Glossary
Administrative Assistant Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential administrative assistant terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key administrative assistant vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in administrative assistant training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Action item
- A task assigned in a meeting with an owner and due date.
- Agenda
- A list of topics to be covered in a meeting.
- Calendar management
- Scheduling and protecting time on someone’s calendar.
- Confidential information
- Sensitive business or personal information that must be protected.
- CRM
- Customer relationship management software.
- Expense report
- A record of business expenses submitted for reimbursement.
- Gatekeeping
- Screening calls and requests to protect a manager’s time.
- Invoice
- A bill requesting payment for goods or services.
- Itinerary
- A detailed travel schedule.
- Mail merge
- Creating personalized documents or emails from a list.
- Minutes
- The official written record of what happened in a meeting.
- Purchase order (PO)
- A document authorizing a purchase from a vendor.
- Records retention
- Rules for how long documents must be kept.
- A central location for team files.
- Workflow
- The sequence of steps to complete a process.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Administrative Assistant practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Administrative Assistant training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.