Point vs hiring an assistant

This is about hiring a person, not about software that calls itself an assistant. The two get compared because they promise the same relief, and they fail in completely different ways. The choice is rarely settled on cost. It is settled on confidentiality, on judgment, and on what happens the week they are away.

• The job you picture is somebody handling your inbox. The job that actually exists is wider than that, and email triage on its own is a slice of a role rather than a role.
• An assistant costs you time for the first months. Your judgment has to be transferred before it can be applied, and it transfers through corrections you make one at a time.
• For an accounting or law practice, delegating the inbox means a person reads client financial matters. That is a real question with a real answer, and it should be answered before the advert goes up rather than after.
• Point does the sorting, the summarizing and the chasing. It does not answer the phone, notice that a client sounded upset, or grow into more of the job. Those are the parts a person is for.

If what you are actually weighing is a software add-on that calls itself an assistant rather than a human being, that is a different comparison and it is drawn in an AI email client versus an AI email assistant.

What are you actually hiring for?

Worth being honest at the start, because the mismatch between the job people imagine and the job that exists is where most of the disappointment comes from.

The picture in your head is somebody who opens your inbox in the morning, works out what matters, deals with the routine, and leaves you a short list. That picture is real and people do it well. But it is not a job on its own at a firm of five to fifteen people. What that firm actually needs is somebody who does the inbox and the phone and the diary and the chasing of unsigned engagement letters and the client onboarding and the thing that broke in the office, and email triage is perhaps a fifth of their week.

Two consequences follow, and neither is obvious in advance. The first is that you are making a hiring decision about a whole role, with everything that involves, in order to solve a problem about your inbox. The second is that the inbox part is the part that gets squeezed. When something urgent comes up, and it does, the triage is what slips, because it is the task with no deadline attached to it. So the relief arrives, and then it becomes intermittent, and intermittent triage is in some ways worse than none, because you stop checking and then have to start again.

None of that argues against hiring. It argues for knowing which problem you are solving. If the problem is that you are doing five jobs, hire. If the problem is specifically that a hundred messages a day arrive and three of them commit you to something, that is a narrower problem, and it has a narrower answer.

Why an assistant costs you time before it saves you any

Anyone who has hired knows this and almost no buying guide says it, so it is worth setting out properly.

For somebody else to sort your inbox correctly, they have to know what matters to you, and that knowledge does not exist in a document. It is a hundred small judgments: that this client is difficult about timing, that this one always says urgent and never means it, that a message from the bank about that account is not routine because of what happened in March, that the referral from the solicitor is worth more than it looks. You know all of it and you have never written any of it down, because you never needed to.

It gets transferred by correction. They sort, you look, you say no, not that one, and here is why. Every one of those exchanges costs you a few minutes and buys them one rule. There are hundreds of rules. The arithmetic is unforgiving in the first quarter: you are spending time to save time later, and in the meantime you are doing your own inbox as well as explaining it. Most owners underestimate this by a factor of several, and some conclude in month two that the hire was a mistake when in fact they were exactly on schedule.

It is also perishable in a specific way. The knowledge lives in one person, and when they take a fortnight off, or leave for a better offer, it goes with them. What genuinely covering for somebody requires, and what it turns out not to be, is the whole subject of covering for each other, and the answer there applies with more force to an assistant than to a partner, because a partner at least shares the client relationships.

Software has the same problem in a different shape, and it is fair to say so. Point has to learn your firm too. The difference is that the corrections stick where you can see them: what Point has learned about how you like things is recorded as something you can read and edit rather than living in somebody’s head, and it does not resign.

Whose confidentiality is it?

This is the question a professional practice should settle first, and the one most likely to be handled by not thinking about it.

Delegating your inbox means a person reads client correspondence: tax positions, disputes, valuations, the letter about the divorce that affects the shareholding. That may be entirely proper. Firms have employed people who read privileged material for as long as firms have existed, and the answer is a contract, a duty, supervision and consequences. It is a well-understood arrangement.

What makes it worth deliberate thought rather than assumption is that the arrangement has parts. An employee who has been trained and is supervised is one thing. An assistant hired part-time through an agency, possibly in another jurisdiction, with mailbox access on day one, is a different thing, and the difference is not a matter of trust in the individual. It is a matter of what your professional obligations, your engagement letters and your insurer actually say about who may see client material, and whether any client consent is required. Those documents will have a view. It is cheaper to find out before than after.

Software raises the same family of questions in a different order, and it is not the softer option merely because nobody is gossiping in a kitchen. The questions worth putting in writing to any vendor, Point included, are in the confidentiality checks for an AI email client. What is particular about Point is that the mail from a sender it does not recognize is held back before anything reads it, that what belongs to one business you operate is not visible from another, and that every action taken is written down in order, explained in a sentence, with undo a click away. A person cannot offer you a log of every judgment they made about your mail last Tuesday, and would reasonably object to being asked.

What a person does that no software will

A comparison that only lists the advantages of the thing being sold is not worth reading, and this is the section where the human wins outright.

They hear the tone. A client whose email is short in an unusual way, from someone who is normally chatty, is a signal a person picks up and picks up the phone about. Software reads the words.

They handle the thing with no category. The landlord, the insurance renewal, the awkward call about an unpaid invoice, the supplier who has messed something up. Real work does not arrive in tidy classes, and a person absorbs the residue without being told how.

They represent you. A reply from your assistant is a reply from your firm, with a human on the other end who can be asked a follow-up question. That is worth something to clients and it is worth something to you.

They notice you. That you are underwater this week, that you have said yes to too much, that you have not eaten. Nobody has built software that does this and nobody should pretend otherwise.

They grow. In a year a good assistant is doing things you did not hire them for and would not have thought to ask for. That compounding is the real return on the hire and no subscription offers it.

They take work away entirely. Not a shorter list, but a job you never see again. That is a different kind of relief from a well-sorted inbox and there are weeks when it is the only kind that helps.

If those are the parts you need, hire, and do not let anything on this page talk you out of it.

What software does that a person cannot

The other side, and it is narrower but it is real.

It is there at every hour. Mail is weighed as it lands at six in the morning, at eleven at night and on the Saturday when the client who runs a restaurant does their admin. An assistant works their hours, which are usually your hours, which means everything arriving outside them waits in a pile for the morning pass.

It reads everything. Not the top of the pile, not the ones that looked interesting, but every message, at the moment it arrives, with the same attention given to the ninetieth as to the first. Attention is the resource a person runs out of at exactly the point in the day when it matters.

It does not need the relationship. This is the part worth dwelling on. Handing your inbox to a person means handing over context about your clients, your firm and your judgment. Handing it to Point means the sorting is done and the relationships stay entirely yours: you still read what needs you, you still write the reply, and Point’s part is that the right message is in front of you with a summary of what it wants and the ask already lifted out as a dated task.

It does not take a fortnight in August. Whatever the arrangement is on the second of the month it is the same on the thirty-first, and it does not need to be handed over before a holiday.

And it costs a different order of money. A part-time person is a payroll line, with employer costs, a desk, equipment, management time and the risk that they leave, sitting well above any software subscription in this category. That comparison is unfair in one direction, since the assistant is doing four other jobs, and it is worth doing honestly against what you would ask each to cover. What an AI email client costs does the software half properly across the whole category.

Which one first, and can you have both?

Both, usually, and the order matters more than the choice.

The mistake is hiring somebody into an untriaged inbox. What you have then created is a job that scales with your volume, which means it gets worse as the firm succeeds, and whose most valuable component is a copy of your judgment that has to be installed by hand and walks out of the door if they leave. You will have spent a salary to move the bottleneck from you to them.

The better order is to sort first and then hire for what is left. Once the mail is ranked as it lands, once every thread carries a summary of what it wants, and once the asks inside messages have already become dated tasks, the work that remains is the work that genuinely needs a person: the phone call, the awkward conversation, the client who needs handling rather than answering, the parts of running a practice that were never email in the first place. That is a much better job to advertise, it is easier to fill, and it survives the person in it changing.

If you can only do one this year, the question is which failure is currently costing you more. If it is that you are personally doing five jobs and one of them is the office, hire. If it is that a client’s message sat unread until Thursday, an assistant is an expensive and slow answer to a problem that is about ordering rather than about hands. And if what actually goes wrong is that work falls between you and a colleague rather than falling on you, that is a third problem again, described in when an email falls through the cracks between you.

Common questions

Is Point a replacement for hiring an assistant?

For one part of the job, yes, and not for the rest. If the reason you are considering a hire is specifically the volume of email and the fear of missing something in it, Point addresses that directly and at a small fraction of a salary. If the reason is that you are doing the phone, the diary, the invoicing and the office as well, no software on the market replaces that, and you should hire.

Would an assistant do a better job of triage than software?

Eventually, on the messages they understand, and at a cost in your time first. A good assistant who has been with you two years will make judgment calls no software will match, because they know your clients as people. In the first three months they will make calls you have to correct, and correcting them is work. Software starts imperfect too, and its corrections are recorded rather than remembered, and it does not have to be retaught when somebody new arrives.

Is it safe to let an employee read confidential client mail?

Usually, under the arrangement firms have always used: a contract, a duty of confidentiality, supervision and consequences. What is worth checking before rather than after is what your professional obligations, your engagement letters and your insurer actually require about who may see client material, particularly if the person is part-time, agency-supplied or outside your jurisdiction. The parallel questions to ask a software vendor are in the confidentiality checks.

What happens to my inbox when my assistant is on leave?

Whatever you arranged in advance, which is usually less than you think. The knowledge of what matters lives in one person, so covering means somebody else applying rules they only partly know, and the fortnight tends to be caught up on afterwards rather than kept up with. What genuinely covering for somebody requires is worked through in covering for each other.

Can I do both?

Yes, and the order matters. Sorting first turns the assistant’s job into the part that actually needs a person: the phone, the awkward conversation, the client who needs handling rather than answering. Hiring first into an untriaged inbox creates a role that gets harder as the firm grows and takes its most valuable knowledge with it when the person moves on.

Which is cheaper?

Software, by a wide margin, and the comparison is not fair in that direction. A part-time person is a salary plus employer costs plus a desk plus your management time, and they are covering four other jobs alongside the inbox. The fair question is not which is cheaper but which job you need done, and whether the email part of it is a person-shaped job at your volume.

Does Point act on my mail without me?

At the top of the dial, yes, and it is the same decision you would be making about a person. You would let a new assistant book meetings in the first week. You would not let them answer a client’s question about a tax position until you had watched them work for a year, and those two permissions are granted separately, as trust arrives. Point is built to be delegated to the same way: each kind of action carries its own level, from suggest-only through review to fully handled, and everything starts on review, where Point prepares and you approve. Scheduling is the errand most owners hand over first, and Point runs the back and forth itself. Where the comparison stops resembling a person is in taking it back. Lowering a level is a setting rather than a conversation, and behind it sits the thing no assistant could offer you: every action in order, with undo a click away. Neither can retrieve a message that has already reached somebody else’s server.

The short version

• Email triage is not a job on its own at a small firm. Hiring for it means hiring a whole role, and the triage is the part that gets squeezed when something urgent lands.
• An assistant costs you time for the first months, because your judgment has to be transferred one correction at a time before it can be applied on your behalf.
• Delegating the inbox means a person reads client material. That is a normal arrangement with a well-understood answer, and it is worth confirming against your engagement letters before the advert goes up.
• A person hears a tone, absorbs the work with no category, represents your firm and grows into more of the job. Nothing here replaces that, and a firm that needs it should hire.
• Software reads every message the moment it lands, at every hour, without needing your client relationships, and it does not leave. If the failure you are buying against is a message seen days late, that is the narrower and cheaper answer.

Whether that is worth a seat is a judgment about your own week rather than about software, and the benefits page is the flat list to hold the week against. It reads differently in an accounting practice than in a law firm, and the rest are here.