Back Office Outsourcing Services: How to Decide What Moves

You probably came here with a job title in mind. A bookkeeper. An admin assistant. Someone to take the pile off your desk.

But that’s usually not the right place to start. 

Owners and department heads feel the pain long before they can name the job. So they write a job description around the pile. One person, four unrelated jobs, one low rate.

This article takes the other approach. It explains what a back office contains, which parts move well, and which parts should not move at all. By the end you should be able to name the function you want to move, and the part of it you have to keep.

If offshore hiring is new to you, read what offshore staffing is first, then come back.

What back office support services actually cover

The front office earns revenue and talks to customers. Sales, marketing, account management, customer service.

The back office keeps the business running behind all of that. Processing, recordkeeping, and administration no one outside the company ever sees.

That division is important. Since back office work is repeatable and rule-based, it’s possible to hand it to somebody else.

Here is what the category usually contains.

Most companies past a certain size have all five. They are just not organized as departments yet. One office manager, or the owner, is doing four of them badly at eleven at night.

When these functions do get their own people, the roles tend to fall into a few groups: operations and administrative support, administrative assistants, finance and accounting, and bookkeeping.

Naming the function is the first step. Once you know which of the five is breaking, the role then becomes obvious.

Start with the bottleneck, not the job title

Gregg Carey, More Staffing’s CEO, puts this part plainly: “Rather than looking at it through the lens of a particular role, I really think it’s about identifying where the biggest bottlenecks are in the business.”

He goes further: “Go at it from an objective perspective and figure out where’s the biggest low hanging fruit just to kind of move stuff off your plate.”

This is simple enough to execute. For one week, write down every task that comes back to you after you thought it was handled. Every invoice you had to chase. Every order that needed your decision. Every report you rebuilt in a spreadsheet because the numbers were wrong.

By the end of that, you will not have a job description. You will have a function.

This also prevents the most common mistake we see. Gregg describes it: a client arrives with a budget and wants one person to do a little graphic design, a little creative strategy, and a little bookkeeping, all at a rock-bottom rate. Those are three different professions. One person will do all three at the level you paid for, which is to say badly.

The rule should be: One bottleneck. One function. One person who is actually good at it.

Which functions move well

Research on large multinationals found a common pattern. They usually start with technology work, move to transactional finance, then customer support, then analytical work.

That pattern is good for companies with thousands of employees and a formal shared services strategy. However, it is not much help to a company with sixty people and a controller who is drowning.

For a business your size, three things predict whether a function will transfer well.

The work repeats

If the same task happens fifty times a month with the same steps, it moves. If every instance is different and requires a judgment call, it does not.

The rules exist somewhere

Written down is best. In one person’s head is workable, as long as that person has time to explain it. Nowhere at all is a problem, and we will come back to that.

Somebody on your side already owns the outcome

Not the tasks. The outcome. If no one is accountable for whether accounts receivable is current, hiring someone offshore will not create that accountability.

Two examples of how this looks in practice:

A home services company with a full schedule and slow collections has two bottlenecks: dispatch and billing. Both repeat daily, both follow rules, and both have a clear owner. That is a strong first move. We see this pattern regularly in home services.

An ecommerce brand growing fast has order issues, returns, and inventory counts that’s hard to trust. Same test, same answer. The work repeats, the rules are in the platform, and somebody already owns fulfillment. Ecommerce operations transfer well for the same reason.

What you should keep in-house

Four kinds of work should stay with you, and each for a different reason.

Work that has to be close to your market

Brand, merchandising, senior marketing. Gregg calls this the barbell approach. You save on operational work so you can pay properly for the handful of roles that need to understand your customer at a level no one can learn from a brief. His words: “there’s roles that need to be close to the culture, the market, and I can hire those A players because of the savings.”

Work that needs same-hour back-and-forth

Some jobs create value by turning something around in an hour. A designer who can hop on a call, iterate, and get an email out before lunch. Put a twelve-hour gap in the middle of that and the value dilutes. We turned down clients for exactly this reason.

Live US phone sales, if you are hiring in the Philippines

A sales role that needs full US daytime coverage means a permanent graveyard shift. That is a retention problem you are choosing on purpose. For phone sales, Latin America usually makes more sense.

Now, academic research on outsourcing has tracked how often companies bring work back in-house. Depending on the study and the industry, somewhere between 15 and 33 percent of outsourced functions get re-internalized. The recurring causes are consistent: coordination and oversight costs that weren’t budgeted for, quality drift as the provider’s people turn over, and the slow loss of internal knowledge until no one on your team can solve an exception without help.

These don’t mean you shouldn’t move the work. But you do have to be careful with moving the wrong work, or moving the right work badly. The common pitfalls are predictable enough to avoid.

Finance work needs a line down the middle

If you are moving any part of finance, this section is critical.

Internal control standards used across US business, including the COSO framework and AICPA attestation standards, require that three things stay separate: custody of assets, authorization of transactions, and recordkeeping. One person should never hold more than one.

That rule applies to offshoring as well.

Your offshore hire belongs in recordkeeping and reconciliation. Somebody on your side keeps custody and authorization.

In practice:

• They match invoices and queue payments for release. You approve the release.
• They prepare bank and balance sheet reconciliations. Your controller reviews and signs off.
• They maintain records. Nobody who enters vendor payments should also be able to add or edit vendors and their bank details. That combination is how wire fraud happens.

This is not a limit on what a strong finance hire can do. Inside that line, the work is substantial and critical.

What stays with you is the decision authority. Gregg’s framing on the business rules: you have to agree on what happens when a client is thirty days late. Do you send a text, or make a call? Your hire executes that rule reliably. You decide what the rule is.

If you are scoping finance work, the relevant roles are finance and accounting and bookkeeping.

What administrative outsourcing services are not

In an outsourcing model, a provider owns the process. You agree on an outcome and a service level. Their supervisors direct the work, their people do it, often on their systems. You buy a result.

In an offshore staffing model, you hire a person. They work in your systems, on your schedule, reporting to your manager. A partner handles recruiting, payroll, compliance, and the support that keeps that person engaged and growing. You buy capacity and you keep control.

They solve different problems. 

If you want a defined outcome and no management responsibility, the outsourcing model fits.

If you want someone who learns your business, follows your priorities, and gets better every quarter, offshore hiring is the model for you.

If you want the longer version, read what an offshore staffing partner does and how it works.

What has to be true before your first hire starts

1. The process is written down

Not a summary. The actual steps, the systems, and what to do when something is unusual. If the process lives only in one person’s head, that person is now your trainer, and you need to give them the time.

2. One person on your side owns it

Single-threaded. Your hire needs somebody to ask, and you need somebody accountable for the outcome.

3. You have a baseline

How long does the work take now? How many errors? How many exceptions a week? Without a number from before, you cannot tell whether it is working after.

4. Onboarding is planned, not improvised

Skipping this is the most expensive mistake in remote hiring. We had a client whose leader came from a large corporate environment where infrastructure and institutional knowledge were just there. We placed two people with them, both technical design roles. Both ended within a week. The client had assumed the hires would arrive running. The talent reported limited onboarding, no check-ins, and unclear direction. Two good people, gone in seven days, for entirely avoidable reasons.

Here’s another related trap: lower rates do not lower the standard. Cost savings do not give you license to eliminate the rigor around your process, your management, and your expectations of the person.

On timing, be realistic. Transactional work usually steadies within a few months. Judgment-heavy work takes longer. Early on, your own capacity drops before it rises, because your people are training while still doing their own jobs. That dip is normal and temporary.

Two things that help: thorough pre-vetting before anyone starts, and a real approach to managing an offshore team after they do.

Where to start

Four steps, in order.

1. Find the bottleneck. One week of notes will show you.
2. Write down the process behind it.
3. Decide what stays with you. Authorization, decisions, and anything that needs your market or your hour.
4. Scope the role around what is left.

If you want to understand the money side before you go further, we have written about what this costs and how staffing fees are structured.

When you know the function, you can look at the roles we place. And if you want help working out which bottleneck to solve first, book a call and we will talk it through.