It is a common problem. When you start a new venture, primary focus tend to be on product and sales development because, what you want the most is return on investment.

Thus other aspects of the business are left aside. Mainly, the back-office tasks, data organisation and resources planning.

In response to a small poll, here are some reasons why paying attention to back-office and organisation is very important as soon as you start your new business.

First comment, is that people who responded did not select  option "I don't need that" answer, which is rather positive.

 

But what about other choices ?

 

1) No priority or no time

Time and priority is not an excuse. Saying that is like pretending to build a new house without bedrock because it takes too much time or you prefer to start with the roof first in case of rain. Any structure needs a solid ground.

 

But it as few others advantages to focus (also) on back-office. The time spend at early stage in organizing and planning data management is investment for the future and a lot of time saving for the years to come as you will not have to dive in messy organization each time you need to retrieve business information.

If you feel it consumes too much time, a proper system will also be a good solution to outsource part of the tasks that are overlooked but will need to be done sooner or later.

It also has an advantage when it comes to transparency. Having a central and well accessible back-office organisation is of great value for your company and stakeholders. If you are dealing with potential investors, they will certainly appreciate that you have an efficient, well structured and transparent data organization that will boost their confidence for investment.

There is another point that is often ignored: business continuity.

Business continuity issues appear when information is not anymore accessible to run the business: loss of critical data or the person that control those data cannot be reached. With a back-office implementation plan and some simple rules, you can greatly minimize the business continuity issues.

Today everybody talk about "big data" and its extraordinary value; but don't forget, big data must start small in anyway and whichever data your business is producing, it is of high value.

 

2) Too expensive

This is what people usually think and it is partially true, because from early stage in business digitization of data, offers, hardware and software, have been expensive.

 

However, with development of internet and cloud computing, there have been a lot of improvement and competition in solutions offered to small and medium business. Today all the big service providers, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, to name few have developed solutions dedicated to SME. Besides, there are plenty of free and open source solution on the market that entrepreneurs can choose from. The list will be too long to establish. Our startup has developed its own back office systems many years ago. Today we offer it as open source code for any startup who would like to implement it (check this tutorial). Our solution advantage is that you have most of back-office functionalities included plus many other collaborative tools that make working in modern environment more efficient. With this system we run today different companies and offices in different countries.

 

3) It is too complicated

Is there something easy when you start a business ?

But most of time "complication" is a false excuse given for something that is considered boring and of low value. For the value, we already covered it in the first point. You can't ignore the value of information.

 

It will also greatly help in simplifying workflow and collaboration inside and outside your organisation. What is perceived as complicated now is actually simplifying work at a global scale. The key point in a good and efficient organization is to have a single source of information. Single source means that you do not duplicate the same information on different media, you avoid potential update errors and gain time in sourcing data because there is only one source to query. When different collaborators have the same excel budget table duplicated on their computer, there is a great chance that they are reading different information because that information is not synchronized or shared from central source.

 

Conclusion

Back-office at early stage helps people in organizing their tasks, to share information, improve efficiency and business continuity.

With a good management system, you can maximize your business value, spend less time on spreadsheets and more on your development: faster response to market demand, precise knowledge of your costs, increased productivity and teamwork.

And you will start building value right from start.