One of the things you need before you open your business to the public is a basic price list, never start your business without one, you will look darn silly to that first client with no idea what to price for their services.
Work out what you would like to earn as an hourly rate. Use this with VA services like office administration tasks. You can group many tasks under an hourly rate. You can offer a client so many hours per week or per day and work within those parameters with a client. You can use a retainer package which gives the client so many paid for hours and a free hour or so thrown in.
But not all tasks can be done via an hourly rate. Typing and Transcription are two of those services.
Typing, through my experience as my job is mostly typing, and ive typed for many many clients, a client prefers a per page price. At the moment up here in Gauteng pricing is around R20 - R30 for basic copy typing per page, with more things involve with the typing like graphics, flow diagrams, graphs, tables, etc then the price will go up as you are actually creating these additional things, so more work and time involved.
Powerpoint Business Presentations, Spreadsheets, Graphs, Flow Diagrams I start off with a basic of R30 per page, but if the tasks are more involved I then take this into account and also how long the job will take me and price accordingly.
Know how long it takes you to do a task so that you can give a client an idea of how long a job will take, but take into account, interrruptions, phone calls, etc. I can safely tell a client I can type 10 to 30 pages a day with interruptions as I know I can achieve this. Clients always want to know how long a job will take you, there is always deadlines to be met, make them reasonable and achieveable to yourself. If you know you cannot complete a task in a given period, tell the client this, they might not be aware of the length of time it takes.
With Transcription you need to look at what is involved with that file, quality of the file, how many speakers, type of transcription (court hearing, focus meeting etc), a one on one meeting is far easier to transcribe than a focus meeting and your pricing should reflect this. Transcription is a good task to have a basic price listing on, as it gives you a starting point to base transcription on depending on what its like. Know how long it will take you to transcribe, so that you can give your client some idea and if you need to negotiate on your time as you know how long it takes more than a client will, tell them if that time is unreasonable, negotiate if necessary, clients are not always unreasonable. It is up to us to education them in this task.
If you need assistance with pricing please contact me,
email: amftyping@mweb.co.za , alison@amftyping.co.za.
msn messenger: alison19558@hotmail.com or
skype: amftyping.
