Hire a verified Filipino virtual assistant

Who this is for

Small UK businesses, roughly one to thirty people, usually hiring offshore for the first time. The owner is doing admin at nine at night, or a bookkeeper is doing work a bookkeeper should not be doing, and a full UK hire is either unaffordable or too much job for the hours involved.

Fifteen hours a week of proper admin support is an awkward UK hire. It is a completely normal engagement in the Philippines.

What a virtual assistant actually does

The title is vague, so here is the work in plain terms. Most of our clients start with some of this and grow it:

• Inbox and diary. Triage, drafting replies, scheduling, chasing people who have not replied.
• Bookkeeping support. Raising and chasing invoices, reconciling in Xero or QuickBooks, expenses, supplier statements.
• CRM and data. Keeping records current, cleaning duplicates, entering what never gets entered.
• Customer support. First-line email and chat, ticket queues, order and delivery questions.
• Research and reporting. Supplier comparisons, prospect lists, weekly numbers pulled together.
• Ecommerce and marketing admin. Listings, stock updates, scheduling posts, formatting content.

If the work already happens through a screen, distance stops mattering. Our honest comparison of a Filipino hire against a UK one sets out where that holds and where it genuinely does not.

If what you need is closer to a right hand for one person, running your inbox and your diary, that is an executive assistant rather than a virtual assistant.

The part that makes the difference

Most hesitation about hiring offshore is not really about the Philippines. It is about not knowing whether the person is who they say they are, and most of the market does nothing to answer that. A job board hands you a profile and wishes you luck.

Everyone we introduce has passed five checks before you see them:

1. Government photo ID, matched to a live selfie. A real document, and a real person holding it.
2. NBI clearance, the Philippine national criminal record check, verified at source rather than taken on trust from a PDF.
3. PRC or TESDA registration where the role calls for it, checked against the official register.
4. Work history, evidenced role by role. Certificates of employment where they exist.
5. Two referees, contacted by us. Not a reference letter the candidate supplies. We write to them ourselves.

You also see how well each past job is evidenced, labelled per role. If a job is backed by a certificate of employment, it says so. If it is only the candidate's word, it says that too. We would rather show you the difference than flatten everything into a tick.

That is a checkable claim, which is the point of making it. Why verified profiles get hired first goes through it properly, and how to spot a legitimate agency is worth reading even if you end up going elsewhere.

How the engagement works

1. Tell us about the role. What the work is, roughly what hours, and what you are willing to pay.
2. We source against it and put forward people who have passed all five checks.
3. You meet whoever you want to. That costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
4. You contract with them directly. We give you a contract pack ready to sign.
5. You pay them directly, at the rate you agreed, on your own schedule.

We are never the employer, never the middleman on your money, and never taking a cut of what the professional earns. Our fee is a one-off placement fee and it is published in full.

Hours and the time difference

The Philippines is GMT+8, so a UK nine to five is roughly five in the evening to one in the morning there. Working UK hours is a long-established and well-paid career path in the Philippines, not an imposition, and plenty of people actively want it.

Three arrangements work, and the right one depends on the job: full overlap with your day when you need someone live; partial overlap, a few hours of crossover for calls with the rest on their own clock; or handover, where you finish the day with a brief and open your laptop to completed work.

Whatever you agree is agreed between you and the professional. We are not rostering anybody. Everyone in our network states the hours they want up front, and you see that before you meet them.

The legal side, briefly

Someone living and working in the Philippines is not UK tax resident and is not performing duties in the UK, so the off-payroll rules do not reach them and there is no PAYE, employer National Insurance or pension auto-enrolment. There is a VAT consequence to buying services from overseas that catches people out, including businesses that are not VAT registered.

Both are covered in full: IR35 and Filipino contractors, and the VAT reverse charge. The wider legal picture is in our UK employer's guide to hiring in the Philippines.

What we will not tell you

We are a young company and we would rather be straight with you than impressive.

We will not quote you a percentage you will save, because it depends on what you would otherwise have paid. We will not promise a specific number of candidates by a specific day, because that promise belongs to agencies with a bench sitting idle and we would rather send you the right person than a quota. And we will not show you testimonials we do not have.

What we will do is check every person properly before you meet them, show you the evidence behind every claim on their profile, and charge you nothing until you actually hire someone.

Common questions