Please Do Not Ask Your Assistant to Do This: The Line Between Support and Serious Trouble

Most of the tasks people delegate are entirely ordinary. Inbox, calendar, travel, invoices, research, social posts, the endless small administrative work that eats a week.

Then there is a category of request that looks equally ordinary to the person making it, and creates genuine problems for everyone involved. It usually arrives casually, phrased as a favour rather than an instruction, and both sides agree to it without thinking particularly hard.

None of this is about distrust. It is about a handful of tasks where the consequences sit well beyond the work itself.

Logging in as you

This is the most common one, and it feels like the most harmless. Sharing your credentials so your assistant can post, reply or manage something on your behalf breaches the terms of service of most major platforms, which generally require that an account is used by the person who opened it.

The practical consequences range from mildly annoying to severe, including security checks triggered by logins from a new country, temporary lockouts at the worst possible moment, and in some cases permanent closure of a business account you cannot afford to lose.

The alternative exists on almost every platform worth using. Proper delegated access, meaning team members, business manager roles, shared inboxes and admin permissions, does the same job without pretending your assistant is you. It also means access can be revoked cleanly when the working relationship ends.

Signing, approving and moving money

Asking someone to sign a document on your behalf, approve a payment, or authorise something in your name is a different order of request, and it deserves a moment of thought.

If you genuinely want an assistant to have that authority, it needs to be granted properly rather than informally, through the right account permissions or the appropriate written authorisation.

Otherwise you have created a situation where neither of you can clearly say who was responsible for a decision, which becomes uncomfortable the moment something goes wrong.

Handling client money directly is a firmer line still. Taking payments into a personal account, holding funds, or moving money between accounts on someone else’s behalf carries regulatory weight in most countries, and it is not something to arrange casually over a chat message.

Work that has quietly become regulated

Plenty of administrative tasks sit next to a regulated profession, and the boundary is easy to cross without noticing.

Recording transactions and chasing invoices is bookkeeping. Preparing and filing tax returns, or advising on tax treatment, generally is not something an unqualified person should be doing. Organising documents for a legal matter is administrative support, while drafting advice on what those documents mean is not.

Managing appointments for a clinic is ordinary scheduling, while handling patient records brings obligations that need proper agreements and training behind them.

The test is straightforward enough. If getting it wrong could create a legal, financial or medical consequence for a third party, it needs someone qualified, not someone capable.

Content that misrepresents who is speaking

Ghostwriting is normal and entirely fine. Your assistant drafting your newsletter, your posts or your replies is the job working as intended.

What is not fine is content presented as coming from someone it did not come from. Writing reviews or testimonials in the voice of customers, creating engagement designed to look organic, or producing comments from accounts that appear to be independent all fall into the same category, and platforms treat them as fraud rather than marketing. So, increasingly, do regulators.

The same applies to outreach. Contacting people who never opted in, or who have already unsubscribed, exposes the business to complaints and penalties regardless of who pressed send.

This is where a written scope helps enormously, and where platform standards do useful work. PA2Assist publishes a code of conduct and prohibited services precisely so that both sides have something neutral to point at, which turns an awkward personal conversation into a simple matter of policy.

How to say no without losing the client

Assistants receive these requests constantly, almost always from people who see no problem with them, and a flat refusal can feel disproportionate.

The approach that works is short, unbothered, and immediately followed by a solution. Explain briefly that you cannot do the request as described, name the reason in one line, and offer the version you can do. You cannot log in as them, but you can be added as a team member.

You cannot write reviews as customers, but you can set up a process that asks real customers for them. You cannot file the return, but you can have every document organised and ready for whoever does.

Delivered that way, it reads as competence rather than obstruction, and most clients simply say yes to the alternative.

Final thoughts

Nearly every request in this category comes from convenience rather than bad intent, which is exactly why it goes unexamined.

Set up proper access instead of sharing passwords, grant authority formally if you want it to exist, keep regulated work with people who are qualified for it, and never ask for content that pretends to be someone it is not.

Agree to all of it at the start of the working relationship rather than in the middle of a problem, and the whole question stops being awkward and becomes what it should be, which is simply how you work together.

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