Thank you for completing our survey. 

If you have any questions, please email Brian Hill.

Sample Discussion Questions: Benchmarking Your Back Office

In case you find it helpful, we wanted to share the following questions to help you think about your back office spend in preparation for our call. 

1. When defining “back-office” within your organization, which departments or functions would you consider as part of your back-office operations? (e.g. Finance, HR, IT, Scheduling/Intake, Facilities, etc.)
   
   
2. What percentage of your total budget is allocated to each of your back-office departments?
   
   
3. How do you currently benchmark yourself for back-office spending and resources internally currently?
   
   
4. What are the key dimensions you use from benchmarking tools? (e.g. % of revenue, # of FTE, SF office space, etc.)
   
   
5. Do you have metrics for headcount/census in high-FTE functions like intake & scheduling, billing & coding, etc?
   
   
6. Where are there gaps in current benchmarking tools you use and what other kinds of information would you like to be able to use when setting budget and strategy?
   
   
7. What goals do you have for your back-office and what does a good / great back-office look like to you?
   
   
8. How do you think about investing for growth? (e.g. some investments may be growth-focused vs. managing current census)
   1. What areas are you thinking of increasing budget compared to prior years and why?
   2. Where are you thinking of lowering budget compared to prior years and why?
9. If you do not currently benchmark, how do you currently control the spending on back office? (e.g. zero-based? Inflation-based? Department by department? etc.)
   
   
10. For technology, do you have a specific way of benchmarking your back-office technology spend? Or do you use the same technique for budgeting technology as anything else?