What is Bookkeeping?
What is bookkeeping?Bookkeeping refers to the process of recording transactions to general and special journals and posting these transactions to their respective ledgers. Bookkeeping is an important record-keeping function of financial accounting that is essential in a duly-registered business of any kind.
This should be done by applying generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) for US companies.
The bookkeeping function consists of the first three steps of the accounting cycle: analyzing transactions, recording transactions in the general journal, and posting the transactions to the ledger. Most businesses outsource bookkeeping because hiring bookkeepers is expensive and most small-medium businesses don’t do large volumes of transactions per day.
Outsourcing bookkeepingThe bookkeeping function is best outsourced in order to keep administrative costs low while helping small businesses grow and become stable. Another advantage is that you are assured that you are working with a skilled and competent professional that has the appropriate experience and educational background for the job.
Outsource Accelerator provides you with the best bookkeeping outsourcing companies in the Philippines, where you can save up to 70% on staffing costs.
What are some of bookkeeping’s best practices?Bookkeeping is one of the most important processes in a company. Here are some of the best practices in bookkeeping that you might want to consider:
Use the services of an expertIf you don't want to perform your own bookkeeping for any reason, you don't have to worry about it. There are a lot of vendors who can provide you with bookkeeping services.
If you choose to outsource your bookkeeping, you should look for a reliable and reputable freelancer or a company. Professional accountants can save you a significant amount of money in taxes because of their extensive knowledge of tax regulations.
Monitor expenses with accounting softwareYour business budgeting should be thoroughly tracked down. Many companies document their expenses daily or weekly. They also save receipts to keep track of expenses.
Daily bookkeeping duties will take a lot of time if you don't have good core accounting software. As your firm grows, this load will only get heavier if you don't use technology.
There is a lot of time involved in daily bookkeeping tasks if you don't have suitable accounting software. If you don't employ technology, this burden will only rise as your company expands.
Get your finances under controlYou may monitor your business's cash balances by comparing your bank account balance to the register in your accounting software. Use the software's reconciliation feature each month to ensure that you don't miss any duplications, circular reference transfers, or other irregularities.
Make preparations for taxesThe end of the financial year is a critical time to pay attention to your tax obligations. Your firm could be in serious tax trouble if you overlook business's expenses.
Preparing taxes in advance avoids any unpleasant surprises during the tax payment period. Use an accounting system that properly tracks all loans and revenue streams to ensure that your company is paying taxes on time.
What is a Customer Service?
Customer Service: Definition, Examples, and How It WorksCustomer service is the support a business provides to buyers before, during, and after a purchase. It covers questions, complaints, returns, technical help, and account changes across phone, email, chat, social, and self-service channels. Done well, it turns one-off shoppers into repeat customers and quiet defectors into vocal fans.
The term sounds soft, but the work is operational. Teams measure response time, first-contact resolution, customer satisfaction (CSAT), and net promoter score (NPS). They tune scripts, staffing rosters, and AI assistants to hit those numbers without burning out agents.
Modern customer service sits at the intersection of people, process, and software. A 2017 Harvard Business Review piece showed 81% of customers try to solve problems themselves before calling a human, which is why self-service portals and chatbots now front the queue. Live agents handle the harder cases — refunds, escalations, anything emotional.
It also overlaps with customer experience, but the two are not identical. Customer experience covers every touchpoint with a brand; customer service is the slice where someone needs help.
How it worksA customer service operation runs on three layers: channels, people, and tooling. Channels are where customers reach you. People are the agents who answer. Tooling is the contact-center platform that routes tickets, surfaces context, and tracks outcomes.
Most mid-size businesses run a hub-and-spoke model. A central queue receives every inquiry, an automated system classifies it, and the ticket lands with an agent qualified for that issue. Tier 1 handles common questions, Tier 2 takes technical cases, and Tier 3 escalates to engineers or account managers.
The typical staffing and channel mix looks like this:
Channel
Share of contacts
Avg. handle time
Best for Self-service / FAQ
30–40%
seconds
Password resets, order status Live chat
20–25%
4–8 min
Pre-sales, quick fixes Email / ticket
20–25%
24–48 hr SLA
Complex, written records Phone
15–20%
6–10 min
Emotional or urgent issues Social / messaging
5–10%
varies
Public complaints, brand reachPerformance is read in three numbers most operations watch weekly: CSAT (how happy was the customer with this contact), first-contact resolution (did we fix it in one go), and average handle time (how long it took). Push handle time down without watching CSAT and your team starts cutting corners. Push CSAT up without watching handle time and your cost-per-contact balloons.
Outsourcing has reshaped the staffing layer. BPO providers — in the Philippines, India, and Latin America — run customer service for thousands of Western brands at 50–70% lower fully-loaded cost than in-house US teams. The trade-off is governance: you need clean scripts, sharp QA, and direct access to the agents to keep quality on spec.
ExamplesReal customer service operations look very different depending on the industry.
Amazon (retail, global). Amazon's customer service runs a heavily automated front end (returns, refunds, and order tracking are self-serve through the app) backed by 24/7 agents for anything the bots can't close. The company built its reputation partly on no-questions-asked returns, a policy that has stayed roughly intact since 2010.
Zappos (e-commerce, US). The Las Vegas shoe retailer, owned by Amazon since 2009, is famous for letting agents stay on calls as long as needed. One 2012 call lasted 10 hours and 29 minutes and ended with a sale of Ugg boots. The strategy isn't efficiency; it's lifetime value and word-of-mouth marketing.
JetBlue (airline, US). JetBlue runs much of its contact center from home-based agents and treats Twitter as a primary channel. The airline typically responds to public complaints within minutes, which contains reputational damage in real time.
Globe Telecom (telecom, Philippines). Globe uses a hybrid model: branded retail stores, a self-service app, and a large in-house contact center in Manila. It also outsources overflow to local BPO partners during peak billing cycles.
These four show the range: high-volume automation, deep human investment, channel specialisation, and hybrid in-house plus outsourced. There's no single right shape.
Related terms Customer experience: the full sum of brand touchpoints, of which customer service is one slice. Contact center: the facility (physical or virtual) where customer service work happens across phone, chat, email, and social. Call center: the older, voice-only ancestor of the contact center. BPO: the outsourcing model that powers a large share of global customer service capacity. Help desk: a customer service function focused on technical issues, usually for software or IT products. Customer support: a near-synonym, but typically narrower and post-sale in scope. CSAT: the most common metric for measuring a single customer service interaction. FAQ What's the difference between customer service and customer support?Customer service is the broader function: anything from pre-sale questions to billing disputes. Customer support usually refers to the narrower, post-sale work of fixing problems with a product or service. In practice many companies use the terms interchangeably.
How is customer service measured?The three most common metrics are CSAT (satisfaction with a specific contact), NPS (likelihood to recommend the brand), and first-contact resolution (the share of issues fixed in one interaction). Cost-per-contact and average handle time round out the operational view.
Why do companies outsource customer service?Cost is the headline reason, but it's not the only one. Outsourcing also gives access to 24/7 multilingual coverage, faster scaling for seasonal spikes, and providers who already have the contact-center technology installed. The Philippines alone hosts hundreds of providers serving Fortune 500 brands.
Is AI replacing customer service agents?AI is taking the repetitive top of the funnel (password resets, order status, simple FAQs) but not the emotional or complex middle. Research from 2014 onward, including HBR's quantification work on customer experience, shows human contact still drives the highest loyalty lift when the issue matters. Most operations now run AI-first triage with human-second escalation.
What makes customer service "good"?Speed, accuracy, and tone — in that order, for most issues. The 2010 HBR study Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers found that reducing customer effort (making the fix easy) predicts loyalty better than over-the-top "delight" moments. Solve the problem cleanly and most customers stay.
How big is the customer service industry?The global contact-center market alone was estimated at around US$340 billion in 2024, with the outsourced share growing fastest in Asia-Pacific. Customer service spend across in-house and outsourced operations is materially larger when you include in-house teams.
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Need help building or outsourcing your customer service operation? Browse our directory of verified BPO providers and compare options against your in-house benchmark.
What is Payroll?
What is payroll?Payroll can refer to three things: 1) the calculation and distribution of paychecks; 2) the record of wages, taxes, contributions, and withholdings of employees; and 3) the total amount paid to employees by the company.
Payroll is important in different ways. For employees, the payroll is important for living expenses, and a timely or late paycheck can spell the difference between good and bad morale.
For businesses, payroll is important to see the actual net profit for the fiscal period. For business owners, a properly done payroll is important for compliance with the law. For this reason, many businesses entrust their payroll to dedicated professionals who can process them with speed and accuracy.
Outsourcing payroll servicesOne of the more popular outsourced functions is the payroll process. Because of the importance of having an efficient payroll, companies that can afford to do so tend to outsource it to dedicated professionals.
Outsourcing companies in the Philippines are experienced with the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) that are being followed in the country they are servicing.
Outsource Accelerator connects you with payroll firms that have extensive experience with the regulatory framework in the US and have a proven track record in accuracy and timeliness in payroll delivery. We make it easier for clients to learn about, and engage with payroll outsourcing.
How payroll is processedThe payroll process nowadays usually involves utilizing payroll software for more efficient and accurate handling. Yet, most small business owners still handle their payroll functions manually, especially when they are starting.
Before the payroll processing begins, employers should prepare the requirements given by their employees such as their tax and financial information. They would also need to secure their employer identification number (EIN) to ensure that deductions such as payroll taxes and employee benefits are accounted for.
The following are the steps for payroll processing.
Choose an effective payroll scheduleFirst, choose a payroll schedule that can work best for a business. Some of the most popular pay schedules include the following.
Weekly. Businesses can pay their workers on a specific day of the week, regardless of the date. For instance, payroll can be given every Thursday or Friday. Bi-weekly. In another variation of the weekly pay, businesses can provide payroll on a specific day every two weeks. Semi-monthly. Semi-monthly pay is the most common payroll schedule used in most countries. Employers pay their workers twice a month on two specific dates. Monthly. Lastly, employers can provide employee wages every month on a specific date.Pay schedules are usually affected by an organization's practice and the legal compliances for pay frequencies in a certain location.
Calculate employee's gross payDepending on an organization's practice, an employee's gross pay can either be fixed or based on their daily or hourly wages.
For the daily and hourly workers, employers should calculate the total number of hours or days an employee has worked in a pay period. A time tracking software can best benefit them for this.
Firms should at the same time consider overtime hours, late logins, leaves, and absences when calculating. Overtime calculations and other additional charges may depend on the country their employees are in.
Identify deductionsGather knowledge of the different deductions that employees are subject to. In the United States, the different deductions applicable for employees include the following.
Federal taxes/tax withholdings
State taxes
Social Security
401(k) contributions
Workers compensationDifferent states and countries collect different taxes and deductions. With this, employers should be mindful of the policies of each country where their workers sit. This would be easier with a reliable payroll provider on their side.
Calculate net pay and process paymentsSubtract gross pay to the applicable deductions for each employee. The amount left after deductions will be the employees' take-home salary for the specific pay period.
The most common ways to pay employees include direct deposit, prepaid cards loaded with salaries, and paychecks to be distributed to each worker.
Make necessary connections and keep recordsBe sure to keep records for salaries in different pay periods through copies of payslips and payroll records. Make any changes and corrections to employee salaries in case of discrepancies and inaccuracies in their pay.
Remit deductionsLastly, companies should make sure to remit the deductions from each employee as a part of their compliance. It's best to consult an accountant for the appropriate tax deductions and always report new hires to the Internal Revenue Service.
What is What is business process outsourcing??
What is business process outsourcing (BPO)?Business process outsourcing (BPO) is the practice of contracting a third-party provider to run a defined business function such as customer support, payroll, accounting, or IT helpdesk. The provider takes ownership of the people, process, and technology, and bills you on a per-seat, per-transaction, or fixed-fee basis.
BPO sits at the intersection of labour arbitrage and operational focus. You hand off a non-core function to a specialist that can run it cheaper, faster, or better, and your in-house team gets to concentrate on what actually moves the business.
The category covers everything from a 4-seat phone team in Cebu answering after-hours calls for a US plumbing firm, to a 5,000-seat captive in Manila handling global claims processing for a Fortune 500 insurer. Same idea, very different scale.
If you've used Apple support, ordered from Amazon, or paid with Wells Fargo, you've talked to a BPO provider — you just didn't know it.
How it worksA BPO engagement runs in three layers: contract, transition, and steady state. You scope the function, sign a service level agreement that locks in response times, quality thresholds, and pricing, then transition the work through documented playbooks and parallel runs before the provider takes the keys.
Pricing usually falls into one of four shapes:
Model
How you pay
Best for Per FTE (seat)
Fixed monthly rate per agent
Steady-volume work like inbound support Per transaction
Set fee per call, ticket, or invoice
Variable-volume back-office tasks Outcome-based
Tied to a KPI like CSAT or collections
Mature processes with clean metrics Hybrid
Base FTE rate plus variable bonus
Long-term partnershipsLocation choice drives most of the savings. Sending work to the Philippines or India (offshoring) typically cuts loaded labour cost by 50–70% versus a US in-house team. Sending it to Mexico or Colombia (nearshoring) trims 30–50% while keeping you in roughly the same timezone. Keeping it domestic (onshoring) protects timezone and language fit but barely moves the cost needle.
The provider absorbs the recruiting, training, real estate, tech stack, and compliance burden. You absorb the vendor-management overhead and the risk that comes with handing a function to an outsider.
ExamplesThe global BPO market hit roughly USD 347.95 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at a 10.05% CAGR through 2035, according to Precedence Research. That growth is concentrated in a handful of hubs and a handful of named buyers.
Google has used Philippine and Indian BPO partners since 2016 for content moderation, ads review, and customer support — a quiet workforce that scales with each product launch. Meta contracts Accenture and TaskUs in Manila for content moderation; the work pulled enough scrutiny in the early 2020s that Meta eventually broadened its provider base across multiple regions. Wells Fargo has operated a Manila back-office hub since 2011, handling mortgage processing, AML checks, and treasury operations for the US parent. JPMorgan Chase runs large captive and outsourced operations in India and the Philippines for KYC, trade settlement, and analytics.The Philippines remains the standout English-language hub. According to the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines, the country's IT-BPM sector generates roughly USD 40 billion in revenue and employs about 1.9 million people, with growth targets pushing past 2.5 million by 2028.
Related terms Outsourcing: the umbrella term; BPO is the back-office and front-office slice that runs whole processes rather than one-off projects. Offshoring: moving work to a distant country (e.g. US to Philippines). A location choice, not a contracting choice. Nearshoring: moving work to a nearby country (e.g. US to Mexico) to keep timezone and culture closer. Knowledge process outsourcing: KPO handles judgment-heavy work like legal research or equity analysis, not transactional tasks. Call center: one delivery format inside BPO, focused on inbound or outbound voice. Back office: the non-customer-facing operations layer that BPO most commonly absorbs. Service level agreement: the contract clause that defines what "good" looks like in a BPO deal. FAQ What is business process outsourcing in simple terms?BPO is paying another company to run a piece of your business for you, usually a repeatable function like answering support calls, processing invoices, or managing payroll. You keep the brand and the strategy; they run the operation.
What is the difference between BPO and outsourcing?Outsourcing is the broad category — anything you contract out, including one-off projects. BPO is the subset where a provider runs an ongoing, defined business process end-to-end, typically with its own staff, systems, and SLAs.
Is BPO only about cost savings?No. Cost is the entry argument, but mature buyers cite access to specialist talent, 24/7 coverage, faster scaling, and freeing in-house leaders to focus on growth as bigger long-term wins. See the directory of vetted providers on Clutch for how the market positions itself today.
What functions do companies outsource most often?Customer support, IT helpdesk, finance and accounting, payroll, HR administration, content moderation, and data entry top the list. Higher-judgment work like legal research, equity analysis, and medical coding has shifted to KPO providers over the last decade.
Which countries dominate the BPO industry?The Philippines leads voice and customer experience, India leads IT and analytics, and Latin America (Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica) leads nearshore work for North American buyers. Eastern Europe serves Western European clients on similar terms.
How do I choose a BPO provider?Match scale to your volume, check for relevant compliance (ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2), ask for two reference clients in your industry, and pilot a small scope before committing to a multi-year contract. Walk away from any provider that won't share agent attrition data.
Ready to scope a BPO partner? Outsource Accelerator lists 4,000+ vetted providers across the top global hubs — use the directory to shortlist, compare pricing, and book intro calls without paying a referral fee.
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