category of its own we're going to call the category video sharing but you might be thinking why do I need a video sharing tool and honestly this tool it's Loom is so useful for so many different reasons so I am actually not showing you the homepage of loom because you're experiencing Loom right now so I am using loom to record these videos so you can see that it is a great screen sharing platform you can also do just individual videos that aren't sharing your screen you can also share your screen and record your voice without having your picture on the screen too if you don't want to show your face that day maybe you didn't shower and you're working with PJs hey that's fine that's why you're working from home right but there are so many different uses for Loom so obviously I'm doing a training right now so you can record trainings with loom you can also send messages I have found that so many times I really can't explain with words what I'm trying to share with a client and I don't want to schedule a one-on-one call because that's just going to be way more time consuming and so the most effective thing I can do is to share a loom video we literally use loom every single day in our business like I can't think of a single day that I don't use a loom I even use Loom with my husband when I'm sharing stuff with him like it's just super useful another really great thing you can do with loom is to respond to emails with loom so again sometimes a student or a client will email me and it will be like this mega long email I'm talking like paragraphs long and honestly I don't want to sit down and spend the time to type out a response to that really long email and so what I will do is I will hit record on loom and I will just read the email that they sent me and respond in real time this saves me so much time I cannot explain to you how how useful it is and then the last way you can use this again why would I need a video tool this is why is because it can actually be used as a really powerful marketing tool as well let's say that you you know help clients with their Pinterest accounts you could literally go through a client's or a potential client's Pinterest boards and show them on a video what you would do to improve their system if you were going to be helping them with website edits or with blogging you could literally go through their website go through their blog and say here's what I would do differently here's some things that I would change give them recommendations right there on the screen it gives them a visual it gives them a chance to see your face so they see your personality it's like so much wrapped into one and this is one of the ways that you can do value first marketing which is one of the things that we teach inside of our signature program The Savvy system is how to actually make your proposals stand out and Loom is one of the best tools to be able to do that that's why it deserves its very own category okay the very last tool actually isn't a tool at all but of course I had to mention it it's the virtual Savvy website if you haven't gone to the virtual savvy.com you definitely need to check it out we have hundreds of blog posts on how to get started as a v gate we have case studies of real virtual assistants who have gone on to build their own successful VA businesses and we have access to our free training tons of freebies and our YouTube channel which also has hundreds of videos on how to get started so tool number eight is reserved for your ultimate V a resource your learning platform and that would be the virtual Savvy Shameless plug right had to do it all right it's comment time again is there a software that I didn't list in this video I want to know about it if there's a piece of software that you're already using or excited about let me know in the comments what it is and maybe I'll include it in my next video I hope this video was helpful to you one of my favorite things to do is to help new vas put those building blocks in place that are going to help you be successful in your business now you have the systems and you have the tools you might be asking yourself what do I do to get clients if that's a question you've been asking I would highly recommend you check out my become a booked out virtual assistant webinar it's totally free it's about an hour long but it's going to break down my top marketing methods for getting new clients as a VA we've literally had students go and get their very first clients just from watching this free training so I definitely recommend you check it out thanks for joining me today go rock it in your business