What Is a Back Office? What Small Businesses Can Outsource (and What to Keep)

A back office is every job that keeps your business running but isn’t the work customers pay you for: the books, payroll, tax filings, invoices, the website, the Google listing, the ads and the inbox. A small business can outsource almost all of it. Keep the work only you can do, the decisions about money and people, and your relationships with customers. Hand off the rest one job at a time, starting with the one that costs you most when it slips.

What is a back office?

Picture a dental clinic. The front office is the hygienist, the dentist and the person at the desk. The back office is whoever reconciles the bank account, runs payroll every second Friday, files the HST return, fixes the booking form when it breaks and answers the supplier who emailed three times about an unpaid invoice.

Large companies staff each of those jobs. In a business with one to twenty people, the owner usually does them, at night, after the real work is finished. Michael E. Gerber named the cause in The E-Myth Revisited. He called it the Fatal Assumption: the belief that if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand how to run a business that does that work. A great electrician opens a shop and finds the trade now comes with eight other jobs attached.

What can a small business outsource?

More than most owners expect. The table groups the common back-office jobs by how much of your own judgment each one needs. The more routine and rule-bound a job is, the easier it is to hand off.

What should you keep in-house?

Three things stay with you, whatever size you are.

• The work customers pay for. Your craft is the reason the business exists. Outsourcing the back office should give you more hours for it.
• Decisions about money and people. A bookkeeper can show you that a job lost money. Only you decide whether to raise the price or drop the customer. An advisor can model a hire. You decide whether to make it.
• Control of your accounts. Keep ownership of your bank accounts, your domain name, your Google Business Profile and your CRA business account. Give the people who help you their own access, and you can take it back whenever you need to.

That last point matters more than it sounds. Owners who let a web designer register the domain in the designer’s name, or who share one CRA login with a former bookkeeper, find out the cost when the relationship ends.

What stays your responsibility after you outsource?

Handing off the work does not hand off the legal duty. Three CRA rules show where the line sits.

• Payroll. The CRA’s employers’ guide (T4001) places the duty to deduct, remit and report payroll deductions on the employer. If a corporation fails to remit, the directors at the time can be jointly and severally liable for the amount, plus penalties and interest. That is why you should still check each remittance. Our payroll remittance deadlines guide lists the 2026 dates.
• Records. The CRA says you generally must keep required records and supporting documents for six years from the end of the last tax year they relate to. That holds for the 2026 tax year whoever keeps the books, so make sure you can get a full copy of your records if you change providers.
• Access. Don’t share your CRA password. The CRA lets you authorize a representative from the Profile page of My Business Account, which gives them their own access. Form AUT-01 gives offline access by phone, mail, fax or in person.

When is it time to outsource the back office?

You don’t need a revenue target. Watch for these signs instead:

• You do the books, payroll or HST in the evening or on weekends, and you dread it.
• You have paid a late-filing or late-remitting penalty, or come close.
• You don’t know what you made last month until your accountant tells you at year-end.
• Nobody has updated the website or the Google listing in a year.
• Invoices go out late because sending them is one more job on your list.
• You turn down work, or deliver it late, because admin ate the week.

Gerber calls this stage adolescence. It starts when the owner first gets help, and it turns into a crisis when the business grows past what the owner can keep track of. The usual response is to work harder. Outsourcing the back office is the other response. You add capacity without adding an employee you have to train, manage and cover when they are away.

Should you hire, use freelancers, or hand it to one team?

Each option works for some businesses. This table compares them on time, cost, cover and oversight.

The “whole picture” row is easy to skip past. When the person running your ads can see your books, they can tell which campaigns paid for themselves. When the person on your inbox knows your payroll calendar, a missing timesheet gets chased before payday, not after. If you are weighing a full-time finance hire, our guide to what a bookkeeper costs in Ontario breaks down the options. For an admin role, our hire or outsource guide works through the 2026 cost of a part-time hire in Ontario.

How do you start outsourcing without losing control?

1. List every back-office job for one week. Write down each task and roughly how long it took. Add up the hours at the end of the week.
2. Pick one job to hand off first. Choose the one with a deadline and a penalty attached, or the one you dread most. One clean handoff teaches you more than five rushed ones.
3. Write down how it is done today. A rough checklist is enough. Gerber’s advice is to treat every recurring job as a system someone else could follow, and this is where that starts. Our process checklist guide shows how to write one.
4. Set up proper access. Separate logins, CRA representative authorization, a shared folder you own. No shared passwords.
5. Agree on what you will see each month. A short report you will read beats a long one you won’t. Ask how fast they reply and how you reach a person.
6. Review after 90 days, then add the next job. If the first handoff runs on its own, move the next one across.

What does it cost to outsource the back office?

Cost depends on how many jobs you hand off and how much volume each one carries. We publish our finance back-office pricing on the services page: Books & Payroll starting at $1,500/month, Growth Partner starting at $4,000/month, and Fractional CFO starting at $12,000/month. We quote local SEO, websites, ads and admin after a conversation, on their own or added to a tier, because that work varies too much between businesses for a flat number to be honest.

Compare that against what the work costs you now: your evening hours, any penalties, the invoices that went out late, and the work you turned down. If you mostly need the books brought up to date first, read our bookkeeping health check before you talk to anyone.

Why one back office instead of eight vendors

Intersect runs the back office for small businesses in Guelph and across Ontario: the books, payroll and HST, the Google listing and website, the ads, and the inbox. We’re based on Carden Street in downtown Guelph, we’re Indigenous-owned, and a real person answers the phone. You can start with one job and add others when you are ready. See everything we handle on the services page, or tell us which job you’d hand off first.

Frequently asked questions

What is a back office in a small business?

The back office is the work that keeps a business running but that customers never see or pay for directly: bookkeeping, payroll, tax filings, invoicing and collections, the website, the Google listing, ads, the inbox and the calendar.

What is the first thing a small business should outsource?

Start with the job that costs you the most when it goes wrong or goes late. For most owners that is bookkeeping, payroll remittances or HST filings, because those carry deadlines and penalties. If the books are fine and the phone is quiet, start with your Google Business Profile instead.

If I outsource payroll or HST, who is responsible to the CRA?

You are. The CRA puts the duty to deduct, remit and report payroll on the employer, and directors of a corporation can be personally liable for unremitted source deductions. Outsourcing moves the work, not the legal responsibility, so pick someone you can reach and check that filings went in.

Do I have to give my bookkeeper my CRA password?

No, and you shouldn’t. The CRA lets you authorize a representative from My Business Account, so they get their own access. You can also use Form AUT-01 to give someone offline access by phone, mail, fax or in person.