A list of business processes most small firms run

Key takeaways

This list of business processes covers the 30 that most UK small firms run, grouped into six areas: finance, customer, sales and marketing, people, IT and data, and operations. Use it to check which processes you have, which have no owner, and which might be candidates to outsource.

• Six areas cover nearly every SME process.
• Name each process by its trigger and its output.
• Processes with no owner are the first to fix.
• Most outsourcing candidates sit in finance and customer service.

Which finance and customer processes do most firms run?

Finance and customer processes are the most common and usually the most outsourceable, because they run on steady triggers and produce outputs you can check.

• Finance: purchase to pay, billing, cash allocation, payroll, month-end close, VAT returns, budgeting, forecasting.
• Customer: enquiry to response, complaint to resolution, order query handling, renewals, feedback and surveys.

• Which business processes should you outsource?
• Finance processes to outsource, and the ones to keep
• Customer service processes: which ones to outsource

Which sales, marketing and people processes are common?

Sales, marketing and people processes mix routine work with judgement. The production and admin parts travel well; the decisions usually stay.

• Sales and marketing: lead to qualified opportunity, quote to order, proposal production, campaign delivery, reporting.
• People: hire to first day, absence recording, pay changes, pension enrolment, performance reviews, leavers.

• Sales processes to outsource without losing deals
• Marketing processes to outsource, and the ones to keep
• HR helpdesk: answer staff questions without an HR team

Which IT, data and operations processes belong on the list?

These are the processes small firms often run by accident, because nobody was hired to own them. They are easy to forget until something fails.

• IT and data: joiners and leavers access, patching, backups, licence tracking, data quality, reporting.
• Operations: buying, supplier reviews, stock planning, document control, compliance checks, maintenance scheduling.

• IT processes to outsource in a small business
• Operations processes to outsource as you grow

How do you use the list to find gaps?

Go through the list with your team and mark each process as owned, shared or orphaned. Orphaned processes, with no named owner, cause most of the surprises: missed renewals, failed backups, late returns. Next, note the weekly hours for each owned process. The processes with high hours and a clear output are where outsourcing conversations start.

• A business process register: map every process once
• The process owner: who keeps an outsourced process healthy

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see: in firms of 10 to 30 people, four or five processes on this list have no owner at all. IT patching, licence renewals and supplier reviews are the usual orphans.

• See client work
• BPO Solutions for UK businesses

Business process list checklist

Run through these checks once a year.

• Mark every process as owned, shared or orphaned.
• Give each orphan an owner this month.
• Record weekly hours for each owned process.
• Note which processes cross more than two people.
• Flag high-hours processes for scoring.

• The process selection score: outsource, split or keep?
• Primary vs support processes: which ones can move out?

Next step

Mark up the list for your business and send us the five processes with the most hours. We will tell you which ones are worth scoring for outsourcing first.