Back office
Backoffice ( German "space behind an office or business" ) is anglicism for the organizational structure and staff of companies that handle all customer-related business processes . The opposite is the front office .
General
The term refers in particular all outside the core business , the customer service or marketing lying tasks , in particular the operational function of organization , human resources and administration . Service points (such as accounting or IT ), secretariats , staff units ( legal department ) or support areas (such as the switchboard ) are typical back offices . The back office comprises those organizational units of a company that have no interface to customers .
In trading companies , for example, purchasing , sales , logistics and marketing form the core business. However, there can also be back offices in these areas, such as driver readiness in logistics.
Segregation of duties
The establishment of back offices primarily serves to separate functions within the framework of the functional organization in order to avoid conflicts of interest during business processes. The four-eyes principle is the oldest principle of the separation of functions, because it is intended to prevent important decisions from being made and controlled by a single person or critical activities not being carried out by a single person. In data processing, there is an organizational separation between data acquisition and data release .
This separation of functions is even required by law in banking and capital management companies . For credit institutions that looks Banking Supervision , organizational separation of customer-related market side and back office before. On the basis of Section 25a (1) KWG , in accordance with BTO 1.1 Item 1 MaRisk, a bank must ensure a separation between front office and back office up to and including management level . The “market” initiates the banking business and has the first vote on credit decisions , while the back office as the back office analyzes the risks and contributes an independent second vote. To separate are in the securities business , the financial analysts and their financial analysis of the investment advisory and underwriting . According to Section 29 (1) of the KAGB, capital management companies must set up and maintain a permanent risk control function that is hierarchically and functionally independent of the operational areas .
These guidelines can be adopted as best practice in the non-banking sector .
Others
The term "back office" has also found its way into various IT products, in particular Microsoft BackOffice Server as a group name for the portfolio of various server systems such as NT Server , Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Exchange Server . The name has not been used by Microsoft since 2000 , but continues to be operated as a Windows Small Business Server . In the case of shops , a distinction is made between the sales area ( English frontstore ) and the storage room or office ( English backstore ).
