BPO & Back-Office Operations

About BPO & Back-Office Operations

The work the business runs on and nobody outside it ever sees.

Invoices and reconciliations, data entry and document handling, payroll admin, order processing, the research nobody has time for. Back-office work is a good candidate for handing over precisely because it is repetitive, rule-bound and measurable — three conditions that make a written procedure possible in the first place.

It is also the work most often handed over badly, and the pattern is always the same. A task moves out before anyone has written down how it is done, so the supplier invents their version of it on the spot, and six weeks later two organisations are running two different processes under one name. Whether the procedure existed before the handover is the single best predictor of whether the handover holds.

So the pieces here spend more time on sequencing and on measurement than on the case for outsourcing, which mostly makes itself. What to move first, how to write the procedure, how to set a standard somebody can actually be held to, and which functions are better kept in-house whatever the saving looks like on a spreadsheet.

Where to start

There are 22 pieces below. These are the ones worth opening first.

1. Back Office Tasks to Outsource

   The inventory. Read it as a list to cut down, not a list to work through.

2. Setting a Data Entry Accuracy Rate

   How to turn "do it properly" into a number — which is exactly where most back-office agreements come apart.

3. How to Build a Remote Back Office Team

   The order to do it in, once the decision is made.