Back Office: What It Means in Business, With Examples

Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings. Research firm Gartner categorizes BPO as either horizontal offerings, meaning those functions that are used across multiple industries, or vertical-specific offerings, meaning those that are industry-specific. For some, such as publicly-traded companies, audits are a legal requirement.

• Outsourcing has become a solution that offers many benefits, helping many companies maintain financial stability and scalability to achieve success.
• Focus your improvement efforts primarily on value-add tasks, weeding out repetitive and mundane tasks that just add more back office work.
• With Certinia ERP, everyone using the back office solution – sales, finance, service delivery, support, and beyond – gains real-time access to all the customer information that matters most.
• They play a crucial role in the company, so the management should ensure their efficiency and competence.
• Sometimes agencies fail to meet the hiring company’s expectations, resulting in a drop in productivity and a significant drop in business.
• Outsourcing your back-office services will put you in a better position.

Today, the use of BPO has expanded, with for-profit businesses, nonprofits and even government agencies outsourcing a range of tasks to service providers located in the U. Manufacturers hired third-party vendors to handle parts of their supply chains after determining that the vendors could bring more skills, speed and cost efficiencies to those processes than an in-house team could deliver. Financial accounting refers to the processes used to generate interim and annual financial statements. The results of all financial transactions that occur during an accounting period are summarized in the balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. The financial statements of most companies are audited annually by an external CPA firm.

What Is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)?

However, many BPO firms are willing to work on shifting schedules to accommodate yours. For example, companies in countries such as the Philippines are willing to schedule graveyard shifts to serve US customers, early morning shifts for Australian customers, and mid-day shifts for European clients. Finally, you must choose an outsourcing partner who is adaptable enough to meet your requirements and has a proven track record of open communication in case of a work disruption. Translingual data entry is critical and necessitates the expertise of multilingual data entry professionals capable of performing data mining and migration and online and offline data entry tasks.

Accountants help businesses maintain accurate and timely records of their finances. Accountants are responsible for maintaining records of a company’s daily transactions and compiling those transactions into financial statements such as the balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows. Accountants also provide other services, such as performing periodic audits or preparing ad-hoc management reports. Therefore, it is crucial that a team of experts with reliable technical support or customer care experience handles the process.

Increase Profitability through Back Office Improvements

Outsourcing the back office will save you money by avoiding the abovementioned costs. BPO vendors, however, are contending with disruption as well, as the practice of business process outsourcing could be at least partially displaced in upcoming years by technology. As your business expands in size and market cap, you need to assess whether the outsourcing company can back office accounting keep up. Therefore, you need to determine your future needs and the kinds of services you might consider offering when you grow your business. You don’t have to be burdened by additional labor force or the performance quality of your back office. In time, you’ll be able to focus on the things that matter the most and invest your money and time in primary resources.

Apart from providing back-office support, outsourcing companies emphasize access to the latest technologies and educate their employees on how to use these technologies so that they can complete tasks as needed. Business leaders then consider whether one vendor should handle all the work being outsourced or whether contracting multiple providers for the various tasks would deliver the best value. An organization typically contracts with another business for such services after it has identified a process that, although necessary for its operations, is not part of its core value proposition. This step requires a good understanding of the processes within the organization and strong business process management.

How can thinking of your business as a flywheel foster cross-team collaboration?

They can assist you in optimizing and simplifying your non-customer-facing functions so that they can perform at their best. The decision to proceed with outsourced marketing is an important step in reducing your company’s responsibilities. More importantly, you will feel better knowing that your expert hands create and execute your marketing techniques. On top of that, denials and rejections of insurance claims are quite common due to coding errors. Insurance solutions offer your business operational efficiency and quality assurance, enabling you to put all your effort into your primary business functions. External billers undergo rigorous training to ensure regulatory compliance, thus increasing the number of accepted claims and reimbursed payments.

However, you can retain control over how and when you use outsourced functions. This is primarily due to the importance of new technologies in today’s ever-changing business environment. A business will fail to function properly if the back office is mismanaged, just as a vehicle cannot start if its engines are not properly working.

So while your marketing and HR departments will also greatly benefit from improved efficiency and productivity, those fine folks don’t have to worry about what financial regulators and the FASB have to say. Many businesses will look for consultants and experts to provide some of the required services if internal employees lack the necessary expertise. This can include handling tax returns and year-end accounts, product management, and other bookkeeping services. However, by outsourcing, you can save money on these consultants by delegating the tasks that must be completed to the outsourcing team. Allowing an external service provider to control a company’s internal operations frequently necessitates providing the provider with sensitive information.

RPA can also be used to capture data from these systems without actually integrating with them. Nonetheless, many consider this a temporary band-aid until organizations can update their core legacy systems. Modern back offices continue to use CRM and BPM/workflow systems but are adding in cloud-based solutions that leverage APIs to integrate with existing systems more easily.

How Can You Transform Traditional Back-office Services?

While improved accuracy might be the lowest-hanging fruit, don’t discount the impact of sheer volume or other factors dragging down your process efficiency. Maybe you’re integrating multiple acquisitions, you’ve grown or divested units, or even changed business lines – whatever the case, your processes might not be keeping up with your organization’s dynamics. Similarly, your organization’s income taxes rely on accurate data stemming from seemingly countless different corners of your enterprise. And if there’s anyone you don’t want to get on the wrong side of – especially for something like defective processes – it’s the taxman. And sometimes, that data and the corresponding documentation can look downright Himalayan in nature – vast, endless, and overwhelming.