Back-office support for businesses with no one to hand it to

Who keeps our company records in order if we have no one in the office?

Rationale Services maintains the records that make up your company's paper trail: the formation and entity documents, ownership and officer details, registrations, licences and permits you hold, and the record of changes as the business changes. Everything stays in one organised place, current, and findable by you without asking us.

These records are quiet until they are urgent. A bank, a landlord, an insurer or a buyer asks, and the request has a deadline attached.

We hold and organise your own records and prepare them when they are needed. We do not provide legal advice, and work that calls for a licensed practitioner is referred out.

Can you handle our vendors and suppliers?

Yes. Rationale Services maintains the vendor file — who you buy from, on what terms, at what rates, under which agreement and renewing when — handles the correspondence, and keeps the details that get out of date quietly. The point is that nobody has to reconstruct a relationship from an email thread.

Most small businesses discover their vendor position by accident: a renewal that went up, a service nobody cancelled, two suppliers for the same thing. A maintained file turns that into something you can review deliberately.

We work with your approvals, not around them. We prepare and administer; you decide what gets committed.

Who sends our invoices and follows up on what we are owed?

Rationale Services can run invoicing on your behalf and follow up on what is outstanding — issuing invoices on the agreed cycle, tracking what is open and how old it is, and chasing politely and persistently so your customers hear about an overdue invoice from a process rather than from a frustrated owner.

Late collection is one of the cheapest problems to fix and one of the most commonly left alone, usually because chasing money is awkward when you also have to keep the relationship. A third party doing it consistently solves most of that.

You set the terms, the tone and the point at which something escalates to you. We work inside it and tell you what the ageing is doing month to month, alongside the bookkeeping that records it.

How do we get all our paperwork into one place?

Rationale Services sets up document management and then keeps it running: one structure, agreed naming, a single current version of each document, controlled access, and a place where new paperwork lands instead of sitting in an inbox. Then you can find a lease, an agreement or a registration without a search party.

The set-up is a project; the discipline is the service. Systems fail not because the structure was wrong but because nobody maintained it after week three.

We document retention and organisation practices with you, and we work to your instructions on how long things are kept and who can see them.

How do we stop our small team doing the same job twice?

Rationale Services maps what actually happens now — not the official version — and then sets up the process and systems that remove the duplication: who does what, in what order, in which tool, and what happens when someone is away. Small teams duplicate work because the handoffs are implicit, not because anyone is careless.

We write the process down in a form someone can follow on their first week, and we keep it current as the business changes. A documented process also means the work survives a departure, which is the real risk in a team of five.

Where tools are involved we work in what you already have wherever that is sensible, and tell you honestly when something is being held together with manual effort that a different setup would remove.

Who helps when the business changes shape?

Rationale Services supports you through the administrative side of a change — a new location, an additional entity, a new line of business, or an owner coming in or going out. There is a long tail of records, registrations, vendors, documents and process behind each of those, and it usually lands on the owner.

We work through it as a list with owners and sequence, so the things that have to happen in order happen in order. Where a step needs a licensed practitioner or a legal filing, we identify it early and refer it out, then carry on with the rest alongside them.

Changes also affect obligations, and what applies differs by state and by how you operate. We track what applies to your situation and handle our part of it rather than leaving you to work out which parts have moved — including the payroll side of a new location or a change in headcount.

What does business support cost?

Rationale Services scopes this to the work you actually want to hand over, so there is no published price. What moves scope is how many entities you have, how many states you operate in, your transaction and invoice volume, headcount, and the condition of the records and processes we are starting from. How we work explains how we scope and agree it with you up front.

Taking on three recurring jobs is a different engagement from rebuilding a back office that has had nobody in it for two years. We would rather see it before putting a number on it.