When you are swamped with more work than you can handle or stuck in operational tasks instead of growth activities, hiring a VA becomes incredibly helpful. Delegate the right tasks to them, and it will not only help you work smarter but also free up time for you to rest and focus on other important aspects of your life.
However, delegating tasks to VAs must be done carefully. Not every task belongs on their plate. One moment, you feel relieved after handing something off; the next, you’re regretting ever letting go of the task. When you don’t know what to delegate, you may just put your data and results—even your whole business—at risk.
I’m writing this article to help you avoid mistakes that are difficult and sometimes costly to undo. Below, I’ll share some tasks you should not delegate to virtual assistants and explain why. Read on to strengthen your delegation strategy and protect your business.
Tasks That Require Your Authority Or Decision-Making
For many tasks, you simply can’t transfer accountability to someone else. Setting the vision and direction of your business is a perfect example. They are personal and high-level strategic decisions that shape your business and depend on your own perspective, which can not be replicated by another person, especially a VA who may not fully understand your long-term intentions.
Besides tasks that you must handle yourself, some decisions require your authorization before implementation. These include your business model, long-term priorities, growth strategy, competitive positioning, pricing philosophy, and significant resource allocation choices. Even when you get some help from trusted team members or leadership, the final judgment must always come from you.
Work That Involves Sensitive Financial Access
Bank logins are sensitive information. When someone has full access to them, every single dollar in your accounts is at risk, and this goes beyond the integrity of your VA. Even if your VA is the most disciplined human on the planet, you never know who has access to their devices or what could happen if those devices are compromised. A misplaced phone or a hacked email is enough for your financial information to fall into the wrong hands.
This is why VA should never handle bank logins, and any financial accounts they are allowed to manage must have strict restrictions. They should also not have full control of payroll, as it can contain sensitive information about staff and tax filings.
Large transaction approvals must remain under your control as well. The higher the financial risk, the more important it is that you make the final call. You can leave low-risk financial tasks, like invoicing and reconciling for VAs, but any task with high financial risk should stay firmly on your desk.
Tasks Requiring Deep Expertise You Haven't Documented
Some tasks are not only complex but also require specialized credentials or deep industry knowledge. You may have grown into such tasks, and the processes you use to achieve great results exist only in your head. However, you haven’t documented the processes enough to share with someone else in a way that’s understandable.
If you haven’t clearly documented the task’s process in SOPs, how can you share it with someone else? When a virtual assistant has to figure things out by themselves, they may take the wrong approach or produce work that falls far below your quality standards. This can not only slow your workflow but also damage client relationships. You may even have to work on the task from scratch again, defeating the purpose of hiring a VA in the first place.
Anything That Involves Legal Liability
While some tasks can be done incorrectly and fixed like nothing ever happened, others can get you in trouble with the law. For such tasks, you want to do them by yourself. Signing contracts or legal documents is an example of such tasks. When a VA signs on your behalf, it can be invalid. Alternatively, it can be legally binding in a way that doesn’t favor you.
Other tasks that can affect you legally are responding to legal inquiries on your behalf or handling employee classification and compliance. WorkMotion explains the risks of misclassification to include hefty fines, back taxes, and business disruptions. These tasks require certified professionals to be executed properly and without risk, or should be handled by the business owner themselves, as they understand the risks involved.
Tasks That Define Your Brand Voice Or Public Image
Some tasks are directly tied to your brand voice and public image. They range from personal-brand decisions and media appearances to defining the core brand message and tone. After execution, these tasks reflect who you are or what your business stands for, not your virtual assistant. Because of that, they require your judgment and intentionality.
This principle also applies to communication with key people in your business, such as investors or major partners. A VA can assist with simple customer inquiries or routine communication, but sensitive conversations should be handled by you or trusted in-house staff who understand the full context and stakes involved.
Work That Requires Your Personal Login Or Identity
Many tasks connected to your email and social media feel great to outsource, but if you can’t share access without handing over your personal login details, then you may want to keep those tasks to yourself. Two-factor authentication helps reduce the risk of account sharing, but constantly needing to verify their login attempts slows down your workflow, and transferring 2FA to their devices hands over your digital identity.
Thankfully, it’s possible to share access without giving your VA your login details. Social media apps like Facebook and LinkedIn let you share access to your pages without sharing your account credentials. Also, a remote PC tool like Zoho lets VAs work on your devices without ever seeing your passwords.
Beyond security, when you share personal login details, you are letting the VA into areas of your life that should be kept private—think about your DMs for a minute. Their access to these areas can quickly blur the line between personal and professional boundaries and create unnecessary risks and discomfort.
Final Quality Checks For High-Visibility Projects
When you have major updates or announcements to make, your VA can help draft the text or create images and videos, but they shouldn’t handle the final checks and approvals. A mistake can quickly spread and backfire severely, and the wider the distribution, the harder it is to control the damage to your brand.
Besides announcements, any important content that goes on the front pages of your blogs or designs that are strategically placed to represent your brand should face the same scrutiny. Examples of such content are terms of service or privacy policies.
Tasks You Haven't Properly Tested Or Systemized
New tasks often need some experimentation before they can be performed efficiently. You should first perform the trial-and-error that comes from learning how to perform such tasks, or get someone more familiar with that type of work to do it. When the task has been tested and systemized, it becomes safe to hand it over to VAs.
When delegating tasks to a VA, it should first be systematized. Experimenting with VAs on some tasks can be frustrating for the VA and time-wasting for you. If you pay by the hour, that’s an investment you may never recover if the VA doesn’t figure out how to handle the task efficiently.
Delegate Smartly, Not Blindly
When used rightly, virtual assistants can make an operation smoother and faster. However, knowing what you shouldn’t outsource to virtual assistants and what you should will not only save your finances but also protect the health of your entire operation.
If you must take one thing away from this post, it should be this: that the high-risk and authority stuff are tasks you must handle yourself or leave to the certified professionals, while the repeatable and time-consuming ones go out to VAs. And always remember to develop systems and standard operating procedures for tasks before handing them off. It makes the process a whole lot easier.
