Back office
The back office is the part of an organization that deals with administrative processes and where there is no customer contact. In addition to administrative tasks, product development, production, distribution and management are often included in the back office.
The term back office is derived from the traditional layout of company buildings, where customer contact (the front office) takes place at the front and support departments are located at the back. However, back offices can also be located at other sites or even (partially) outsourced, whether abroad or not. With the rise of e-commerce, an increasing proportion of many businesses are run from the back office.
The various back office processes are often facilitated by central back office systems, ICT applications surrounding a database that stores customer data, orders, invoices, schedules and annual reports.