What Are the Different Types of Back Office Services?

The different types of back office services include a range of administrative duties such as human resources, accounting, customer order processing, equipment maintenance, and records management. Back office tasks can also be more specialized for certain professional areas such as medicine or information technology. While back office support staff normally do not interact with customers as frequently as the front office staff, back office services still provide essential components to daily business operations. Various professionals often begin their careers with entry-level back office jobs in their specific areas of interest.

Human resources (HR) is an integral part of back office services that is responsible for recruiting, hiring, and training new employees for various departments. HR staff also usually provide employees with their required tax documents and arrange payroll services such as paycheck direct deposit into workers' bank accounts. This particular back office support department ensures that qualified people are assigned to available jobs and appropriately compensated for their work.

Accounting departments are back office services concerned with a company's various financial transactions. Large organizations often have their own in-house accounting departments, and small businesses frequently outsource these duties to independent accounting firms. These types of back office tasks generally entail keeping accurate records of customer transactions and balances that the business owes to other vendors. Accounting staff usually also calculate cash flows and existing liabilities to present a general picture of how well the company is doing financially within a given time frame.

Back office services also include order processing for businesses that provide specific goods or services. These duties often entail inventory pulling, packing, shipping, and invoicing the customers for the cost of their orders. Some order processing departments in large companies may have a courier on the staff to make local deliveries, though this job duty is often outsourced in many cases. Accurate record-keeping of receipts and invoices is an important part of this back office department as well.

The back office services of a medical office may include routine work such as processing blood tests. Medical back office technicians rather than doctors often perform these tasks where local regulations also them to do so. Information technology (IT) back office support staff usually make sure that the computers and phones in other departments are working properly. These specialty back office workers promptly repair any problems with this equipment and its associated software, and they also frequently perform regular system updates and maintenance.