iVvy Virtual Assistant: a VA who answers the function enquiry while it's still hot

A function enquiry has a shelf life measured in hours. The bride, the EA organising the conference, the club member planning a 60th: they’ve sent the same enquiry to three venues, and the one that comes back first with real availability and a priced proposal is suddenly the front-runner. iVvy, built on the Gold Coast in 2009 and now running the events pipeline in venues across Australia, exists to make that speed possible. It captures the lead, holds the diary, builds the proposal, generates the BEO and raises the invoice.

What it can’t do is be the person. In most venues that person is the events manager, who is also running tonight’s function, or the owner, who is also doing everything else. So enquiries sit for two days, tentative holds clog the diary for months, and BEOs describe the menu the client wanted in March, not the one they changed to in May. You search “ivvy virtual assistant” because the software is fine and the pipeline is starving.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your iVvy

The morning pass starts with leads. Everything that landed overnight, from the enquiry widget on your website, from your iVvy Marketplace listing, from emails forwarded into the system, gets opened, checked against the function diary for the requested date and space, and answered the same business day. Not with a holding line, with substance: availability confirmed or alternatives offered, the qualifying questions asked (guest numbers, budget range, sit-down or cocktail, catering expectations), and the lead staged in the pipeline so you can see at a glance what’s live, what’s warm and what’s stalling.

Qualified enquiries become proposals. Your VA builds them in iVvy from the packages and menus you’ve already configured, priced per person or as room hire plus catering the way your venue actually sells, branded properly, and sent for online acceptance. When the client says yes, the contract goes out for electronic signature, and here’s the unglamorous part that wins revenue: it gets chased. Signed contracts don’t come back because clients are eager, they come back because someone followed up on day three and day seven without being asked.

Then the diary itself. A function diary is only useful if it tells the truth, and the thing that makes it lie is the tentative hold. Your VA enters holds with decision dates, contacts the client before the date arrives, and either converts the booking or releases the space. That last one matters more than it sounds: a Saturday in November held by a couple who ghosted you in July is a Saturday you can’t sell to the couple ringing today. Dead holds get cleared; the diary stays honest.

Once a booking confirms, the event order becomes the living document. iVvy generates BEOs from the booking’s sessions, menus, room setup and AV requirements, and your VA keeps them matched to reality as the client does what clients do: changes the start time, swaps the alternate drop for a buffet, adds a data projector, remembers three coeliacs the week before. Final numbers get chased at your cutoff, dietaries get recorded in the order rather than in someone’s memory, and the updated BEO is redistributed to the kitchen and operations team before your weekly BEO meeting, so the chef is never cooking from last month’s version.

Money runs on the same discipline. Each confirmed booking gets its payment schedule set up in iVvy, deposit due on signing, balance due before the event, however your terms read. Invoices are raised from the booking and synced through to your accounts package (iVvy connects to Xero and MYOB), and the deposit chase runs on a written cadence you’ve approved, in your venue’s voice. A function that arrives unpaid is a hospitality tradition nobody enjoys; a weekly sweep of outstanding schedules mostly retires it.

Weekly, the wider passes: pipeline hygiene, so lost enquiries are closed with a reason and your conversion numbers mean something; duplicate contacts and companies merged; and the calendar of repeat business worked, because the association that held its AGM with you last August and the firm that booked last year’s Christmas party are the warmest leads you own, and iVvy has the history sitting right there. A three-line email in June (“we’ve pencilled your date, shall we hold it?”) books Christmas functions that would otherwise go to whichever venue emailed first in October.

The same weekly slot covers reporting, because iVvy’s reports are only as good as the data discipline behind them. With enquiries staged properly and losses closed with reasons, your VA can pull the numbers a venue actually needs before the Monday meeting: pipeline value by status, conversion by lead source (so you finally know whether the Marketplace, the website widget or word of mouth is paying for itself), and forward function revenue by month. None of that is analysis the VA invents; it’s iVvy’s own reporting, finally trustworthy because someone keeps the inputs clean. Most venue owners have never seen their real enquiry-to-booking conversion rate. It’s usually a confronting number, and it’s the one that tells you where the money is leaking.

The Marketplace listing nobody owns

The iVvy Marketplace is a real channel: corporate planners and agencies search it, compare venues, and send RFPs, sometimes to a dozen venues at once. Two things decide whether that channel feeds you. The first is the listing itself, and in most venues it was set up once and never touched, so the capacities are right but the photos are three renovations old and one package still shows 2023 pricing. Your VA keeps it current. The second is RFP response time, and it’s brutal: a planner comparing twelve venues has usually shortlisted within a day or two, so an RFP answered on Thursday for an enquiry that arrived Monday was answered for practice. Same-business-day responses, with live availability, are the whole game.

The honest bit

iVvy will not answer an enquiry for you. The Marketplace and your website widget are excellent at capturing leads and terrible at replying to them; every minute of your response-time advantage is a human being at a keyboard, and if nobody owns that job, buying better software just means losing functions with better record-keeping.

Tentative holds don’t chase themselves either. iVvy will hold the space and show the decision date, but the phone call that converts or releases the hold is someone’s task, and in venues without a dedicated coordinator it is usually nobody’s.

The BEO is only as true as its last edit. Clients change details by phone, at site visits and in reply-all threads, and none of that reaches iVvy on its own. A BEO meeting run off stale event orders is theatre; the value is in the person who captures every change the day it happens.

And iVvy is the sales and catering layer, not the whole stack. If you’re a hotel, your PMS still owns the bedrooms, and while iVvy handles group accommodation blocks alongside function space, keeping the two systems agreeing about the same conference is reconciliation work, not magic. Same with the till: unless you run one of the two POS systems iVvy actually integrates with (Bepoz or Swiftpos), your restaurant POS and iVvy don’t finish each other’s sentences. A VA who knows where the seams are is worth more than software pretending there aren’t any.

What stays with you

Pricing power, first and always. The VA quotes from the packages, menus and rates you’ve configured in iVvy; they don’t set them, discount them or negotiate off them without your written say-so. Contract terms, cancellation policy and any deviation from them are owner calls. Anything touching your liquor licence, licensed hours, capacity limits or RSA obligations is escalated, never improvised: an enquiry asking for a 2am finish or an 18th birthday gets flagged to you with context, not creatively accommodated. Finance settings, refunds and credit decisions stay yours, and iVvy’s module permissions mean the VA’s user group can’t reach venue configuration or rate setup even accidentally. Site visits, tastings and the handshake moments of selling a venue remain with your team; the VA’s job is filling that calendar, not replacing it.

What it costs and where to start

iVvy pipeline work sits on the admin tier: $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, and most venues land at 10-15 hours a week, roughly $500-1,100 a month, for enquiry response, proposals, the diary, BEOs and deposit chasing. Placement takes 7-10 business days, with the first 5-7 days supervised inside your iVvy, enquiries and the function diary first, event orders and payment schedules once those are running clean. There’s a $500 refundable deposit that comes off your first month, a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and no lock-in beyond 14 days notice.

If you want the wider picture first, the hospitality page covers how venues use VAs beyond the events desk, the quote preparation page goes deeper on the proposal side, and the invoice chasing page covers the deposit cadence. Pricing in full detail is in the VA cost guide. Or skip ahead and book a discovery call: Jenn takes every one, and if your function volume doesn’t justify a placement yet, she’ll tell you that too.