What are the business areas that you need to outsource?

You now have an idea what is the meaning of outsourcing, what outsourcing does, and how outsourcing work. The overall advantages of outsourcing eliminate certain cynicisms, specifically whether it works or its relevance. 

In terms of services to outsource, note that you have a wide range of options you can acquire from third-party providers. These outsourcing processes support various business areas, which will be discussed as you read through the article. 

Distinct business areas to outsource 

To further this outsourcing explanation, here are some distinct business areas that you can outsource from external service providers.

Administrative tasks

Company and business administration is composed of day-to-day operational activities. 

More often than not, employees spend too much of their time focusing on admin tasks. This usually leaves them little to no time to develop the core aspects of the business. Thus, it is why most companies outsource some of their administrative functions.

Here are the common admin tasks that you can outsource from a third-party service provider:

1. Data entry

Typing and data entry works take a lot of employee time. Instead of spending hours of the day typing your business data, a third-party service provider can do this job for your business. Your business data can be arranged and filed without allotting many hours to do it.

2. Travel Management

Having a person that focuses on your travel management can come in handy. Your staff will ensure that you have the necessary reservations and airline tickets you need. 

While there is the software you can use for this task, having someone to handle it makes it easier. This is specifically when it comes to certain issues that need to be resolved.

3. Scheduling

Running a business is hard and would usually keep you busy. Having someone that arranges and organizes your schedule always helps. 

You don’t have to worry when there are people you have to call or places you have to go. Through outsourcing, you will have someone who will regularly remind you of these schedules.

4. Typing

Typing jobs, especially bulk ones, can be time and effort-consuming. Instead of doing this in-house, typing can be outsourced outside your company. This frees up more of your time so you can focus on your efforts to grow your business.

5. Personal Assistant

Hiring a virtual assistant is quite the same in duplicating yourself. This way, you can be more focused in attending to the more pressing issues of growing your business.

6. Data management and processing

Data management and processing is not an easy task. Whether it is as simple as entering data on Microsoft Excel or Word, it is usually time-consuming. Fetching data whenever you need them can also take time, especially if you don’t have it organized.

Outsourcing data processing for your business makes everything easy, as you would have all documents organized.

Customer support

Customer Support involves direct communication with your customers through various communication channels. 

Here are the roles you can outsource for customer support: 

1. Sales Moderation

Sales moderation is a technical business function. If you are no expert in this area, it would always help to have an expert do it for you.

2. Customer Service

Customer service is among the commonly outsourced services. Customer service experts handle customer complaints, concerns, and needs more effectively when you outsource. 

It is a smart move to have experienced professionals or a robust system for your customer service. This practice ensures that customers are happy and satisfied as they are the most valued asset of any business.

3. Live Chat Support

Live chat support systems can also be outsourced for the same purpose as outsourcing customer service.

4. Community Moderation

For companies and businesses that have a rapidly increasing online community, outsourcing can be an excellent option.

Instead of doing it in-house, having third-party experts handle this technical function can be convenient, saving time and expenses in training current employees or hiring new ones.

Financial and accounting duties

It’s always better to keep your financial data and accounts organized all the time. It helps you avoid trying to catch up on the duties at the end of the year when you need them. 

It can be time-consuming and tedious to scramble when the tax season comes. However, maintaining an organized book takes more time and focus. This usually pushes you to hire an in-house accounting team which can be an additional labor cost.

Fortunately, there are some financial and accounting duties that you can outsource. Here are the top outsourced services for finance and accounting.

1. Bookkeeping

Working with a bookkeeper outside your business is so much easier, especially with the available cloud-based accounting software these days.

It will be more efficient to outsource a professional for this specific business function. You can simply send your business account data that you want your bookkeeper to organize. In turn, they will send you the reports you want.

Outsourcing the services from a bookkeeper also eliminates the hassle when it comes to taxes.

2. Invoicing

Choosing to outsource your business’ invoice processing can save you all the hassle. It can provide your company with a better business operation by giving regular, accurate, and timely invoice management.

3. Accounts Payable and Receivable

One of the best ways you can reduce costs and expenses in your business is through invoices, particularly in both accounts payable and receivables or AP and AR.

Outsourcing helps companies improve their compliance regarding internal controls, saving a huge chunk of money. It also helps make streamlining AP and AR convenient without spending huge hours every day doing the job.

4.  Financial Reporting, Analysis, and Planning

Financial reporting can be tedious, especially if it’s not streamlined and organized well. It can also take a lot of time, especially when preparing reports and analysis to identify your company’s current financial health. 

To make this process seamless and efficient, outsourcing financial reporting services can be a great option.

With outsourcing, you can save time, usually in analyzing financial documents and preparing reports. It also saves you from spending money to purchase financial reporting software.

IT operations and management

Specific IT specialists should always handle Information Technology (IT) roles. These roles aren’t something that regular employees can do. 

Hiring in-house IT professionals can be pretty expensive. However, IT roles are essential to your business’s internal processes. This is why many companies today outsource, as they can work with seasoned specialists while cutting costs.

Here are IT-related roles you can source out: 

1.  IT Support

– System

No matter what the size of your business, glitches in your system are inevitable. Problems like crashing servers and websites, corrupted data, and malware attacks can be pressing issues. 

These are just some instances when an outsourced IT support system can come in handy. It is also much cheaper than having an in-house IT team. Security is another reason why a lot of companies outsource.

– Network Admin

Aside from a secure system for your business, outsourcing a network admin can also be advantageous. It helps maintain a seamless process within the company.

Creative services

1. Website Design

An excellent website can make or break your online presence. If you are not an expert, website design can be quite a challenge. 

Hiring a professional can be helpful. It will not only save you time and energy, it will also give you a quality output – a  website that can provide you with high customer satisfaction.

2. Graphic Design

Graphics puts a face to your brand. Having a talented graphic designer will help you to represent your brand and your voice effectively. You need eye-catching visuals and designs that will attract your customers. 

3. Web Development

It is always a great choice to leave web development and maintenance to an expert. Business owners should be more focused in growing the business and ensuring the quality of products and services instead of consuming a lot of time in maintaining an e-commerce website.

4. Software Development

Outsourcing software development can be another advantage for a business in terms of improving one’s competitive edge within the market. It’s a strategic approach for every company. 

Instead of costly in-house software development, outsourcing makes an obvious choice in terms of cost-effectiveness. Through outsourcing, you are guaranteed that an expert professional is doing the job for you.

5. Animation

A lot of entertainment companies, small or large corporations, usually outsource animation services. One of the main reasons is to cut costs, contracting pre-production tasks from studios overseas where costs are cheaper.

6. Storyboard

Outsourcing storyboards and creative design can provide a lot of benefits. It helps in cutting time and costs. It gives you access to skilled professionals outside of the company. 

You can also take advantage of their international exposure and excellent infrastructure that are otherwise not available in your company.

Human resources

Hiring and training new and existing employees can often be a rigorous task for the human resource department. 

Usually, it takes so much of the employees’ time that they can otherwise use it to give attention to core business functions.

This is why human resources are among the common tasks being outsourced. Here are some examples on how you can define outsourcing jobs in HR business functions:

1. HR Support

Outsourcing to a human resource support can help a business manage a wide range of HR functions. These functions include payroll processing, recruiting, employee training, and benefit plan management.

2. Medical Billing

There are a lot of advantages in outsourcing medical billing. Every reason works toward making the entire billing process easy and convenient. 

Instead of spending a lot of time taking care of the billing documents, employees can cater more to their patients. Hiring a professional to do the process also helps reduce billing errors and ensure billing compliance.

3. Insurance Support

Outsourcing insurance support helps drive innovation in business processes. Further, it can also help in improving customer service.

Sales and marketing

Your sales and marketing should always be well aligned as they will be your way of closing deals with your customers. 

To help you earn more profits, here are some of the roles you can outsource with regard to sales and marketing: 

4. Brand Development

Marketing and developing your brand requires proper knowledge and expertise. This specific role will need time for planning and execution. 

Since time is a precious commodity when running a business, having an expert can come in handy. An expert in this field can also help in developing a better strategy to build brand awareness.

5. Press Release

Press releases can be used by businesses to gain media coverage or for search engine optimization purposes. However, a press release can be either good or bad. The latter will be ineffective, thus, a waste of money. 

Outsourcing press release services from someone who knows how to do it right can help you establish your name.

6.  Online Marketing

Online marketing is considered the most effective and convenient way of marketing today. This is mainly because you can pretty much find everyone online these days. 

However, online marketing is pretty cutthroat, especially with the ever-changing trends and market competition these days. 

To help you with your online marketing, here are some of the roles you can farm out to experts: 

– Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is extremely helpful and advantageous. It helps in keeping your business relationship with your current customers and connecting to new ones. However, it can often be tedious as you need to regularly post social media updates.

Finding a tech-savvy professional who can manage the company’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media platforms can save you both time and energy.

– Content Marketing

Aside from social media, creating quality content is also an excellent marketing strategy to bring your business into the market. But again, it takes time and effort to create and produce contents that will make you relevant in your chosen niche.

Fortunately, you can hire a content writer or a freelance content marketer to do this tedious job, making outsourcing articles that much easier.

– SEO and PPC

Simply making content would not bring your business to the top, especially if you want your brand to appear on the search engine result’s first page. 

You have to be familiar with SEO and PPC marketing strategies. Training an employee for this job takes time and money. A more cost-effective option is to find a professional that can optimize your content for your business.

– Email Marketing

Any marketing campaign also takes a lot of time and effort, and email marketing is not an exception. Fortunately, you can outsource this marketing task to someone outside your business, someone who knows how to do it right.

Legal services 

Business owners also have the option to outsource legal counseling and support at a fraction of the costs. This is very helpful, especially for startups and small businesses with tight budgets. 

As for legal services, here are the roles to outsource: 

1.  Lawyers and Paralegals

When it comes to cost savings, is outsourcing legal services an excellent move? With legal services outsourcing, firms can lower their costs through labor arbitrage. 

There is a big difference between labor costs in employing in-house legal teams and outside vendors.

2. Real Estate

Outsourcing in real estate means hiring a remote team or individual to perform certain tasks in the field. Outsourcing helps real estate agents to free up more of their time to do more important work. 

3. Management and Administration

Business management and administration involve a handful of daily tasks and usually take the focus of employees from core business functions. 

Having a third-party service provider to manage these taxing tasks, you will be free to focus and improve control on growing your business.

Outsource Accelerator can help you with your outsourcing needs. Book a call with us today for your consultation! As a start, we also offer three free quotations on our Homepage!