101 tasks to outsource to a virtual assistant (the honest Australian list)

Every VA agency publishes one of these lists, and most are padded to hit the round number: vague entries like “business strategy support” that no client has ever actually delegated. This one follows a stricter rule. Every task below is something we genuinely place VAs to do, pulled from our live task pages, role scopes and industry placements across 48+ Australian businesses since 2024. Where a task has a guardrail, the guardrail is in the sentence, because the guardrail is the difference between delegation and a mess.

One piece of honesty before the list: nobody outsources 101 tasks. The realistic delegation surface for a single business is 10-15 of these, done properly, by one dedicated VA working 15-20 hours a week. If you are starting from zero, read The three tasks every Australian founder should delegate first, then come back and build your shortlist. If you are new to the whole idea, the first VA playbook covers hiring, cost and the legal bits end to end.

Right. All 101, grouped the way we actually scope them.

Inbox + email

The fastest payback category in every placement, and where we start most new clients.

1. Inbox triage. The VA reads everything, archives the noise, and surfaces the five or so emails that genuinely need you, so you stop digging through 200 to find them. Full breakdown on the inbox management page.
2. Routine reply drafting. The five or six replies you send on repeat become templates the VA personalises in your voice, and you keep the send button on anything sensitive until trust is built.
3. Labelling and routing. Every email tagged by type (client, supplier, finance, internal) and forwarded to whoever owns it, so threads stop dying in your inbox.
4. Unsubscribe and noise control. Newsletters culled, spam filtered, recurring senders sorted under rules you set once and never think about again.
5. Client onboarding email sequences. Welcome emails, document requests and kickoff scheduling sent on a cadence, with polite chasing of whatever is missing. See client onboarding emails.
6. Document chasing. Structured request lists out, follow-ups on a 3-5-7 day cadence, documents filed when they land and you notified when the file is complete. The bread and butter of our accounting firm placements.
7. Shared inbox management. Your info@ and support@ addresses cleared daily under your templates, with escalation rules written down rather than assumed.
8. End-of-day inbox summary. A short note each evening: what was handled, what is waiting on you, anything unusual.

Calendar + scheduling

Your VA owns your time before you spend it.

9. Diary ownership. Bookings, reschedules, buffers between calls and a daily agenda, covered in full on the calendar management page.
10. Meeting prep and agenda circulation. Agendas out the morning of, briefing notes attached, action items chased afterwards.
11. Booking-link management. Calendly and CRM booking flows kept current, confirmations and reschedules handled without you touching them.
12. Confirmation and reminder sequences. SMS and email reminders staged before every appointment, the standard tool for cutting no-shows.
13. No-show recovery. Every missed appointment followed up same-day and rebooked, instead of shrugged at and lost.
14. Focus-block defence. Your deep-work blocks protected against meeting creep, with requests filtered against rules you write down once.
15. Timezone juggling. Interstate and international calls scheduled without the 11pm accident, double-booking prevention included.
16. Cancellation backfill. A short-notice gap filled from the waitlist within the hour rather than left empty, standard practice in our clinic and salon placements.

Money: AR, AP + bookkeeping

The category with the strictest guardrails, and the clearest cash-flow payoff.

17. Bank reconciliation in Xero. Daily recs and coding queries drafted for your confirmation by a bookkeeping-tier VA. Where the VA stops and a registered BAS agent starts is spelled out on the Xero bookkeeping page.
18. Invoice issuing. Invoices out same-day or at project milestones, not in a guilty Sunday-night batch.
19. Invoice chasing. A 7/14/21/30-day AR cadence with polite-but-firm scripts, and payment plans flagged to you before anything is agreed. See invoice chasing.
20. Accounts payable. The VA preps the payment run, matches invoices to orders and schedules the batch; you release the payments. Full scope on the accounts payable page.
21. Receipt capture and expense categorisation. Receipts into Dext or your capture tool, GST coding against a clean chart of accounts, month-end tidy included. See expense categorisation.
22. Payroll support. Pay runs prepared in Xero Payroll or Employment Hero Payroll (formerly KeyPay) for your review; nothing is ever paid without your approval.
23. BAS preparation. Figures prepped under registered BAS agent supervision. This is bookkeeper scope, never a general admin task.
24. Monthly P&L and cashflow reports. The numbers in front of you on the first of the month, not whenever you remember to ask.
25. Year-end prep for your accountant. The pack your accountant actually wants, assembled before they have to chase you for it.
26. Quote preparation. Quotes drafted from your price list and templates, sent only after your sign-off, and every quote logged so the follow-up below actually happens. See quote preparation.
27. Quote follow-up. Every open quote chased at day 3, day 7 and day 14 with templates that match your voice, because most quotes are not lost, they are just never followed up.

Customer service

First-line handled, exceptions escalated, and you stop being the help desk.

28. Helpdesk ticket triage. First response in Zendesk, Gorgias or Freshdesk under your macros, SLAs watched, anything novel escalated. See customer support tickets.
29. Live chat first response. Chat answered on your Australian hours by your dedicated VA, not a rotating offshore pool.
30. Refunds and returns. Processed within your written policy bounds, with anything outside policy escalated rather than improvised.
31. Order status and delivery tracking. “Where’s my order?” answered with the tracking actually checked and exceptions chased with the 3PL, a staple of our ecommerce placements.
32. Complaint escalation routing. Sensitive complaints flagged to you immediately with the full thread attached, never answered on the fly.
33. Macro and template maintenance. Your saved replies kept current as products and policies change, so the templates never go stale.
34. Knowledge base updates. Help articles written and refreshed from real tickets, so the same question stops arriving.
35. Phone answering. A dedicated virtual receptionist on your number during AU business hours, taking messages and booking appointments straight into your calendar.

Social media + content

Delegable, with one caveat: production first, voice later. A new VA should not own your brand voice in week one.

36. Social media scheduling. Posts queued in Later or Buffer against an agreed calendar, captions and hashtags prepped. See social media scheduling.
37. Content calendar planning. A monthly plan you approve once, instead of a daily “what do we post” scramble.
38. Caption and copy drafting. Written in your tone of voice and sent for sign-off, with your corrections training the VA week by week.
39. Community management. Comments, DMs and brand mentions answered under your tone guide, anything heated escalated to you.
40. Hashtag research and competitor tracking. The unglamorous research layer that makes the posting schedule worth running.
41. Canva production. Your brand kit turned into social tiles, carousels, decks and flyers on a steady cadence. The production-versus-design line is drawn honestly on the Canva design production page.
42. Newsletter production. Drafted from your brief, formatted in Beehiiv, Mailchimp or Kit (formerly ConvertKit), segmented, scheduled, and the opens and clicks reported back. See newsletter production.
43. Podcast editing. Audio cleanup in Descript, show notes, chaptering and clips repurposed for social. See podcast editing.
44. Review responses. Every Google and Tripadvisor review answered within 48 hours under your tone guide, negatives escalated to you first. A fixture of our hospitality and beauty placements.

Marketing + lead gen

Specialist-tier work: the VA runs the machine, you own the strategy.

45. Cold email outreach. List building, sequence setup in Instantly or Smartlead, deliverability warmup and Spam Act 2003 compliance, reply triage included. See cold email outreach.
46. LinkedIn prospecting. ICP lists built in Sales Navigator, connection and follow-up cadences run without tripping LinkedIn’s limits, every touch logged to your CRM. See LinkedIn prospecting.
47. Lead list building. Ideal customer profile lists built and verified in Apollo or similar, the raw material every outbound campaign runs on.
48. Reply triage and qualification. Outbound replies sorted into interested, not-now and never, with the interested ones qualified against your script.
49. Speed-to-lead response. Inbound enquiries answered within minutes during business hours, because the first responder usually wins the job.
50. Sales call booking. Qualified leads booked straight into your calendar with confirmations and reminders attached.
51. Keyword research and on-page SEO. Research in Ahrefs or Semrush plus on-page edits, executed to a brief you approve.
52. Email campaign production. Campaigns built, segmented and scheduled in Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp from your approved copy.
53. Marketing reporting. GA4 dashboards maintained and a monthly performance report that tells you what actually moved.

Websites + tech

If you have ever paid an agency $180 to change a paragraph, this section is for you.

54. Website content updates. Someone to update your website when prices, team members or services change, on a same-week turnaround. See website updates.
55. Blog publishing. Posts formatted, internally linked, imaged and published in WordPress, Webflow or Shopify, with QA before they go live.
56. WordPress maintenance. Plugin updates, daily backups with restore testing, and security hardening, the core of a WordPress developer VA’s week.
57. Shopify theme tweaks. Liquid edits, section changes and app configuration handled by a web developer VA instead of sitting in an agency queue.
58. Site performance tuning. Caching, image optimisation and Core Web Vitals work that makes the site measurably faster.
59. Tier-1 tech support. Ticket triage, bug reproduction with console logs, and structured escalation to your engineers, a standing tech support VA scope.
60. Landing page and A/B test setup. Pages built from your templates and tests configured with tracking that actually fires.
61. Technical SEO implementation. Schema markup, redirects and crawl fixes implemented to a written specification.

Documents + SOPs

The operational layer. Item 62 is the one that makes the other hundred possible.

62. SOP documentation. How-you-do-it turned into written SOPs with Loom walkthroughs, checklists and version control. See SOP documentation.
63. Meeting minutes. Transcripts cleaned up, action items extracted, minutes distributed same-day. See meeting minutes.
64. Data entry. CRM, spreadsheet and PMS entry with dedup and accuracy checks, realistic error rates and all. See data entry.
65. CRM hygiene. Dedup, enrichment, tagging and pipeline tidying in HubSpot, Pipedrive or Salesforce, so your reports stop lying to you. See CRM hygiene.
66. Document formatting and proofing. Agreements, proposals and reports formatted to your house style and proofed for typos and clause numbering.
67. Dictation to done. Your voice memos typed into file notes, letters and emails formatted to your precedents and filed to the matter, a staple of our law firm placements.
68. Board pack and investor update assembly. Compiled and circulated on schedule, with your numbers and your narrative; the VA assembles, you author.

Hiring + HR admin

A VA cannot pick your people, but they can run the funnel around the picking.

69. Job ad drafting and posting. Job descriptions drafted from your brief and posted to SEEK, LinkedIn and Indeed.
70. Candidate sourcing. LinkedIn Recruiter searches and outreach run to your criteria by a recruitment assistant.
71. First-screen calls. Fifteen-minute culture and scope checks, so only real candidates reach your diary.
72. Interview scheduling. Multi-stakeholder interview logistics handled without the eleven-email thread.
73. ATS hygiene and reference checks. Greenhouse, Lever or Workable kept current, reference calls coordinated and documented.
74. Templated offer letters and onboarding packs. Drafted from your templates for your review; the offer decision is always yours.

Industry-specific: health, trades, property, fitness

Each of these comes straight from a live industry placement. The links go to the full scope, software and guardrails for that industry.

75. NDIS claiming and plan tracking. Claims through the myplace provider portal and PACE, reconciled against plan budgets, with plans nearing expiry or exhaustion flagged before they bite. See VAs for NDIS providers.
76. Medicare billing admin. Bulk-bill batch lodgement, rejected-claim rework and DVA claims through your practice software. See VAs for medical practices.
77. Patient recall and reactivation. Overdue-recall and lapsed-patient lists worked daily by phone, SMS and email, with every clinical question escalated to the practitioner. See VAs for dental practices.
78. Allied health intake admin. Referrals acknowledged same-day, consent and plan documents collected, files set up in Splose or Cliniko before the first session. See VAs for allied health.
79. Clinical report formatting. Assessment and progress reports formatted from your dictation, with version control and signature chasing; the clinical content stays yours. See VAs for occupational therapists.
80. Better Access session tracking. Valid referrals confirmed before the first session, session counts tracked against the annual cap, GP review letters flagged when due. See VAs for psychologists.
81. Trades job scheduling and compliance certs. Call-outs slotted into your calendar with travel time and job notes attached, certificates of compliance lodged on time and filed. See VAs for trades.
82. Loan processing support. ApplyOnline data entry, document collection and daily lender chasing through to formal approval, the full loan processor scope for mortgage brokers.
83. Conveyancing file admin. PEXA workspace preparation, searches ordered and chased, critical dates entered with reminders set and every one flagged to you for confirmation. See VAs for conveyancers.
84. Property management arrears and renewals. The daily arrears run on the PM’s desk by 10am, and lease expiries worked from 90 days out. See VAs for property management.
85. Real estate enquiry and OFI follow-up. Portal enquiries answered fast and every open-home attendee called within 24 hours, qualified and fed into your CRM. See VAs for real estate.
86. Studio booking and membership admin. Class bookings, waitlists, membership changes and failed-payment follow-up handled between sessions in Mindbody, Momence or your booking tool. See VAs for gyms, Pilates and yoga studios.
87. Adviser review pack preparation. Annual review packs assembled to your template in Xplan, fee consents tracked and chased before the deadline bites; the advice itself never leaves the adviser. See VAs for financial advisers.

Personal + travel

The category founders feel guiltiest about delegating, and the one their families notice first.

88. Travel booking end-to-end. Flights, accommodation and ground transport booked to your preferences, domestic and international. See travel booking.
89. Itineraries and calendar holds. TripIt itineraries built and every leg blocked in your calendar before you ask.
90. Contingency rebooking. When the 6am flight is cancelled, your VA is rebooking while you are still in the taxi queue.
91. Personal admin. Registrations, renewals and appointments handled by a personal assistant VA, so they stop living in your head.
92. Gift shortlists and important dates. Anniversaries, client milestones and birthdays tracked, with shortlists prepared well in advance.
93. Family logistics. Where you want it in scope: shared calendars, school-term dates and the weekly activity shuffle.
94. The follow-up list. Everything you are owed, tracked and chased on schedule, so nothing depends on you remembering.

AI-augmented tasks

Every DotVA VA does AI training in week one (Claude Pro, ChatGPT Plus, Claude Code), so these are standard scope now. One rule runs through all of them: AI drafts, a human verifies.

95. AI research briefs. Claude-drafted research turned into sourced, structured briefs, with every claim checked by a human before it reaches you. See AI research briefs.
96. AI-drafted replies, human-sent. First-pass replies generated, then edited against your tone guide; nothing goes out unread.
97. Transcript-to-action pipelines. Meetings transcribed by AI, then cleaned, summarised and turned into task lists by the VA.
98. AI-assisted data work. Bulk cleanup and entry accelerated with AI, with the VA owning the accuracy check the model cannot.
99. AI-first content drafts. Outlines and first drafts generated against your brief, then rewritten by the VA into something that actually sounds like you.
100. Knowledge base assembly. Your scattered SOPs, FAQs and tribal knowledge structured into a searchable knowledge base your team and your tools can both use.
101. Automation upkeep. Your Zapier and Make workflows monitored, broken steps flagged and simple fixes applied before you notice the breakage.

What it costs, and what to do next

Three tiers, no mystery: general admin runs $12-17/hr, specialist work $18-25/hr, and bookkeeping $25-35/hr, all AUD excluding GST. The detail is on /pricing/, and you can model your own hours on the VA cost calculator.

Then turn the list into a shortlist. The industry task audit narrows these 101 down to the 10-15 that fit your business, or you can skip straight to a free discovery call: 30 minutes, no card, and we will tell you honestly which of these tasks you should and should not delegate first. Placement takes 7-10 business days, the $500 deposit is refundable and credited to your first month, and the first 30 days are covered by our recalibrate-or-replace guarantee.