Guide
What a back office does, and what you can hand off
The back office is the work that keeps a company running but never meets a customer: finance, people and the workplace. What's in it, what it costs you, and which parts you can hand off first.
Key takeaways
- The back office has three parts: finance, people and the workplace.
- Most of it is routine work with clear rules, spread across email, chat and several systems.
- Its real cost is the time your best people spend on it, and what slips when they're busy.
- Hand off the routine first, keep the decisions, and start with the part that piles up fastest.
Front office, back office
The front office is the work customers see: selling, serving, delivering. The back office is everything that makes that possible and that customers never see. It pays the bills, keeps the books, looks after the people and keeps the workplace running.
In large companies the back office is whole departments. In most companies it's a few people doing it on top of their actual jobs, and a founder who still signs off on more of it than they'd like.
Finance
The financial back office keeps money moving and recorded. It's the largest part for most companies, and the one with the clearest rules.
- Recording supplier bills and expenses as they arrive
- Matching payments to invoices and reconciling the bank
- Filing receipts and checking spend against policy
- Keeping track of subscriptions and contracts before they renew
- Preparing payments for approval
- Getting the books ready for the accountant and month end
People
The HR side covers everything from someone's first day to their last, and all the small requests in between.
- Answering time-off requests and keeping balances and calendars current
- Getting new starters ready, and closing everything off for leavers
- Keeping one record per person, with documents and expiry dates
- Gathering and checking payroll inputs before the cutoff
- Answering routine policy questions
The workplace
The office side keeps the place, the supplies and the services working, whether your team is in one office, several or none.
- Booking meeting rooms and welcoming visitors
- Reordering supplies inside the spending policy
- Managing suppliers, deliveries and repairs
- Planning travel, events and team days
Signs it needs help
Back-office trouble rarely arrives all at once. It builds up in small ways that are easy to explain away. If several of these sound familiar, the back office has outgrown the time you give it.
- Month end takes days, and starts with a hunt for missing receipts
- Nobody is quite sure which invoices have been paid
- Leave requests wait until a manager has a free moment
- Renewals are noticed when the charge appears, not before
- The same question gets a different answer depending on who you ask
- A founder still approves orders that never need a second look
What it really costs
The back office rarely shows up as a line in the budget. It shows up as time: the operations lead who spends Friday afternoons on bills, the manager answering leave requests between meetings, the founder approving every order.
It also shows up as what slips. A supplier paid twice. A renewal nobody noticed. A new starter with no laptop. None of these is a disaster. Together they cost more than most people think, and they fall on the people you'd least like to distract.
What you can hand off
Sort each task by two questions. Does it follow rules you could write down? Does it happen often? Work that's rule-based and frequent is the work to hand off first. Work that needs judgement, such as pay decisions, a difficult supplier or a sensitive HR matter, stays with people.
That split is the idea behind OFFHOURS. It gives you a back office team, The Accountant, the HR Admin and the Office Manager, who work inside the systems you already use and do the routine work around the clock. They bring back what needs a decision, with the evidence attached. They prepare payments but never send money. Every action is logged and can be undone, and Sogody's engineers supervise the work.
Where to start
Start with the part of the back office that piles up fastest. For most companies that's finance: bills, receipts and the bank. For people-heavy businesses, such as agencies or hospitality, it's often time off and new starters.
Write down how the work is done today, decide where it should stop and ask, and hand off one area at a time. With OFFHOURS, a role is working within a week: mapping the work in the first days, connecting your systems and setting the rules, then starting on probation while you review everything it does.
