The Control Panel — a solution to orchestrate back-office processes
The main goal of Enty is to automate all back-office processes of your company. Today, I would like to tell you about the heart of our solution — the control panel that helps companies manage their processes with ease.
What is Back-Office?
So we talk about back-office management quite a lot. First, let's take a look at the concept of back-office management, how it's different from middle- and front-office management, and what is the importance of these processes.
According to Investopedia
The back-office is the portion of a company made up of administration and support personnel who are not client-facing. Back-office functions include settlements, clearances, record maintenance, regulatory compliance, accounting, and IT services. For example, a financial services firm is segmented into three parts: the front-office (e.g., sales, marketing, and customer support), the middle-office (risk management), and the back-office (administrative and support services).
Based on this, the back-office includes over 10 different areas of companies' activities. We divide back-office operations into general (that are mandatory for all companies) and optional (those that are mandatory only once companies start certain activities e.g.: issue shares).
General back-office areas:
Accounting;
Tax Reporting and Compliance;
HR;
Legal;
Financial Management.
Optional back-office areas:
Risk Management;
IT;
Equity Management;
AML;
Data Compliance.
Importance of Correct Back-Office Maintenance and Management
Correct operations and maintenance of back-office are vital for multiple reasons. Each piece of this puzzle covers an important part of companies operations without which no company can exist. At the same time, all these processes are deeply connected and if you fail in one of them, it might collapse most of them or even all of them.
Let's take a quick look at one of the most obvious connections:
HR. No company can work without people. Let's imagine that you have amazing HR specialists who hired crème de la crème for your business. The HR department might work closely with financial management to understand the available wage budget; must work closely with accounting in order to account for the costs; with the legal department to have a clear and regulated relationship with employees; make sure that intellectual property created by a company is transferred correctly, and ensure compliance with labor regulation. Just this example highlights the importance of correct back-office operations and how one of them cooperates with the others.
Current Back-Office Management Process and Problems
Just a quick question. Do you have nightmares? Well, we have one for you — we get to the explanation of how back-office is managed now. There are multiple reasons why back-office operations are so complicated.
Firstly, back-office management comes at extreme costs. Let's take a quick look at some numbers. 25M micro and small- enterprises in the EU spend approximately €10.000.000.000 yearly on back-office operations. On average, European SMEs spend about 2.5% of their revenue on tax compliance only (outside of being taxed). While about 40% of business owners take accounting as the worst part of the business, according to the research by Zenefits. Another horrific number comes from the UK, where the cost of unresolved legal problems for SMEs are estimated at £13.6B, while UK startup spends around £22 000 on back-office procedures in the first year of operations on average.
Why is Back-Office in Such a Bad State?
No Exact Measures to Track the Performance
So the front-office people have their performance constantly measured and as a consequence are continuously recognizing individual achievement, with back-office it's a bit different. The reason for this is the fact that most of the work done by back-office employees is harder to characterize because their tasks are so multi-faceted and involve multiple touchpoints. These departments are the cornerstone of a business but you can't measure the lack of lawsuits, while the marketing team shows generated leads. In the end, it's quite hard to measure the performance of the back-office and have a clear picture of its state.
All Departments and Processes Exist Separately
So, while we've talked about the deep connection of all back-office processes, all departments still exist separately and in most cases, they speak on different levels. Even if all departments do their job correctly, there are several corner cases where they collide and some processes stay in the shadows. The problem increases when a company hires outsourcers that are not interested to be involved in the processes deeply, in order to have more clients (this doesn't mean that they do their job badly and you can't blame them really).
Lack of Automation
Even in the digital era, there is a lack of instruments for back-office automation. Sure, there are instruments for accounting or tax automation. However, each tool is responsible solely for one task, therefore it exists in isolation without taking other back-office functions into account.
Data is Separated
All data regarding the back-office processes is collected, controlled, and managed separately by each department. While it must be unified as it influences other processes.
In the end, company management doesn't have a clear picture of the current state of the back-office and there is no solution that unites all processes together.
How Back-Office Must Look: a Single Control Panel to Orchestrate All Back-Office Processes
So, now that we have taken a look at the problems, we would like to tell you about the product we are developing, what we would like to achieve with and why it's important to us personally.
Enty's control panel is a simple tool that allows entrepreneurs to orchestrate all back-office processes of a company from one place. With us, you can incorporate a company in the EU and then manage it online through the whole lifecycle of a company. Starting from tax reporting and continuing to more complicated tasks as corporate actions and cap table management. Basically, we would like to cover both general and optional back-office functions.
Our main goal is to provide businesses with a clear picture of the current state of back-office operations. We achieve this through a blend of our automated solutions and integration with other services. So if there is a decent tool for automation of some processes, we won't spend time rebuilding it on Enty but will integrate it with our control panel. This way all data necessary data is gathered in one place.
We do believe that a solution for true back-office automation is not an AI or rocket science tool. In our view, real automation can be achieved only if all back-office processes and data regarding these processes are handled and analyzed in one place. We are the only team on the market who treats a legal entity as a set of obligations: we truly believe that by controlling the birth and life of the obligations, we can easily automate most of the back-office processes and therefore save time, energy and money for thousands of entrepreneurs worldwide.
Our aim is to cover end-to-end cross-functional processes and create an industry standard for back-office operations. This way, we would like to enlighten the parts that are in the shadows now
Back-office automation won't mean that a company will be able to forget that completely but it will significantly improve current processes, saving time and money for business owners. And of course, some problems can't be solved without professionals getting involved, that's why we offer constant help and consultations from professionals.
Another thing that we are working on is building a truly human approach to back-office operations. The current market is ruthless and there is no true human approach there — that's why all we have created a new paradigm — a personal Online Therapist that is here to navigate through legal, accounting, and even general business struggles.
At this point, you might have a question why do we care? The answer is simple, our team has previously been at both sides of the table: our team has worked in consulting and we've already built a startup company together. Using our expertise, we aim to build the products to fix these flaws with one goal — set the new industry standard for back-office operations management. This market has a huge potential for change and it's time to bring this change (it actually was like 10 years ago). Let's bring this change together, we invite you to work with us or simply share your opinion on the subject.
