New VA, 3 Departments: How to Handle Finance, Creatives & Operations from Day One
Most new Virtual Assistants start with one focused role — maybe inbox management, maybe social media scheduling. They ease in, learn the ropes, and gradually expand. But what happens when you're a brand-new VA and you're handed the keys to three departments on your very first week? Finance. Creatives. Operations. All at once.
That's exactly what happened to Princess Cuasay, VA Masters' newest Operations and Admin Virtual Assistant. In Episode 8 of From Kayod to Keyboard, Princess sits down with hosts Tata and Roxy to share what it's genuinely like to jump straight into a multi-department role with no finance background, a BS Psychology degree, and an aeronautics dream she left behind during the pandemic. It's raw, honest, and packed with hard-won lessons for any aspiring VA who worries they're not ready.
Whether you're still figuring out which VA niche is right for you, or you're already in a role that's way bigger than your job description, this episode is your reminder that adaptability — not perfection — is the real superpower.
🎧 Listen to the Full Episode
Want to hear the complete conversation with Princess? Catch Episode 8 on your favorite platform:
📋 What You'll Learn in This Episode
- Meet Princess: The VA Who Wore Three Hats from Day One
- Breaking Down the 3 Departments: What Princess Actually Does
- The Mindset Switch: Going from Finance Mode to Creative Mode
- When Everything Hits at Once: How Princess Handles Overwhelm
- Advice for VAs Whose Role Goes Beyond the Job Description
- Questions & Answers from the Episode
- Key Takeaways
Meet Princess: The VA Who Wore Three Hats from Day One
Princess Cuasay didn't take the traditional route to becoming a Virtual Assistant. Before joining VA Masters, her career was a patchwork of genuinely diverse experiences — the kind that looks unusual on a resume but turns out to be exactly what a growing agency needs.
Her background includes working as an admin assistant in a school's guidance department, a discrepancy encoder at a logistics company (tracing where product shipments went wrong), and most recently, a graphic designer at a travel agency creating itineraries and brochures. On top of that, she has a BS Psychology degree — and she was originally planning to pursue aeronautics until the pandemic redirected her path.
When she applied to VA Masters, the original plan was for her to focus on operations. But as the interviews progressed, the scope evolved — dramatically. By the time she was onboarded, Princess was tasked with supporting the finance team, the creatives team, and the operations team simultaneously.
"In my resume, I included that I have quite diverse experience in various fields. So they thought maybe I can do these things." — Princess Cuasay, From Kayod to Keyboard Ep. 8
The lesson here for aspiring VAs? The skills you've gathered across different jobs — even ones that seem totally unrelated — can become your biggest asset. Don't downplay a non-linear background. Highlight it.
Breaking Down the 3 Departments: What Princess Actually Does
So what does juggling three departments actually look like on a day-to-day basis? Princess breaks it down clearly, and it's more structured than you might expect.
💰 Finance
- Daily check-in on company expenses and income
- Collection and tracking of VA invoices
- Payroll assistance (end-of-month)
- Routine, detail-heavy, time-sensitive
🎨 Creatives
- Helping publish podcast promo Shorts
- Moderation support for the Facebook group
- Light video editing tasks
- Exploratory, expressive, lower-stress
⚙️ Operations
- Onboarding document preparation for new hires
- Organizing files for internal and client use
- Supporting the post-hiring process
- Volume fluctuates based on hiring cycles
What's striking about this breakdown is how different the demands are for each department. Finance is rigidly routine — daily tasks with little room for error. Operations is reactive — quiet some weeks, overwhelming others when a big hiring batch comes through. And creatives is the emotional release valve, the place where Princess can actually put her personality into her work.
This is an important reality check for new VAs: even if your job title says "operations," your actual role will almost always be broader than the label. Clients and agencies need versatile people, not just specialists — especially when you're working with a growing team like VA Masters.
| Department | Type of Work | Key Skill Required | Stress Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finance | Routine, repetitive | Attention to detail | High (detail-dependent) |
| Creatives | Exploratory, expressive | Creative adaptability | Low (personally fulfilling) |
| Operations | Batch-based, variable | Time management | Medium (spikes with new hires) |
The Mindset Switch: Going from Finance Mode to Creative Mode
One of the most fascinating things Princess shares in this episode is what it feels like mentally to switch between such different types of work in the same day. Tata asks her directly: do you have to switch personalities?
The honest answer is yes — and it turns out that switching is the hardest part, not the tasks themselves.
"In finance, it's very stoic and you have to be very focused. Meanwhile, in creative, I get to explore more of my creative side — I get to expose my creative self in my work." — Princess Cuasay, From Kayod to Keyboard Ep. 8
Princess describes herself as naturally free-spirited. Structured tasks feel rigid to her — there's no room to put her personality into them. But creatives? That's where she breathes. When she's stressed, her go-to outlet has always been arts and creative work, so the creatives tasks actually function as a form of recovery from the more demanding finance work.
What This Means for Multi-Role VAs
If you're a VA working across different task types, understanding your own energy rhythms matters more than any productivity system. Some practical strategies that work well for context-switching:
- Time-block by task type. Do your most detail-heavy, analytical work first when your focus is sharpest. Save creative tasks for when your energy has dipped and you need a different kind of engagement.
- Use physical cues to signal transitions. Something as simple as making a cup of coffee, stepping outside for five minutes, or changing your desktop background between task types can help your brain register the mental shift.
- Stop mixing task types mid-flow. Jumping between a finance spreadsheet and a Canva graphic in the same 30-minute window is a recipe for errors in both. Commit to one mode at a time.
- Know which tasks restore you. Like Princess does with creative work, identify the tasks that re-energize you. When you're burnt out on one department, lean into your restorative tasks deliberately — not as avoidance, but as recovery.
🎯 Try This Context-Switch Routine:
- Morning (high focus): Finance, data entry, spreadsheets, invoices — anything numbers-related
- Midday (moderate focus): Operations tasks — onboarding documents, organizing files, email correspondence
- Afternoon (creative energy): Creatives — content editing, social media, visual tasks
- End of day (wind down): Quick finance check-in, wrap loose ends, prep for tomorrow
When Everything Hits at Once: How Princess Handles Overwhelm
Barely a month into the role when this episode was recorded, Princess is candid about one of the toughest realities of a multi-department position: sometimes, everything becomes urgent at exactly the same time.
Finance needs the daily update. Operations just got a huge batch of new hire documents. And there's a podcast short waiting to be published. All urgent. All happening simultaneously. What then?
Princess's answer is deceptively simple — and genuinely effective:
"I organize my thoughts first. I have to understand what the most urgent task is. My prioritization is based on what is most needed at the moment." — Princess Cuasay, From Kayod to Keyboard Ep. 8
This isn't just about time management tools or productivity apps. It's about slowing down before you speed up. When you're overwhelmed, the instinct is to just start doing something — anything. But Princess's approach is to pause, assess, and then commit to the most critical item first.
A Simple Triage Framework for Overwhelmed VAs
When multiple urgent tasks land at once, try asking these three questions in order:
- What breaks something if I don't do it in the next hour? (Time-sensitive deadlines, client-facing deliverables, payroll windows) — do this first.
- What will take 5 minutes or less? Quick wins clear mental clutter. Send that confirmation email. Move that document. Don't let tiny tasks linger.
- What can I schedule or communicate about? Not everything "urgent" is truly urgent. If a task can be done in two hours instead of right now with no real impact, schedule it and communicate that timeline to whoever's waiting.
The goal isn't to do everything faster — it's to stop feeling paralyzed by volume. One thing at a time, in the right order.
🎯 When You're Overwhelmed, Do This:
- Step 1: Stop and write down every pending task — don't trust your memory when you're stressed
- Step 2: Mark each as Urgent/Not Urgent and Important/Not Important (Eisenhower Matrix)
- Step 3: Pick the single most urgent + important item and start there
- Step 4: Communicate any delays proactively — a short message to your client or manager manages expectations before they become problems
- Step 5: After finishing the first task, re-assess before jumping to the next
Advice for VAs Whose Role Goes Beyond the Job Description
Princess's situation is more common than you'd think. Almost every VA eventually discovers that the job description they signed up for expands. A client needs something extra. A new project lands. The team grows and gaps appear. Suddenly you're doing things nobody trained you for.
Roxy poses this directly: what advice would you give to VAs whose roles go beyond what they were originally asked to do?
Princess's answer has two parts — and both are grounded in her own lived experience of starting this role terrified.
1. Accept That Struggle is Part of the Learning
Being new to something means not knowing how to do it yet. That's not a character flaw. It's just the nature of learning. What matters is staying in the process long enough for competence to catch up with commitment. Every task that feels impossible today will feel routine in three months — if you don't give up before then.
2. Stop Being So Self-Critical
This one hits hard. Princess admits she had a bad habit of immediately going into self-criticism mode after making a mistake — "Oh no, I messed this up" — and then spiraling. The advice she'd give her day-one self? Be gentle with yourself.
"Stop being self-critical because at the end of the day, you're still learning and it's normal to make mistakes. Eventually you'd get to adjust — and by then, you don't have to talk yourself down saying 'I can't do this' or 'this is too scary for me.'" — Princess Cuasay, From Kayod to Keyboard Ep. 8
Self-compassion isn't softness — it's strategy. Research consistently shows that people who treat themselves kindly after failure are more likely to try again, learn faster, and persist longer than those who are harsh on themselves. For VAs navigating steep learning curves, this is genuinely useful to know.
Roxy and Tata close the episode with a line worth keeping: "Growth happens when you say yes to opportunities. The scary roles are the ones that grow you the most."
That's not just encouragement. It's what Princess is living proof of.
💬 Questions & Answers from the Episode
Q: Do you actually have a background in finance?
A: No, not really. Princess's internship was in human resources, and the company she interned at had a dedicated finance department — so she had zero direct exposure to financial tasks. She was placed in finance at VA Masters based on her history as a discrepancy encoder at a logistics company, where she tracked product shipment errors. The meticulous, trace-and-verify nature of that work suggested she had the attention to detail finance requires — even if the content was completely different.
Q: Which department is the most challenging for you, and why?
A: Princess says she struggles most with structured tasks — and finance is the most structured of the three. She describes herself as naturally free-spirited, so rigidly routine work feels limiting. She can't put her personality into it the way she can with creative work. Creatives, by contrast, is her lowest-stress department because the work itself functions as a creative outlet for her.
Q: Where does time management matter most across the three departments?
A: Finance, because it's highly routine and time-sensitive. Daily tasks need to happen at specific points in the day — there's no flexibility to push them. Operations is different: work comes in waves. Some weeks there are almost no new hires; other weeks there's a large batch all at once. Those surge periods are when time management in operations gets genuinely difficult.
Q: If you could tell your day-one self something, what would it be?
A: Princess says her advice to aspiring VAs is essentially what she wished she'd told herself from the start: be gentle with yourself. She was terrified of making mistakes in finance — "What if I mess something up? What am I going to do?" — and that fear fed a cycle of self-criticism. Looking back, she'd remind herself that the overwhelm is temporary, that you will cope through it, and that things genuinely do get easier as you build familiarity with the tasks.
Q: Was it a surprise to be assigned to three departments, or did you expect it?
A: Somewhat of both. Princess had anticipated that she might be placed in HR alongside operations — so being assigned to additional departments wasn't entirely unexpected. What she didn't anticipate was specifically finance and creatives. That came up in the latter stages of the interview process, and while she could trace the logic (her diverse background made her a natural fit for multi-department support), it was still a bigger scope than she had mentally prepared for.
🔑 Key Takeaways from Episode 8:
- A diverse background is an asset, not a liability. Princess's mix of admin, logistics, and design experience is exactly why she was placed across three departments. Don't edit out your non-linear career history — lean into it.
- Know your energy rhythms for context-switching. Finance and creatives demand fundamentally different mindsets. Understanding which tasks restore you and which drain you lets you sequence your day in a way that sustains performance across all departments.
- Overwhelm is managed by prioritizing, not by working faster. When everything becomes urgent at once, slow down, assess what's truly most urgent, and commit to one thing at a time. Communicate proactively about everything else.
- Your role will always be bigger than your job title. This is normal. Adaptability — the willingness to learn outside your lane — is the single most valuable trait a VA can develop.
- Self-compassion is a performance strategy. Being harsh on yourself after mistakes doesn't help you learn faster — it just keeps you stuck in fear. The VAs who grow the fastest are the ones who acknowledge errors and move forward without spiraling.
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From Kayod to Keyboard brings you real stories, insider tips, and actionable strategies from Filipino VAs who've made it. Subscribe to never miss an episode!
Subscribe to the Podcast📻 More Episodes You'll Love:
- Episode 3 – Work-Life Balance: Real Talk with a Mommy VA & VA Manager
- Episode 5 – How Roxy & Tata Actually Became VAs (It's Not What You Think)
- Episode 6 – Salesforce VA: The High-Paying Niche Most Filipinos Overlook
- Episode 7 – From Zero to Video Editor: The Beginner's VA Guide to Editing
Anne is the Operations Manager at VA MASTERS, a boutique recruitment agency specializing in Filipino virtual assistants for global businesses. She leads the end-to-end recruitment process — from custom job briefs and skills testing to candidate delivery and ongoing VA management — and has personally overseen the placement of 1,000+ virtual assistants across industries including e-commerce, real estate, healthcare, fintech, digital marketing, and legal services.
With deep expertise in Philippine work culture, remote team integration, and business process optimization, Anne helps clients achieve up to 80% cost savings compared to local hiring while maintaining top-tier quality and performance.
Email: [email protected]
Telephone: +13127660301
