Guides
Virtual assistant agency KPIs owners should track monthly
Nine virtual assistant agency KPIs worth tracking monthly, each with its formula, its data source, and the specific decision it is supposed to change.
What to take away
- A measure earns its place by changing a decision. If you cannot name the action a number would trigger, stop reporting it.
- Nine measures, in three groups: capacity, client, and cash. Each has a formula and a source, written down before the first month.
- Read them per person and per account. Aggregates hide exactly the account or the person the number was supposed to surface.
- Direction over quarters beats level in any month. At the volumes a small agency handles, one client can dominate a month.
No targets, benchmarks or industry figures appear here. Every number is yours, compared against your own previous quarters.
Rule one: write the formula and the source first
Before a measure goes on a page, write two lines: how it is computed, and where the data comes from.
This sounds bureaucratic and it prevents the most common failure in small-agency reporting, which is a number computed differently in March than in January, then compared. The tools that have to supply each source, and the seven jobs a tool set covers, are set out in the software and KPI guide for agency owners.
Keep those definitions in one document and change them rarely. When you do change one, restate the history under the new definition or mark the break.
The three groups
| Group | What it measures | The decision it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Capacity | Utilization, non-delivery hours, single-person accounts | Whether to hire, and which account gets covered next |
| Client | Reserved against used, request volume, repeat questions, out-of-scope work | Which account to speak to this month |
| Cash | Cash collected against committed, days to payment | Whether you can afford the hire at all |
Read them in that order. Capacity problems cause client problems, and client problems become cash problems about a quarter later.
Capacity group
1. Utilization, per person. Delivered client hours divided by paid hours.
Decision it changes: whether to hire, and whether your price floor is still right. Falling utilization raises your cost per delivered hour faster than the fall itself, because the cost is divided by a shrinking denominator.
2. Non-delivery hours, split three ways. Training, absence, and idle. Source: time records.
Decision: idle concentrated in one person is a scheduling problem. Training staying high after month three is a documentation problem.
3. Accounts with only one trained person. A count, not a rate. Source: the account register.
Decision: which account gets a second person trained on it this month. This is the measure most closely tied to whether clients stay.
Client group
4. Reserved capacity used against bought, per client. Source: time records and the agreement.
Decision: whether to raise a tier change with a client before they raise it with you. A client well under will eventually decide they are wasting money.
5. Request volume against that account's own median. Source: the intake queue.
Decision: whether to ask a specific question about an account that has gone quiet. Falling volume is the earliest churn signal there is.
6. Repeat questions per account. How many times somebody asked a thing that was already answered. Source: the queue and your own honesty.
Decision: what to write into the working standard this week. It is a direct measure of documentation quality and it is the cheapest measure on this list to collect.
7. Work delivered outside the agreed scope. Source: the queue, reviewed monthly.
Decision: absorb it deliberately, reprice at renewal, or stop. Doing nothing is the fourth option and it is the expensive one.
Cash group
8. Cash collected against cash committed. Not revenue invoiced. Source: the bank and the payroll or contractor schedule.
Decision: whether you can hire this quarter. Revenue-based measures will tell you yes several weeks before it is true.
9. Days from work delivered to cash received. Two parts: delivery to invoice, and invoice to payment. Source: the books.
Decision: whether to change invoicing timing, which is usually worth more than any financing and costs nothing.
Keep the underlying records to a standard that makes these retrievable. The IRS guidance on which business records to keep sets out the baseline, and the operational half, hours by client and by line, is yours to build.
What to leave off the page
- Task counts as a headline. A rising count often means the client's own process is getting worse.
- Response time averages with no distribution. One bad week vanishes into an average and reappears as a complaint.
- Satisfaction scores collected quarterly. They measure politeness at a moment.
- Anything ranking people against each other. Nearly every measure here is about systems, and using them for ranking makes people manage the number.
- Any measure you have never acted on. Twelve months of a number nobody used is twelve months of maintenance.
The monthly routine
Twenty minutes, one sheet, three passes.
First pass, capacity: read the three measures per person. Second pass, client: read the four measures per account, looking for outliers rather than at averages. Third pass, cash: two measures, read against the coming quarter's commitments.
Then write one sentence: what will be different this month because of what you just read. If you cannot write it, either nothing needs to change or you are reading the wrong numbers.
Security and access, measured differently
Two things belong on a checklist rather than in a metric, and they should be confirmed monthly.
Access removed for anybody who left, verified rather than assumed. And credentials held only where your policy says they can be. Size that policy to what you can actually maintain: the NIST small business quick-start guides and the CISA material for small and medium businesses both describe practices scaled for an operation this size.
A short policy confirmed every month protects more than a long one reviewed annually.
Where the numbers come from and go
Most of these measures depend on records created during delivery rather than assembled afterward, which means the practices established at the start of an account decide whether the measures are possible at all. That work is described in the onboarding workflow for new clients.
The capacity group feeds directly into what an assistant actually costs you per delivered hour, which is set out in the guide to agency pay rates and labor costs. The training measures point at the documentation work in the hiring and training guide.
And the client group is what tells you whether you can take on more work at all, which should govern how hard you push the channels in the marketing and growth guide.
Common questions
Nine seems like a lot. Which three would you keep?
Utilization per person, reserved against used per client, and cash collected against committed. Those three will surface most problems, later than the full set but not much later.
Should I share any of these with clients?
Reserved against used, yes, in the monthly summary. The rest are internal and sharing them invites a conversation about your business rather than theirs.
How long before the numbers mean anything?
Three months for direction, a year for confidence. Resist reacting to a single month, particularly with few clients.
What if my records cannot produce some of these?
Start collecting from this month and say plainly that the history does not exist. A gap acknowledged is better than a number reconstructed.
