Small Business Bookkeeping AR/AP Payroll
Back-Office Outsourcing: What the Bundle Includes, and What Still Lands on You
Published October 19, 2026 by Invisible LLC Team · 9 min read
You run an HVAC company, or a landscaping crew, or a contracting outfit with eleven people on it. You are not an accountant and you were never supposed to be one. The books live in a shoebox, a glovebox, and whatever your spouse set up in QuickBooks four years ago, and the CPA sees all of it once a year — in March, for a bill that makes you wince.
That bill is usually what starts the search. So is a bank asking for financials on an equipment loan, three days before you need the equipment.
Key takeaways: "Back office" means the execution layer — coding transactions, paying bills, sending invoices, running payroll, reconciling accounts, closing the month. That's a different purchase from the oversight layer, and knowing which one you're buying is the difference between a fair price and a bad surprise. The work that transfers on day one is narrower than most pages imply, the first ninety days are mostly catch-up, and four decisions never transfer at all.
What "back office" actually means when someone sells it to you
Strip the marketing off and back-office outsourcing services cover the recurring, deadline-driven work that has to happen every week and every month whether or not you have time for it:
- Coding and reconciling every bank and credit card transaction
- Taking in vendor bills, coding them, routing them for approval, and running the payments
- Sending customer invoices, issuing statements, and chasing what's late
- Running payroll and filing the payroll taxes that follow it
- Closing the month and producing a statement package
- Keeping the vendor file clean so January's 1099s aren't a scramble
That's execution. It's the keystrokes, the deadlines, and the paperwork.
There is a second, separate layer above it — reviewing the close, explaining why a number moved, building the reporting and the controls, and forecasting. That's oversight, it's a different job with different deliverables, and we wrote it up on its own in outsourced controller services: what they cover, and when a business actually needs one. If what you actually need is someone to own the close and tell you why the number moved, start there instead — that post is the right one for you, and this one isn't.
Most owners at six to fifteen staff need the execution layer first, and only need the layer above it later. The reason to be precise about the boundary is money: you can be sold oversight pricing for execution work, or buy execution and then be surprised that nobody is interpreting anything.
What actually transfers on day one
The honest list is narrower than the brochure. Here is what a competent provider takes off your desk immediately:
Transaction work. Every bank and card feed gets coded against your chart of accounts and reconciled monthly. This is the foundation; nothing above it is trustworthy until it's done.
Accounts payable. Bills arrive at a single address instead of three inboxes and a truck seat. They get entered, coded to the right job or category, and routed to you for approval. Payment runs happen on a schedule you set — say, Thursdays — instead of whenever somebody calls about a check.
Accounts receivable. Invoices go out on a cadence rather than on a Sunday. Statements go out monthly. Somebody who is not you makes the second and third phone call about the invoice that's forty days old.
Payroll. The run happens, the taxes get filed, new hires get set up, and the quarterly returns are somebody's named responsibility.
The monthly close. The books get closed and you get a profit-and-loss, a balance sheet, and a cash position — on a date, every month, without asking.
Vendor and contractor hygiene. W-9s collected before the first payment, not in January. The vendor master kept clean so the 1099 run is a report instead of an archaeology project.
And here is what does not transfer, no matter what you buy:
- Deciding which bills to pay first in a tight week
- Releasing the money
- Pricing your work
- Hiring and firing
- The tax return itself, which is a separate engagement with a preparer
A provider who implies otherwise is either describing a bigger engagement than they quoted or hasn't thought it through.
The first ninety days, honestly
This is the part most pages skip, and it's the part that determines whether you'd hire the same firm again.
Days 1–30 is access and archaeology. View access to the bank and card accounts, the payroll system, the invoicing system, and whatever the books live in now. Then catch-up: unreconciled months get reconciled, the chart of accounts gets straightened out, and somebody finds the three accounts nobody has looked at since 2024. If your books are a year behind, this is not a thirty-day job and anybody who says otherwise is bidding to disappoint you. Catch-up should be scoped and quoted as its own piece of work, separate from the monthly.
Days 31–60 is the first real close. The first month that closes cleanly on a stated date, with a statement package attached. It will raise questions, and those questions are the useful output — this is usually when an owner learns which jobs were actually profitable.
Days 61–90 is routine. Bills in one place, payments on a schedule, invoices going out without a nudge, the monthly package arriving without a request. If month three still feels like month one, that's your signal, and it's early enough to act on.
What you keep: access, approvals, and the money
Owners ask the right question here, and they ask it first: if somebody else is paying my bills, what stops them from paying the wrong one?
Four things stay with you, and you should insist on all four in writing:
- The bank relationship. The accounts are yours and the primary login is yours. A provider needs read access to reconcile and, if they're running payments, a limited payment role — not ownership of the account.
- Approval before payment. Nothing gets paid that you didn't approve. Most small shops set a dollar threshold: under it, approved batches go out on schedule; over it, your explicit sign-off. Write the number down.
- Release of funds as a separate step from entry. The person who enters a bill should not be the person who can send the money unsupervised. In a company your size this is easy to arrange and cheap insurance.
- Your data. The books live in your subscription, under your login, and you can take them with you. If a provider keeps your ledger inside their own system and exports a PDF on request, you are renting your own history.
None of that is exotic. It's just rarely spelled out before the first invoice.
Where handoffs break — and the questions that prevent it
Four failure points account for most of the bad experiences owners describe, and each one has a question that heads it off.
The receipt that never arrives. A card gets swiped at the supply house and the receipt lives in a truck. The coding guesses, the job cost is wrong, and nobody notices until the job is closed. Ask: how do you handle receipts, and what happens when one is missing?
Approvals that stall. A provider is only as fast as the approvals they're waiting on, and the most common cause of a late payment run is an owner who hasn't looked at the queue. Ask: what exactly are you waiting on from me each week, and when?
The ask-the-owner loop. Every unusual transaction bounces back to you for a decision. The fix is a written coding policy — this vendor is always materials, that one is always subcontract — built in the first sixty days. Ask: how do you document coding decisions so you stop asking me the same question?
The once-a-year CPA handoff. A bookkeeping provider who has never spoken to your tax preparer produces books the preparer has to rework, which is exactly the March bill you were trying to avoid. Ask: will you talk to my CPA directly, and what do you hand over at year end?
Two more worth asking, because they sort providers faster than anything on a pricing page:
- Who, specifically, is on my account, and what's the standard for calling me back? You are hiring a person, not a company. Get the name. A firm that won't give you one is giving you a queue.
- What do you do when you don't know? The right answer is "we tell you, and we ask your CPA." The wrong answer is a confident guess, which is how wrong numbers end up in a loan package.
If you're specifically looking to outsource bookkeeping for a small business and nothing more than that, say so — the bundle is a convenience, not a requirement, and a good provider will quote the slice you actually want. If what's really breaking is only the bill-pay side, that's a narrower engagement than this whole bundle.
Where we fit — and where we don't
We run this layer for owner-operated companies: bookkeeping and the monthly close, invoicing and bill pay, and payroll and benefits, with one named person who knows your business and calls you back the same day. You see how we work with small businesses generally, and the number you get each month is a plain number with a plain explanation attached.
Being straight about the edges: we are not a tax preparation firm, we don't issue audits or any form of assurance, and if you need a full-time controller on site, we'll tell you that on the first call instead of three months in. If your books are badly behind, we'll scope the catch-up separately and tell you honestly how long it takes before we quote the monthly.
What we are is the back office you'd hire if you could justify hiring one — the execution layer, run by a person whose name you know.
Tell us what your month looks like now and we'll tell you which pieces are worth handing over first. If what you actually need is somebody to own the close and explain the numbers rather than produce them, the companion piece is outsourced controller services.