Fergus Virtual Assistant: a VA who keeps the Status Board moving

Nobody searches “fergus virtual assistant” for fun. You search it because the Status Board has fourteen jobs spread across it, three of them stuck in the Pricing column because you have not had a spare half hour to send the quote, two more sitting in In Progress weeks after they were finished, and the back costing on the last big job is still a pile of supplier invoices you keep meaning to reconcile. The software is doing its part. The person who is meant to drive it is you, between site visits.

Fergus earns its place. For a crew of one to twenty it is the right depth: jobs flow left to right across the Status Board, quotes built off supplier price books, scheduling that drags onto a calendar, back costing that catches the blowouts, and invoicing that syncs straight to Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks. It is properly built software. The catch is the same as every job management platform: it organises the admin, it does not do the admin. Something still has to turn the enquiry into a priced quote, the accepted quote into a scheduled job, and the finished job into a correctly costed invoice.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Fergus

It starts with the Status Board, because the board is the business. Jobs that should have moved get moved: quotes you have sent pushed out of Pricing, accepted work dragged into Scheduling, finished jobs pulled through to invoicing. A board kept honest is a board you can actually read at a glance, instead of a wall of jobs in the wrong columns that tells you nothing.

Then quotes. Your VA builds them off your Price List and the connected supplier price books, labour and materials laid out the way you price, then hands the draft to you to set the rate and send. The VA assembles every line; you put the number on it. In trades the first decent quote usually wins the work, so getting yours out the same day instead of Friday is the single most profitable habit on this page.

Accepted quotes become scheduled jobs, booked onto the calendar against the right tradesperson, the week routed so the travel makes sense, and the team notified so nobody turns up to a job they did not know about. Notes, photos, certificates and compliance documents get filed against the right job as they come in, so the job card is complete when you open it rather than half-empty.

Then the part almost no one on the tools ever reaches: back costing. The day a job wraps, your VA matches the supplier invoices against it and reconciles the estimated cost against what it actually cost, so a blowout shows up before you invoice, not after. Get that right and the invoice that follows is the real number. The invoice goes out the day the job is marked complete, progress claims on the long ones, everything syncing through to your accounting software so nothing is keyed twice, and overdue invoices chased on a schedule you have approved in writing.

Friday is timesheets: missing entries hunted down while the week is still rememberable, hours against the right jobs so the costing means something, and the export ready for whoever runs payroll.

The honest bit

One thing before you hand over a login. Back costing only protects your margin if someone actually does it, and it is the first job that gets dropped when the owner is also the estimator, the scheduler and the person on the tools. That is exactly why it belongs in a VA’s scope rather than on a list of things you will get to. The Status Board is the same story: it does not move jobs by itself, it shows you where they are stuck, and a board nobody maintains slowly stops meaning anything. Both of these are work, not magic, which is the entire reason this page exists.

And budget the seat. Fergus charges per user, so the VA’s login is a real line on the bill, not a free reception seat. It is worth it when the hours it frees up are back on the tools or in front of a customer, but go in knowing it is there.

What stays with you

Your rates, your margins, what a job should cost and whether to take it. The VA assembles quotes from the Price List and supplier price books; you set the prices and approve anything unusual before it goes out. Anything technical or compliance-related a customer asks gets escalated to you under a written rule, because nobody wants admin guessing at a regulated question. And the controls that can change your business stay switched off: subscription and billing, company settings, and the ability to add or remove other users never go to a VA placement.

The good news on confidentiality is that Fergus gives you a real lever. Each user gets a set of permission checkboxes you tick per person, including a specific control for whether they can see financial information. Want the VA running scheduling and job admin with no view of your costs? Leave that box unchecked. Want them quoting and back costing? Then the financial view is on, the same as it would be for any office manager. It is a decision you make on the way in, not a default you discover later.

Where Fergus sits, and where the VA fits either side

Fergus is a notch above the simplest tools, with proper job costing and back costing built in, which is why it suits crews running up to around twenty in the field. If you have outgrown a lighter platform, Tradify is the simpler end of the same idea, and if you are pushing into large multi-stage projects with heavy cost centres and progress claims, Simpro is the full operations platform built for that scale. We place VAs into all of them, and the rhythm barely changes across the lot, quote, schedule, deliver, cost, invoice, chase, which is exactly why the role survives a platform move.

What this costs and how it starts

The work on this page is admin-tier ($12-17/hr AUD excl GST), and a crew under twenty typically needs about 10 hours of it a week; add more if the phone needs answering as well. From discovery call to start date runs 7-10 business days, the first week of it supervised in your own Fergus, backed by our 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, a refundable $500 deposit that comes off month one, and 14 days notice if you ever want out.

The trades page has the wider industry picture, and the VA cost guide has the full pricing breakdown. If the stuck Status Board sounded familiar, book a discovery call with Jenn. She has placed 48+ VAs since 2024, all into Australian businesses, and will tell you plainly if you are not ready for one. Bring the jobs sitting in Pricing and the aged receivables; that is where the hours are hiding.