Back Office Support Services: What Belongs There and What Does Not

The Problem

“Back office” is the bucket companies drop every unglamorous task into. Invoice coding, vendor records, document processing, CRM hygiene, bookkeeping support, the CEO’s calendar, the CEO’s inbox, the CEO’s flight to Chicago. Most companies buy all of it under that one phrase, on a single budget line and a single vendor contract.

I’m Nir Sabato, co-founder of Catch, and most of my week goes to conversations with executives at US growth-stage companies and owner-led businesses about this exact line item. They tend to open the same way. One back office support contract, a dozen task types on it, results that came back uneven. The document work went fine. The scheduling and inbox work did not.

That split is not bad luck, and it is usually not a bad provider either. The two halves of that contract are different kinds of work with different requirements, and buying them together hides the difference until it shows up as a missed reschedule or a flight booked into the wrong half of the day.

What Back Office Support Services Actually Cover

Back office support services are the administrative and operational functions that keep a company running but never touch a customer directly. The front office sells, serves, and delivers. The back office processes, records, coordinates, and files. Seniority does not enter into it, and neither does difficulty. The only test is whether the work faces outward.

What gets sold, in practice, is a menu of roles. Wing Assistant matches clients with a dedicated remote assistant supervised by a customer success manager, and that assistant handles email triage, calendar coordination, scheduling and data entry, plus expense tracking, bookkeeping updates and invoice processing. BELAY places a dedicated US-based professional who covers calendar and inbox management alongside CRM updates and lead list cleanup, and offers specialized versions of the role for sales, marketing, operations and financial client services. Magic pairs you with a human assistant for email management, calendar and scheduling, travel arrangements, expense reporting and phone calls.

Read those menus closely and the same thing jumps out. Work that arrives as a queue sits on the same list as work that arrives as an interruption, bought on the same contract. Wing’s data entry sits alongside its calendar coordination; BELAY’s lead list cleanup sits alongside its inbox management.

The Two Kinds of Back Office Work

Sort the menu with one question: does this work arrive as a queue, or does it arrive as an interruption?

Batchable work: a queue with a defined output

Data entry, document processing, records cleanup, bookkeeping support, invoice coding, list building, bulk CRM cleanup. Four properties in common:

• It accumulates. Nothing breaks if a batch gets processed Thursday afternoon instead of Tuesday morning.
• The output is defined before anyone starts. A clean record either matches the source document or it does not.
• It needs almost no context about any specific person. A trained processor working from a documented procedure gets the same result as the three-year veteran.
• It scales by hours. Twice the volume really does take twice the time.

Batchable work is what back office outsourcing was invented for, and the hours-based model fits it exactly. Wing publishes $699 a month for 80 hours of part-time general virtual assistant support and $999 a month for 160 hours full-time. For a predictable monthly queue of processing, buying it in blocks of hours is a sensible transaction.

Executive-adjacent work: context on a clock

Inbox. Calendar. Travel. Bookings and the calls they take. Reminders, and the judgment about which ones matter. All of it gets filed in the back office because none of it faces a customer, and that filing is technically correct. The requirements are nothing alike.

• It does not accumulate, it expires. A reschedule request for tomorrow morning is worth nothing by tomorrow afternoon.
• Nobody defines the output in advance. Which of four possible times is right depends on what else is moving that week and who is in the room.
• It is almost entirely context. That Thursday’s board prep is immovable. That this investor gets a reply within the hour. That the executive will not take a 7am flight, and that a hotel without a gym gets complained about. None of that lives in a standard operating procedure. It lives in a relationship.
• It does not scale by hours. The work is fragmentary and unpredictable, arriving in two-minute pieces spread across fourteen hours.

Email is the one that gets mislabeled most often. Contracts get negotiated over email, clients make decisions over email, and deals stall in a quiet thread nobody chased. Treat that as clerical volume and it gets handled last, which is how the stall happens in the first place.

Why Bundling the Two Hurts the Second One

Put both categories in one contract and the batchable half sets the terms: hours, coverage windows, documented processes, quality managed against those processes. For a queue, that is the right structure.

Then the executive-adjacent half has to live inside it. A reschedule that needed a reply in four minutes waits its turn in the queue, and context nobody can write into a standard operating procedure gets approximated instead. A shared pool, by design, does not hold the specific knowledge that makes this work good, which is why all three of these providers answer it the same way: one dedicated human, matched to you. Magic also runs a 24/7 concierge that picks up urgent tasks when the primary assistant is offline.

That dedicated human is the expensive part. BELAY’s published answer to what US virtual assistants cost puts the market at $1,200 to $3,000 a month for part-time support, or $30 to $75 an hour. That is a figure for the US market, not BELAY’s own rate; BELAY does not publish one.

Neither model is wrong. The two categories simply want opposite things. Batchable work wants documented process and cheap hours; executive-adjacent work wants deep context and an answer now. Buy them separately.

How Catch Handles the Executive-Adjacent Half

Catch is an AI executive assistant. It takes the second category, all of it, end to end, for a flat $99 per person per month. I built it for the half of the back office that runs on context and speed, not the half that runs on volume.

The distinction that matters is delegation. Catch does not propose work and wait for you to approve it; it handles the task and reports back once it is done.

Email

Catch reads the inbox, works out what genuinely needs you, and handles the rest. Routine replies go out on your behalf. When something needs a decision only you can make, Catch brings you the context already assembled, takes your answer in whatever channel you are already in, and sends. It also watches threads that have gone quiet and weighs which ones are worth chasing, so a stalled deal does not sit for three weeks because nobody was looking.

Calendar and scheduling

Catch runs the calendar instead of reporting on it. A conflict forms, and it contacts the other party and moves the meeting. Ask for something to be scheduled and it checks availability, coordinates with everyone involved, confirms the time and sends the invite. When someone sends you a scheduling link, Catch reads the slots and books one, choosing by your real availability and how urgent the meeting is. What comes back to you is a confirmed time rather than a link you still have to fill in.

Business travel

Catch books business travel end to end, as the booking party itself: flights and hotels. It learns your preferences, including the ones you only ever expressed as a complaint, and applies them. The last mile is part of the job, whether that means picking a hotel within walking distance of the actual meeting address or calling the front desk about a room detail. After the booking it keeps watching, rebooks if a better rate appears, and rearranges when the trip moves. It uses the travel preferences and requirements you have shared.

Often it starts before you ask. A conference receipt lands in your inbox or an out-of-town meeting appears on your calendar, and Catch comes back with the usual flight and the usual hotel ready to book.

Calls and bookings

Catch places outbound calls on your behalf: the restaurant, the hotel, the appointment, the late checkout. You can also call Catch to talk something through or hand over tasks by voice. Voice is included in the $99, with no per-call fees. Incoming calls it does not pick up, the same way a human assistant does not answer your personal phone.

Your CRM and project tools

Catch retrieves and updates records in HubSpot and Zoho, and takes actions in Asana and Notion: closing a task, moving a deadline, pulling a brief. That is the deal and task context sitting around a meeting. Not bulk record cleanup.

Reminders, flagging and judgment

Catch surfaces what needs your attention and reminds you of what is coming: the pre-meeting to-do you have not done, the brief you should read, the client email that actually matters. It also knows when not to interrupt you, which is the harder half of being proactive.

None of this runs on conditions you configure. Catch is not a workflow builder. It learns how you work from your calendar, email and connected tools, and from the corrections you give it, then decides what to ignore, what to handle, and what to bring you. Autonomy gets earned rather than switched on: early on it checks with you before doing things on your behalf, and takes on more as it learns you. It verifies details before acting, on everything it does.

What Catch Does Not Do

Here is what sits outside the work Catch takes on.

• No bulk data entry, document processing, bookkeeping support or records cleanup. That is the batchable category, and it belongs with a provider built for volume.
• No expenses, receipts, reimbursement or spend reporting. Catch books the trip, it does not administer the travel program. Expenses are on the roadmap.
• No leisure or consumer trip planning. Business travel only.
• No in-person or physical coordination.
• No mass outbound calling or messaging. Catch is built for one-to-one conversations.

Who This Is For

• Executives and founders at US tech companies of roughly 20 to 300 employees, still carrying their own calendar and inbox.
• Owner-operators in non-tech businesses, from law firms to production companies to construction, with heavy admin and no assistant.
• Leaders whose back office contract is working for processing and underperforming on scheduling, email and travel.
• Companies where an executive assistant headcount keeps losing the budget conversation, so the admin stays with the executive by default.
• Executives who already have a human assistant on operational and in-person work, and want the calendar, inbox and travel load lifted off both of them.

How It Works

1. Sign up. Self-serve, under three minutes.
2. Connect Gmail or Outlook. One connection covers email and calendar. Outlook may need IT approval in some organizations.
3. Add anything else you want covered. Slack, HubSpot, Zoho, Asana, Notion, note-takers.
4. Start talking to it. Text message, iMessage, Slack, email, voice note or a phone call. No dashboard to learn, no workflows to build.
5. Hand over more as it learns. Catch checks in more at the start and takes more on its own as it builds a picture of your priorities and preferences.

What Changes

The calendar stops being yours to maintain. Conflicts resolve without reaching you. Scheduling comes back booked. The inbox arrives sorted by what needs a decision, with the routine already answered and sent. Trips get booked, monitored and rearranged without you assembling anything.

The money is worth stating plainly. A fully loaded US executive assistant runs about $120,000 to $180,000 a year. Catch is $99 per person per month, available around the clock, and responds in seconds. None of that is an argument for letting anyone go. The traditional administrative role is fully handled, and the person in it grows into the operational and in-person work Catch does not cover, which is usually the work they wanted to be doing anyway.

On security: SOC 2 Type II and CASA Tier 2.

Travel booking is currently in beta for selected Catch customers and covers supported flights and hotels. Ground transportation, expenses, receipts, and reimbursement are outside the current scope.

Frequently Asked Questions

Get Started

If your back office contract is doing well on processing and poorly on calendar, inbox and travel, that is the split this page is about, and it is fixable without renegotiating anything. Catch takes the executive-adjacent half for a flat $99 per person per month, voice included, no per-call fees. There is a 10-day free trial and setup takes under three minutes.