When your assistants work across several clients at once, keeping everyone in the loop usually means a lot of checking in. Virtalent found a way around that.

Overview

Virtalent runs a fully remote team of virtual assistants. Most of them support several clients at the same time. That makes tracking time more than an admin task. When you sell an assistant's hours, knowing exactly where those hours went is the whole business.

Challenge

Before Apploye, Virtalent had a hard time tracking hours accurately and seeing how work was going across different client accounts. Assistants worked on their own, from home, often for several clients in a single day. There was no shared record of how that day broke down.

So the company did what most remote teams do: it asked. The operations team followed up with assistants to find out how things were progressing, and assistants wrote up their own work by hand. It worked, but it took time from both sides, and once the conversation ended, there was nothing left to look back on.

“Before using it, it was difficult to accurately track work hours and monitor productivity across multiple client accounts.”

— Sam W., Co-CEO, Virtalent

Solution

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Virtalent brought time tracking, employee monitoring, and reporting in a single platform.

Using Apploye, hours get recorded as the work happens, against the client project it belongs to. The operations team can see how tasks are moving using the screen monitoring and internet usage tracking features without stopping an assistant to ask. Also, client and project activity is right there to look at, instead of something assistants have to write up.

Getting the team on board was straightforward. Sam points out that the dashboard is easy to follow even for people who aren't technical. This was helpful because his team is made up of generalist assistants, not analysts.

“Automatic screenshots, app usage tracking and detailed timesheets improved accountability and cut down the manual reporting our team had to do.”

The Results

More accountability, less paperwork.

Usually those two move in opposite directions. More oversight means more forms to fill in. However, at Virtalent it went the other way. The reports that Apploye provided turned out to be the same record assistants had been writing up by hand.

The operations team got the visibility it used to chase. Nobody has to ask how the day is going, because the answer is already there.