I Hired a Virtual Employee to Handle My Invoices

It’s the beginning of the month. Time to prepare last month’s documents for the accountant. Collecting invoices from various sources – platforms, suppliers, emails, paper invoices.

A purely operational task – one that needs to get done on time, but adds little real value to my work.

Since it only took me around 1-2 hours a month, I kept doing it myself without ever prioritizing it for optimization.

But I realized that this task doesn’t just cost me the one or two hours I sit down to prepare the accounting package. It eats away at my attention and focus throughout the entire month. My work requires deep concentration – and every interruption has a price.

An invoice email arrives from AWS. I don’t open it right away, but I make a note of it. A paper invoice arrives from a courier – I set it aside. But all of this sits on my to-do list, waiting for the start of the month to be packaged up for the accountant.

Research in psychology suggests that every decision we make – no matter how small or insignificant – draws from the same limited reservoir of mental energy.

Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner in economics, dedicated much of his work to understanding how the brain spends mental energy and how that affects the quality of our decisions. The more we draw from that reservoir on small things, the less we have left for the ones that matter.

Attention and focus are among the most valuable resources we have.

Some tasks are important and urgent – you do them right away. Some are neither – you never do them at all. But some are important, just not urgent – and so they sit and wait.

Streamlining the process of collecting and packaging invoices for the accountant was exactly that kind of task – important, but not urgent.

And so it waited.

Meanwhile, as AI was developing, we had started thinking about how it could support our work – and invoice collection was a natural example of an operational task that could be taken over by an AI-powered virtual employee.

That’s how the Finance & Accounting Employee (FAE) came to be.

FAE is not an accountant. He doesn’t replace the accounting firm we work with. He’s the one who handles the operational work around finances and accounting internally, so I don’t have to – within the limitations he has, of course.

For me, he’s part of the team. Collecting and packaging invoices is just one of the things he does.

He’s loaded with enough company context to do his job.

What does FAE actually do?

What I used to do.

Now at the start of the month I simply tell him: “Go ahead, prepare the invoice package for the accountant.”

He knows all the sources he needs to pull invoices from – various platforms (AWS, OpenAI, Facebook and others), suppliers, and those that arrive by email. He also takes care of paper invoices.

The analogy is as if the task is being handled by a real person. With paper invoices, my job comes down to passing it along – I snap a photo and send it to him as soon as it’s in my hands. After that, I don’t think about it anymore, because I know he’ll take care of it. Just like I would hand it off to a real employee whose job it is to handle that.

When a new invoice source appears – for example, I start using a new service, product, or recurring payment – I set it up once: where the invoice comes from and what’s specific about it, if anything.

After that, every month he knows what to do – no involvement from me needed.

The effect is that one task drops off my plate – one that adds little real value to my work – and I can redirect that time and focus toward developing our platform or anything else that moves the business forward.

And the task still gets done.

Invoices are just one example of a process that can be handled this way. In our company, many tasks are already taken care of by virtual employees – our team is made up of both people and virtual employees.

Time and focus are among the most valuable assets we have – so I believe it’s worth protecting them for the things that truly matter, and delegating everything else that can be delegated.

Attention is not something you can hire. So be mindful of where you spend it.

For the bigger picture on virtual employees and how we build the operational model of our company — I wrote about it here.