There are words we keep hearing in the corporate world but never truly understand what they mean. One such thing is back-office services. What is it exactly? Well, an office is run by a lot of departments working together. Some of them are related directly to the customers while others aren’t. Roles that don’t interact with customers are usually considered “back office”.
Back-office operations are considered to be the backbone of an enterprise and hence are no less important than the essential functions. Back-office services include a wide range of jobs and tasks depending on your business’s structure. All data-related jobs, including data mining, data entry, and data management are back-office operations. Similarly, invoice processing, handling payrolls, taxes and bookkeeping are also back office services.
Large companies have dedicated teams to handle the back-office tasks, but small business founders usually rely on themselves to fulfil these roles. In addition to running your business, you will have to invoice and collect payments from your clients, prepare contracts, manage and pay taxes, organise benefits and insurance, and ensure your business remains complainant with all federal, state, and local laws. Sounds chaotic? It sure is!
4 Ways to handle back office operations
If you’re running a small business, there’s no doubt that you’ll be juggling a lot of different tasks. Often, it feels like all of the admin just gets in the way of what you really want to focus on. There are several ways to handle these operations, and your choice will depend on your business needs, personal preferences, and work style. Here are a few options to consider:
- Do It Yourself
Most small business owners and startup founders opt for this initially. They handle all their back-office management themselves. With a small team and a limited customer base, this might be possible. But, as your business grows, burning yourself out with handling everything yourself can hamper your growth. You have limited energy and capacity, investing your time handling administrative tasks would keep you from working on growth and expansion.
- Hire an Accountant
Spending your time on back-office management takes away from the time you can dedicate to your actual work. You can hire accountancy support to get this burden off your shoulders. You can hire an administrative assistant who can handle invoicing, recordkeeping, paying bills, and maintaining tax records. However, you can now have one-to-one accountancy support in more than one way according to your scale and preferences.
- Full-time accountant
- Part-time accountancy support
- Freelance Virtual assistant
This seems like the best option so far, but affording an accountant even in a part-time facility is unaffordable for most new startups and small businesses. Along with cost, it would also require additional oversight, training, and management from your side.
- Outsource back office services
Back office outsourcing involves delegating labour-intensive administrative tasks, that would otherwise be performed by your own staff, to remote workers employed by a third party. This outsourcing provides your company access to skilled workers, increases flexibility and scalability, and liberates you from rising operational costs. There are firms of chartered accountants that offer such services. Though this seems like the easiest option, there would be interference, it would still cost you a good amount, and above all, you might have concerns about your data privacy. Trusting someone else with all your business information can lead to security and confidentiality risks.
- The All-in-one solution with Metric
Any of the mentioned ways might suit your business, but there are a few issues with them all.
- Doing it yourself takes up too much of your time and increases error probability.
- Hiring an accountant might not be affordable for your business at this stage.
- Outsourcing services raises security and confidentiality risks.
The metric app facilitates founders opting for any of the above-mentioned ways of handling back-office services. The free app lets you have control of all your financial decisions yet handles all the monotonous routine accountancy tasks for you. The free app offers bookkeeping, essential business metrics tracking, financial reporting and transaction record services.
However, since metric automates all your back-office services there isn’t any interference and the service is completely free. In addition to that, your business’s data is only accessible to you, the founder, it can’t be accessed by the metric team. As far as the one-on-one accountant consultation goes, metric’s “Growth financial plan” offers dedicated chartered accountant support for specific business insights and advice. This app lets you benefit from the pros of all ways while avoiding all the cons altogether.
What back-office services does Metric offer?
Many companies are outsourcing their back-end offices to maintain access to highly trained executives at a lower cost. Outsourcing also allows you to be more responsive to fluctuations in the market.
Back-office services are complex, time-consuming, and require absolute accuracy. This makes it essential for founders to have help with these administrative financial tasks while they focus on customer-facing operations. Metric offers assistance in almost all of the back-office services. Some of the offered services include:
Data Management
Data is getting bigger and more complex with every passing day. It has now become almost impossible to manually store, organize and draw meaningful insights from raw data. Metric app stores all your transactions, keep a record of your cash flow, constructs financial reports from the raw data and on top of that keeps you updated on your financial status in real-time.
Invoice Processing
Processing invoices is an essential part of back-office that requires precision and accuracy. Metric keeps track of due, partial and paid invoices along with digitizing receipts from paper invoices into electronic format.
Essential metrics tracking
The metric app automates the tracking of all key metrics of your business. Some of them include:
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the amount of money a company spends to get a new customer. Metric tracks it to help measure the return on investment of efforts to grow their clientele.
- Average order value (AOV) is an e-commerce metric that tracks the average dollar amount spent whenever a customer places an order on a website or application.
- Retention is when a customer retains an amount of money for a specified period of time after the service has been provided or goods bought.
- Customer and Employee retention is a company’s ability to retain customers and employees respectively. Customer retention is critical to track because the cost of acquiring new customers is much higher than retaining existing customers. Similarly, employee retention directly impacts the productivity of the company, this is important to track.
- Payables and Receivables Tracking
- Deposits and Withdrawal Tracking
Financial Reporting
Metric offers custom financial reporting that makes pitching investors and filing tax returns easy. A few of the reporting services offered in different financial plans of Metric are:
- Custom Profit and Loss report
- Custom Revenue and Expense Report
- Cash-flow statement
- Balance Sheet
- Ageing Report
Cloud-based record keeping
The metric app is equipped with modern-day technology thus offering efficient, organized and cost-friendly services to small business founders. The app keeps a cloud-based transaction record along with cloud-based receipts and document records. This saves new founders from the huge amount of data on drives at risk of getting corrupted. Cloud-based record-keeping makes data accessible anytime anywhere.
Metric offers a great number of services but the best part is it is founder-friendly. This app has been designed for founders thus if you have no experience or knowledge of accounting you’re at the right place. There is no need to avoid back office services, just let metric handle it for you. It is extremely easy to use, needs no accountancy experience and supports all kinds of businesses.