Five Essential Personal Assistant Tools

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Personal assistants may be known for their resourcefulness and can-do attitude, but even the best rely on a little help from smart tech to boost their productivity. These online services are becoming more and more vital with the rise of remote-working PAs and EAs. As a PA you’ll build up your own personal toolkit to deal with whatever the role throws at you, but to give you a head-start we’ve put together a list of five essential tools for personal assistants.

In the list, we’ll highlight the top software and apps designed to complement the most common personal assistant duties, including:

All the personal assistant resources listed below have desktop and smartphone versions, can be integrated with other apps and, best of all, have a free tier! So, what are the best PA and virtual assistant tools?

Diary management: Calendly

A big part of your role as a personal assistant will be keeping on top of your manager’s diary. With new client appointments, team meetings and event invitations coming in from multiple platforms every day, a co-ordinating tool like Calendly is indispensable. Integrate all your online calendars into one place, and allow contacts to view your manager’s availability and book in a meeting – all without the long emails back and forth.

Tidying up the to do list: Trello

Trello is hugely popular across industries and professions, and for good reason. It’s a customisable, easy-to-use, shareable task manager that helps teams work seamlessly together. PAs can organise theirs and their manager’s day-to-day tasks in a simple, visual style that will help you prioritise work, separate different projects, and set deadlines.

Travel itinerary: TravelPerk

Booking and managing travel and accommodation for your manager can be a messy business. Shopping around for the best airline and hotel deals often means you end up juggling emails from different travel companies for every leg of a business trip. Enter TravelPerk: a one-stop shop for plane, train and hotel bookings! Personal assistants can view all tickets, amendments, and cancellations on their desktop or mobile, making one of the most stressful aspects of the role manageable.

Balancing the books: Expensify

With this fantastic tool you’ll be the company accountant’s best friend! PAs can create automatic expense reports, input physical receipts via photos, and even sync with apps like TravelPerk to import digital receipts. Cutting out tricky manual inputting makes this a real time-saver.

Flawless writing: Grammarly

Corresponding with clients and other senior partners on behalf of your manager is a big responsibility for a PA. You’ll need excellent writing skills and an understanding of tone of voice. Grammarly is the perfect tool to help with this. Not only does it catch any grammatical errors that could reflect badly on your manager, but it will also suggest revisions to your writing to make it clearer, more concise, and appropriate to different audiences.

With these tools in your arsenal, you’ll free up hours of time spent on admin, and in turn help your manager be more productive.

Once you’ve mastered these tools, don’t forget to add them to your CV! Refer to our personal assistant CV template for extra tips on getting ahead of the pack.

Author Zahra Clark Tiger Recruitment Team
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