Tradify Virtual Assistant: a VA who runs the office while you stay on the tools

It’s 9:40 on a Tuesday night and you’re quoting. Not because you enjoy quoting at 9:40pm, but because the daylight hours were for the tools, and the Enquiries inbox has three jobs in it that won’t price themselves. That’s who searches “tradify virtual assistant”: not the curious, the buried. This page is the way out of the after-dinner admin shift.

Tradify earns its place in the van. For a crew of one to ten it’s the right amount of software: enquiries in, quotes out, jobs on the Scheduler, timesheets against jobs, invoices synced straight to Xero, MYOB or QuickBooks, no implementation consultant required. The catch is the same as every job management platform: it organises the admin, it doesn’t do the admin. Someone still has to turn the enquiry into a quote, the quote into a booked job, and the finished job into money.

The weekly rhythm a VA runs in your Tradify

Each morning starts with the Enquiries inbox, a Pro-plan feature and a fair chunk of the reason to be on Pro. Everything that hit your enquiries forwarding address overnight, plus whatever came through the web enquiry form, gets triaged: customer created, details confirmed, then actioned into a quote or an appointment from the Enquiry Actions button. In trades the first decent quote usually wins the job, so getting yours out the same day instead of Thursday is the single most profitable habit on this page.

Quotes get built from your Price List (kits as well, if you’re on Plus), sent for your sign-off, and, crucially, marked as sent. That last click matters: Tradify’s automatic quote reminders only fire on quotes marked as sent, an email at 7 days, another at 14, and a last nudge three days before the quote expires. Your VA arms the automation, then does the part it can’t: the phone call on day ten, the re-quote when one expires quietly, the note about why the customer hesitated.

Accepted quotes become jobs, jobs get booked into the Scheduler against the right person, appointment reminder texts go out at 20 cents a message, which is considerably cheaper than a no-show, and subbies get slotted in on the Pro plan and up.

Then money. The day a job is marked done, the invoice goes, progress invoices on the long ones, everything syncing through the accounting integration so nothing is keyed twice, and overdue invoices chased on a schedule you’ve 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 timesheet CSV exported for payroll, because Tradify hands timesheets to your accounting or payroll software rather than paying anyone itself.

And the slow-burn one nobody ever gets to: the Price List. Supplier price files actually imported, pricing levels checked, kits rebuilt, so your March quotes aren’t going out on last winter’s copper.

The honest bit

Two things before you hand over a login. Tradify’s staff permissions are module toggles, not roles. A new user starts on the Basic default, Jobs and Timesheets, and you switch on Enquiries, Quoting, Invoicing, Scheduling & Dispatch or Purchases to match the work. The toggles are all-or-nothing: Quoting shows every quote and every Price List, kit and cost value in the account, Invoicing and Purchases expose item values and costs the same way, and there’s no read-only mode. If your VA quotes and invoices, they see your margins. Plenty of office managers see margins, so it’s workable, but it’s a decision, not a default, and it’s noticeably coarser than the security groups you’d get in Simpro.

Second: the seat and the plan both cost real money. Tradify charges per user, $48 to $62 AUD a month ex GST depending on plan, and nearly everything on this page, the Enquiries inbox, quote reminders, timesheets, the reminder texts, starts on the $52 Pro plan, with kits and purchase orders sitting up on Plus. On Lite, this rhythm simply isn’t there to run. Budget the licence next to the hours.

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; you set the prices and approve anything unusual. Anything technical a customer asks gets escalated to you under a written rule, because nobody wants admin guessing at compliance questions. And three toggles stay off permanently: Settings, Staff Members, and Subscription & Billing, the one that could change your plan.

One more honest thing: if you’re heading past ten on the tools, or into projects with progress claims and cost centres, Tradify will start to pinch. Heavier checklists and automation is ServiceM8 territory; full-scale operations is Simpro country. Bigger crew, heavier ops, we’ve written those pages too.

What this costs and how it starts

The work on this page is admin-tier ($12-17/hr AUD + GST), and a crew under ten 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 Tradify, 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. If the 9:40pm quoting sounded familiar, book a discovery call with Jenn. She’s placed 48+ VAs since 2024, all into Australian businesses, and will say so, kindly but plainly, if you’re not ready for one. Bring the open quotes list and the aged receivables; that’s where the hours are hiding.