Administrative Virtual Assistant SA 2026 - Pricing Guide - Get Quotes

What an Administrative Virtual Assistant Costs in South Australia

Administrative support is the broadest category in the virtual assistant market and the one where published rates mislead most often. The same job title covers somebody emptying an inbox for twelve dollars an hour and somebody running a small firm's entire back office for seventy. Neither rate is wrong for the work it describes. The broader virtual assistant market in South Australia spans the same range for the same reason. They describe different work, and the gap between them is where South Australian businesses either save a great deal of money or waste it.

The useful numbers for 2026 sit in three bands. An Australian-based administrative assistant working independently charges $38 to $65 an hour, with most Adelaide-based providers quoting between $45 and $55 for general work and lifting toward the top of the band for anything involving client contact or judgement. An offshore assistant engaged directly, most commonly in the Philippines, runs $9 to $18 an hour. The same offshore worker engaged through an Australian agency that handles recruitment, supervision, payroll and cover runs $22 to $38, and that spread is almost entirely the agency's management layer and not the worker's pay.

Most small businesses now buy a monthly block of hours on a retainer and very few still pay by the hour on demand. A ten hour block with an Adelaide provider is commonly quoted at $420 to $600, and doubling that to twenty hours lands around $780 to $1,150 with the same person. A full-time offshore assistant through an Australian agency, which is forty hours a week with supervision and leave cover included, runs $3,400 to $5,600 a month. Buying hours in committed blocks costs less per hour than calling somebody when something is urgent, and the difference is often thirty per cent. Specialist roles such as executive assistant support price separately and sit above this band.

What almost nobody prices properly is the first month. Handing over administrative work requires documenting processes that have never been written down, setting up access to systems, and correcting the assistant's early output while they learn how you actually operate. Budget somewhere between twenty and thirty hours of your own week-by-week attention through the opening month of a general admin handover, and allow for the fact that the arrangement will feel slower than doing it yourself until about week six. Arrangements that fail almost always fail here and not later.

Contractor or Employee, and Why It Matters More Than the Rate

This is the rule that decides whether an administrative arrangement is cheap or expensive, and it is the one most small businesses never examine. Calling somebody a contractor and paying them an hourly rate against an invoice does not make them a contractor. The arrangement is classified by what actually happens day to day, and an administrative assistant working set hours on your systems under your direction is close to the line by design.

The classification tests are published by the Fair Work Ombudsman and they look at the substance of the relationship, not the paperwork. Who controls how and when the work is done. Whether the person can delegate it to somebody else. Who supplies the computer, the software and the phone. Whether the person carries any commercial risk or stands to make a profit or loss. Whether they work for other clients or are economically dependent on you. A single factor rarely settles it, but a worker who does fixed hours on your laptop doing only your work, with no ability to subcontract, looks like an employee to anybody assessing it.

Getting it wrong is not a paperwork problem. An arrangement reclassified as employment creates back liability for superannuation, annual leave, personal leave, notice, and in some cases penalty rates under whichever award applies. The Clerks Private Sector Award covers most general administrative work in Australia, and it carries minimum rates by classification level, overtime loadings and allowances. Deliberately misrepresenting employment as a contracting arrangement attracts separate penalties under the sham contracting provisions.

Superannuation needs separate attention, because it trips up businesses that have the employment question right. The extended definition of employee for superannuation purposes can capture a contractor engaged wholly or principally for their labour, even where the arrangement is a genuine contract for every other purpose. The Australian Taxation Office publishes the test and an employee or contractor decision tool. An Adelaide bookkeeper or administrative assistant invoicing you forty hours a month of their own labour is a realistic candidate for compulsory super, and the liability accrues quietly with interest.

Three structures avoid the problem instead of hoping it does not surface. Engaging a provider who runs an actual business, with multiple clients, their own tools, an ABN and the ability to send a substitute, is a genuine contract. Engaging through an Australian agency that employs the worker directly puts the obligation on the agency, which is a significant part of what the higher agency rate buys. Employing somebody part time and paying them properly under the award is the honest option, and for more than about twenty-five hours a week it is frequently cheaper than the alternatives once the risk is priced. The same analysis applies to bookkeeping support, where registration rules add a second layer.

Where the work is genuinely ad hoc and spread across several clients, a contracting arrangement sits comfortably. Where you are buying somebody's week, the arrangement needs a structure that matches. The question to ask before signing anything is simple enough: if this person stopped working for me tomorrow, would they still have a business? Where the answer is no, the arrangement needs another look.

Administrative Virtual Assistant Rates by Task

The table below separates rates by where the work is done as well as by task, because the onshore and offshore columns are not interchangeable for every line. Some administrative work is entirely location neutral and should be bought at the lower rate. Some of it requires an Australian voice, Australian business knowledge or presence in the same working hours, and buying that at the offshore rate produces a result you then have to redo. The fourth column of the table marks which lines fall into which of those two groups.

Read the last column before the price columns. The lines marked onshore are not marked that way out of preference. Debtor calls to an Adelaide builder, award interpretation for a hospitality roster and tender assembly for a state government procurement all need either an Australian voice or working knowledge of Australian rules. A provider without either will produce work you then have to check line by line. Checking somebody else's work line by line costs more than doing the task yourself.

The lines marked as suiting offshore work are the opposite case. Data entry, list building, CRM deduplication and receipt coding are rule-bound and verifiable, which means a documented process produces the same output regardless of where the person sits. These are the tasks to move first, and moving them is where the genuine savings in this category live. A business paying an Australian rate for list building is paying four times what the task is worth.

The retainer lines near the bottom of the table reward buying hours in committed blocks. A business committing to twenty hours a month pays meaningfully less per hour than businesses that engage on demand, because the provider can plan their week around a committed client. The ad hoc line near the bottom of the table is what you pay when you have not committed, and it is worth looking at as a comparison and not as an outrage. Urgency is expensive in every service market and this one is no exception.

Two lines are not rates at all and are the ones to query hardest. The setup line is real work and a provider who quotes nothing for it either plans to absorb it in the first month's hours, which is fine if stated, or has not thought about it, which is not. The agency placement fee is a one-off charge that varies widely in what it actually covers, so ask specifically whether a replacement within the first three months is free. Several agencies guarantee exactly that, and several do not.

What the Work Actually Covers, in Three Tiers

Administrative support divides into three tiers that look similar on a scope document and behave completely differently once the work starts. Knowing which tier you are buying is the difference between a useful arrangement and a frustrating one, and most mismatches happen because a business bought tier one and expected tier three.

Tier one is execution against instructions that somebody else has written. Somebody does a defined task to a defined standard and tells you when it is done. Entering data from a supplier statement, formatting a document to a template, sending a sequence of emails from a list, updating addresses in a CRM, booking a flight against a stated preference. Pure data entry work sits entirely in this tier and prices accordingly. The instructions carry all the judgement and the assistant carries none, which means the work can be done by somebody with limited context, offshore, overnight, at the lowest rates in the table. It also means the quality of the output is a direct function of how well you wrote the instruction.

Tier two is ownership of a recurring process from end to end. The assistant holds a recurring workflow and runs it without being asked each time. The accounts inbox is cleared daily and anything unusual is escalated. New clients receive the onboarding pack, the engagement letter is tracked, and the file is set up. Debtors at thirty days get the first reminder and debtors at sixty get a call. This tier needs an assistant who understands the purpose of the process beyond its steps, because the exceptions are where the value sits. It is the tier most small businesses actually need and the one they most often underbuy. A dedicated virtual receptionist arrangement is the same idea applied to inbound calls.

Tier three is the exercise of judgement on your behalf and in your absence. Deciding which of fourteen competing requests gets into your Tuesday. Drafting a reply to an unhappy client that you will send with minor edits. Assembling a tender response and flagging the three criteria your business answers weakly. Noticing that a supplier has quietly changed their terms. This tier requires sustained context about your business, your clients and your preferences, and it cannot be bought cheaply or rotated between people. Rates run $55 to $90 an hour in Australia and the relationship takes months to become properly useful.

The practical approach for a South Australian small business is to split the work instead of choosing. Keep tier three with one Australian provider on a modest retainer of eight to twelve hours a month, and push tier one work to the cheapest competent option once it is documented. Tier two sits with whichever of the two has the better grasp of the process. Trying to buy all three tiers from one person at one rate either pay tier three rates for data entry or get tier one judgement on a tender.

One warning on scope creep, which runs in both directions. An assistant hired for tier one who is good will start making judgement calls, and that is usually welcome but should be acknowledged and repriced, not quietly absorbed. Somebody hired for tier three who drifts into data entry is an expensive way to buy data entry, and it happens constantly because the work is right there and they are already paid for. Reviewing the actual mix every quarter against what you are paying for is a fifteen minute exercise that routinely finds money. Work that turns out to be mostly client contact belongs with a customer service assistant instead.

Onshore, Offshore and the Agency Layer

The decision between an Australian assistant and an offshore one is usually framed as a trade between cost and quality, which is the wrong frame and leads to bad choices in both directions. The real variables are timezone overlap, context, accountability and what happens when the person is unavailable. Price follows from those four and not the reverse.

Timezone is the one that favours South Australia more than most people realise. Adelaide sits half an hour behind Sydney and Melbourne on central time, and two and a half hours ahead of Manila while standard time is in force. A Philippines-based assistant starting at eight in the morning local time is online from half past ten Adelaide time, which gives six hours of genuine overlap with a standard Adelaide working day. That is enough for a tier two arrangement to function properly, and it is markedly better than the overlap a Perth business gets with eastern Europe or a Sydney business gets with Latin America.

Context is where offshore arrangements fail and the failures follow a predictable pattern. Somebody who has never seen an Australian BAS, does not know what a strata levy is and has never heard of the Clerks Private Sector Award will handle rule-bound work well. The same person handles context-dependent work poorly, and no amount of instruction fixes that in the first month. None of that is a capability question about the person doing the work. It is a knowledge question, and it resolves over six to twelve months with a stable assistant and never resolves with a rotating one. Sector knowledge matters even more in niches such as real estate administration, where the paperwork is state specific.

Accountability is the argument for the agency layer, and it is a stronger argument than the margin suggests. Engaging an offshore assistant directly at twelve dollars an hour means you are the recruiter, the supervisor, the payroll function and the backup when they are sick. Engaging the same calibre of worker through an Australian agency at thirty dollars means the agency recruits and replaces, handles payment and local employment obligations, supervises quality and provides cover during leave. For a business with one assistant and no capacity to manage them, that eighteen dollar difference is frequently the whole reason the arrangement survives.

Direct engagement makes sense in narrower circumstances than the marketing suggests. It works where you have somebody internally with genuine capacity to manage remote staff, where the work is stable enough that the relationship can run for years, and where you can tolerate a gap if the person leaves. Several Adelaide businesses run direct arrangements very successfully and pay a third of agency rates. The ones where it fails are almost always businesses where the owner is the manager and has no spare hours, which describes most small businesses.

On payment mechanics for direct arrangements, use a platform in place of bank transfers. Wise and Payoneer both handle Philippines and Australian currency pairs at reasonable rates and produce records that survive scrutiny. International transfers through a bank cost more and the paper trail is worse. Where you are paying an individual overseas for their labour, keep the invoices, the engagement terms and the payment records together, because the arrangement will eventually need explaining to somebody.

Your Data, Your Clients' Data and the Obligations That Follow

Handing administrative work to somebody outside your business means handing over access to information about other people, and that triggers obligations that sit with you, not with the assistant. Most small businesses give this about ten minutes of thought and the ten minutes is well spent, because the failures in this area are the ones that damage client relationships on top of costing money.

The Privacy Act applies to businesses with annual turnover above three million dollars and to a range of smaller businesses regardless of turnover, including health service providers, businesses trading in personal information and contracted service providers to Australian government agencies. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner publishes the Australian Privacy Principles and the guidance on each. A great many Adelaide businesses assume they sit outside the Act because they are small, and a fair proportion of those are wrong because of the exceptions, not the threshold.

Where the Act applies, two principles bear directly on virtual assistants. Australian Privacy Principle eight governs cross-border disclosure and holds you accountable for an overseas recipient's handling of personal information unless specific conditions are met. In practice this means a written agreement requiring the overseas assistant to handle information consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles, which is a one-page document and almost nobody has one. Australian Privacy Principle eleven requires reasonable steps to protect information, and sharing a password in place of issuing a named account fails that test plainly.

The Notifiable Data Breaches scheme is the part with teeth. An eligible data breach involving personal information that is likely to result in serious harm must be assessed and, where it meets the threshold, notified to both affected individuals and the Commissioner. Credentials shared over email, a client list downloaded to a personal device, and an assistant's compromised mailbox are all realistic routes to exactly that scenario. The scheme does not care that the breach happened at a contractor instead of inside your office.

Four practical measures cover most of the exposure and take an afternoon. Issue named accounts in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace in place of a shared login, so access can be revoked in a single action and activity is attributable. Use a password manager with shared vaults, 1Password and Bitwarden both handle this properly, and never send credentials in a message of any kind. Grant the minimum access the role needs rather than administrator rights because it is quicker. And write down what the assistant may and may not download to their own device. Where none of that infrastructure exists yet, local IT support can set it up properly in a day.

Offboarding is the step that gets skipped and it is the one that matters most. When an arrangement ends, revoke every account the same day, change any shared credentials the person knew, remove them from the password manager, and check which files sit in their personal cloud storage. Keep a short list of granted access from the start, because reconstructing it afterwards from memory never produces a complete answer. Somebody with live access to a client database eight months after they stopped working for you is a common situation and an entirely avoidable one.

Systems, Access and the Setup Nobody Budgets For

An administrative assistant is only as useful as the systems they can reach, and the single commonest reason a new arrangement stalls in week two is that the assistant is waiting on access while the business owner is too busy to grant it. Doing the setup before the first paid hour converts a frustrating month into a productive one.

Start with the mailbox, because inbox work is the most requested administrative task and the wrong setup causes immediate problems. Do not simply hand over your own password and hope for the best. In Microsoft 365, delegate access or create a shared mailbox the assistant is a member of, which lets them send on your behalf with their own credentials and leaves an audit trail. Google Workspace does the same through mailbox delegation. Both arrangements survive a change of assistant without a password change, and both can be revoked in under a minute.

Calendar access needs a decision made deliberately, not a default. Full write access to your calendar lets the assistant actually manage your week, which is the point, but it also means a mistake lands in front of a client. The usual compromise is write access plus a convention that anything involving an external party is drafted as a tentative entry for your confirmation. Set the convention in week one, because retrofitting it after a double booking is an unpleasant conversation.

Then the operational systems, and the list is longer than most businesses expect. Accounting software, almost always Xero or MYOB in the Australian small business market, where the assistant needs a named user with a role of their own, not your login. The CRM, whether that is HubSpot, Pipedrive or something industry specific. Project or task tracking in Asana, Trello or Monday.com, which doubles as the place you assign work and see what is done. A shared document store with a sensible folder structure. Communication through Slack or Microsoft Teams instead of personal messaging apps, so the record of what was asked survives.

Process documentation is the part that is hard work and clearly worth it. The recurring tasks you want handed over need to exist as written steps somewhere outside your head, and writing them is your job rather than the assistant's, at least for the first version. The practical shortcut is to record yourself doing the task once with narration using Loom or the built-in screen recorder, then have the assistant write the steps from the recording and send them back for correction. That inverts the effort, produces documentation that matches reality, and doubles as a comprehension check on the new assistant. Recordings handed over for written notes are closer to transcription work and can be bought that way if the volume is high.

Build the handover list before you advertise the role. Twelve to twenty recurring tasks, each with a rough frequency and time estimate, tells you how many hours you actually need instead of guessing at ten. It also tells a prospective provider what the job is, which produces far better quotes. Businesses that approach the market with a clear list get accurate pricing, and businesses that ask what a virtual assistant costs get the published range and no useful answer.

Where the systems themselves are the obstacle, fix that first. Nobody can do useful administrative work for a business running three unconnected spreadsheets and a shoebox, and the setup work of getting onto proper software is a separate project with its own cost. That is a job for software installation and setup and not for an administrative assistant. The Australian Government's business portal sets out the records a business is required to keep and for how long, which is a reasonable starting point for deciding what needs to exist before anybody else touches it.

What Is Different About Administrative Support in South Australia

Three things shape the South Australian market for administrative support in ways that do not apply the same way in Sydney or Melbourne. There is the half-hour timezone offset, a business base weighted toward sectors with sharp seasonal peaks, and a smaller pool of local providers who therefore fill up faster.

The timezone offset is a small thing that causes a steady drip of errors. Adelaide keeps Australian Central Standard Time, thirty minutes behind the eastern states, and Central Daylight Time maintains that gap through summer while Queensland does not observe daylight saving at all. Somebody scheduling meetings across a national client base gets this wrong regularly if they are working from a mental model of whole-hour offsets. Insist that every calendar system is set to Adelaide time and not to the assistant's own location, and check the first fortnight of interstate bookings yourself. The error is almost always thirty minutes and it is almost always with a Brisbane party.

Public holidays are the second administrative trap and South Australia has its own pattern. Adelaide Cup Day falls on the second Monday in March and does not exist in any other state. Proclamation Day on 26 December is a South Australian holiday in its own right, not a Boxing Day equivalent. South Australia also retains part-day public holidays on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, which affect penalty rates and trading hours in ways an interstate or offshore assistant will not anticipate. Anybody handling your rostering, invoicing cut-offs or client communication needs the South Australian holiday calendar loaded instead of a national one.

Seasonality is sharper here than the national picture suggests and it changes what administrative support is for. Vintage runs from roughly February through April across the Barossa, McLaren Vale, Clare Valley, Adelaide Hills and the Coonawarra, and for any business serving those regions it brings a compressed period of casual payroll, contractor onboarding, compliance paperwork and invoicing volume. Riverland citrus and almond harvests follow their own calendar. Grain in the Mid North and on Eyre Peninsula concentrates activity into a few weeks. A flat monthly retainer suits a business with even workflow and suits these businesses badly, so negotiate a baseline with an agreed surge band rather than paying year round for a March capacity.

The sector mix matters for what kind of assistant is worth paying for. Defence work around Osborne and the shipbuilding supply chain brings security, documentation and procurement requirements that plainly need an Australian assistant who can handle controlled documents and will pass a check. The health and research cluster around Lot Fourteen and the North Terrace precinct brings grant administration and ethics paperwork with specific formats and deadlines. Wine brings export documentation, label compliance and vintage payroll in a compressed window. That is not tier one work, and businesses in these sectors routinely waste money trying to buy it at tier one rates.

On the supply side, Adelaide has a smaller independent virtual assistant market than Sydney or Brisbane and the good ones carry waiting lists. The practical consequence is that the better Adelaide providers are often not advertising, and the ones responding immediately to a general enquiry are either new or have capacity for a reason. Allow four to six weeks to engage a strong local provider for a tier two or tier three role, and ask accountants and bookkeepers for referrals before you start searching, because that is how most of these arrangements are actually formed here.

Regional South Australian businesses have one advantage worth using. Remote administrative support removes the geography problem entirely for a business at Port Lincoln, Mount Gambier, Whyalla or Renmark, where hiring an experienced administrator locally can be genuinely difficult. A Port Augusta operator can engage an Adelaide provider for tier three work and an offshore team for processing, and pay no premium for distance at all. That is a real structural change for regional operators and it is underused outside the larger regional centres. It does depend on a connection that holds up, which for many properties means a satellite installation.

Business name and licensing administration runs through Consumer and Business Services in this state, and an assistant handling renewals, registrations or licence conditions needs to be working from South Australian requirements, not generic national guidance. Occupational licences in particular differ between states in both scope and renewal cycle, and a missed renewal is a trading problem rather than a paperwork one.

Administrative Support Rates by South Australian Region

Remote work has flattened administrative rates across the state more than it has flattened trade rates, but the differences that remain are real and they follow local demand instead of distance. The table sets out what Australian providers charge in each region, what a sensible blended arrangement costs, and the local factor that most often shapes the engagement.

The blended column is the one worth reading closely, because it describes what most businesses actually end up with instead of a single rate. A forty hour month built from eight Australian hours at tier three and thirty-two offshore hours at tier one costs far less than forty Australian hours and produces better results than forty offshore hours. The range inside each region reflects how much of that forty sits onshore.

Rates at the top of the table are driven by the kind of work more than the postcode. The CBD and defence precinct figures are higher because the administrative work in those sectors carries documentation, procurement and security requirements that cannot be handed to the cheapest available option. A business in Elizabeth doing the same work pays the same premium, and a professional practice in the CBD doing straightforward reception work pays the lower figure.

Regional figures sit in a narrower band than trade pricing does and the reason is worth stating plainly. Nobody is driving anywhere, so there is no travel component to recover and no regional surcharge to argue about. What does vary is local supply, and in the Mid North, the Yorke Peninsula and the pastoral districts the thin local market pushes businesses toward Adelaide or offshore providers by default and not by choice.

Two local factors in the last column change the arrangement more than the price. The vintage and harvest entries mean a flat retainer is the wrong instrument, and a baseline with an agreed surge rate is the right one. The connectivity entry for the far north is a practical constraint and not a cost one, and it is the reason a satellite connection is often the enabling piece for remote administrative work on a pastoral property rather than the assistant themselves. Properties running several devices over a long distance usually need mesh networking work as well.

What to Look Out For in an Administrative VA Quote

Quotes in this category are harder to compare than trade quotes because the deliverable is hours instead of an outcome, and two providers quoting the same hourly rate can represent very different value. The questions below separate them, and most of them can be asked in a twenty minute call.

Ask first who is actually going to be doing the work each week. A provider quoting an Australian rate who intends to subcontract the work offshore is not necessarily a problem, but you need to know, because it changes the privacy position, the supervision question and what you should be paying. Ask directly whether the person on the call is the person doing the work, and if not, whether you will meet them. A provider who will not answer that has told you something.

Ask what happens when they are sick or on leave. An independent Australian assistant on a twenty hour retainer has no backup by definition, and for tier one work that is survivable while for a daily inbox or a reception line it is not. Agencies and small teams carry cover and charge for it. Decide which of your tasks genuinely cannot wait a week, because that answer determines whether you can use a sole operator at all. Providers who build a social presence into the retainer are really selling social media management, which is priced separately.

Ask how time is recorded and what counts as billable. Reasonable providers track in Toggl, Harvest or their own system and will send a summary with the invoice. The specific things to clarify are whether brief interruptions are rounded up, whether reading your instructions is billed, and whether unused retainer hours roll over. Rollover is the one that varies most: some providers roll unused hours for one month, some forfeit them, and over a year that difference is significant.

Ask for the setup proposal as well as the rate. A provider who has thought about the work will tell you what they need from you in week one, how long they expect the handover to take, and which of your tasks they would document first. Anybody who simply confirms an hourly rate and availability has not engaged with your business, and the first month will reflect that.

On the written terms, four clauses matter and the rest is boilerplate. A confidentiality clause covering your clients' information, not only yours. A clause assigning ownership of work product to you, which matters for documentation, templates and anything written. Notice period on both sides, where two to four weeks is normal and anything longer deserves a question. And for offshore arrangements, the clause committing the provider to handle personal information consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles.

Be alert to three things that signal trouble. A rate well below the band for Australian-based work, which usually means the work is being done elsewhere than stated. Pressure toward a long minimum term, where three months is reasonable and twelve is not for an untested arrangement. And an unwillingness to start with a paid trial of ten or fifteen hours, which costs you little and tells you most of what you need to know. Good providers welcome a trial because it works in their favour too. Ask too how they expect technical faults on their end to be handled, since remote IT support is their problem rather than yours.

Finally, keep the dispute path in mind before you need it. Small business disputes with Australian providers can be referred to the small business ombudsman, which provides assistance and low-cost mediation for exactly this kind of disagreement. Misleading claims about a service, including misrepresented qualifications or location of staff, fall under Australian Consumer Law and sit with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission alongside the state regulator. Neither route helps if the agreement was never written down, which is the usual situation and the reason most of these disputes end badly.

Getting Administrative VA Quotes Across South Australia

The quotes you get back are only as good as the brief you send out, and in this category the brief is a list of tasks and not a description of a role. Write out the twelve to twenty recurring things you want handed over, put a frequency and a rough time against each, and mark which ones need an Australian voice or Australian knowledge. That single page will produce comparable quotes from providers who have actually understood the job, and it will tell you how many hours you need instead of leaving you to guess. The same brief works for the wider virtual assistant category if you are still deciding what you need.

Get three quotes and make sure they are not three of the same thing. One independent Adelaide provider, one Australian agency with offshore staff, and one direct offshore arrangement will give you three different structures to compare instead of three variations on the same rate. The comparison is rarely close once you look at cover, supervision and what the first month involves, and the cheapest quote is frequently the one that costs most by March.

Start with fewer hours than you think you need and build from there. Ten hours a month on documented tier one and tier two work tests the relationship at low cost, and almost every successful arrangement in this category grew from something modest before scaling up. Expand once the documentation exists and the assistant has demonstrated they handle exceptions sensibly, and expect that to take two to three months rather than two to three weeks.

Review the arrangement at ninety days against the task list you started with. What has actually been handed over, what is still sitting with you, what the assistant is doing that was never in scope, and whether the hours match the invoice. Businesses that run that review keep these arrangements going for years. The ones that skip it tend to drift into paying a good rate for the wrong work, which is the quiet way this category stops being worth it. Where a hardware fault is what keeps stalling the work, computer repair is the cheaper fix.