Basics

What are shared back-office services, exactly?

Shared back-office services means that multiple organizations pool their administrative infrastructure — finance, accounting, payroll, IT systems, revenue cycle management — under a single operational platform, rather than each organization building and maintaining those functions independently.

The 'shared' part refers to the platform, the expertise, and the cost structure. Not your data, your staff relationships, or your organizational identity. Every organization's financial information, client data, and operational details remain entirely confidential and walled off from other participating organizations. What's shared is the infrastructure that makes those functions run reliably.

What do shared back-office services actually include?

The scope varies by engagement. In practice, shared back-office services can include any combination of the following:

• Bookkeeping and transaction processing

• Monthly, quarterly, and annual financial reporting

• Budget development and performance monitoring

• Revenue cycle management — billing, claims submission, remittance, and rejection management

• Medicaid eligibility tracking and coordination

• Payroll processing and reconciliation

• IT systems support, data integrity, and reporting infrastructure

• CFO-level financial leadership and decision support

Not every organization needs all of these. Most engagements begin with an assessment that identifies where the highest-value work is, and the scope is built from there.

Who are shared back-office services a good fit for?

Keystone Shared Services is designed for nonprofit organizations that are:

• Spending more leadership bandwidth on back-office management than their mission warrants

• Running finance functions that depend on one or two key people — and recognizing the risk that creates

• Growing programmatically faster than their administrative infrastructure can keep up

• Navigating a finance leadership transition and uncertain about what comes next

• Ready to stop building from scratch and join something already built

Keystone Shared Services are specifically not designed for organizations in acute financial crisis looking for a quick fix. Our engagement model requires a stable enough foundation to build on. The assessment process will tell you honestly whether the timing is right.

Is engaging shared back-office Services a sign that our organization is struggling?

Not at all, in fact the reverse is true. The organizations that benefit most from Keystone Shared Services are often performing well programmatically and recognizing that their financial and administrative infrastructure hasn't kept up with the incredibly complex program, funding, and compliance requirements . That's a success problem, not a failure problem.

The leaders who reach out aren't looking for a rescue. They're looking for a smarter model that lets them focus their energy where it creates the most impact. That's a strategic decision, not a distress signal.

Specifics

Does engaging shared back-office services mean our staff will be replaced?

The right answer to this question depends on your current staff’s strengths and your organization’s needs.  We’re happy to work directly with your current staff as partners to provide them with better support, clearer processes, and more sophisticated tools. Some organizations use an “outpost model” where a current staff member becomes the day-to-day liaison to the Keystone Shared Services platform, maintaining the institutional knowledge and relationships that matter while connecting to a much deeper operational infrastructure.  Some organizations want to work with us because a key staff member is leaving so we fill in that gap.  Again, the right structure is the one that best meets the needs of your mission.

What changes isn't the people. It's the system around them.

Is our financial information safe within a shared back-office Program? Who else sees our data?

Your data is yours. Period.

The “shared” in Keystone Shared Services refers to the operational platform and expertise, not your financial information. Each organization's data is maintained in a completely separate, confidential environment. No other participating organization has access to your financials, your client information, or your operational data. We maintain the same data security standards we apply to our own founding organizations.

How is shared back-office services different from hiring a consultant or a fractional CFO?

A consultant delivers a recommendation and moves on. A fractional CFO fills a leadership role but typically doesn't touch the operational infrastructure underneath. Keystone Shared Services is neither of those things.

It's an embedded operational partnership.  A partnership that is ongoing, deeply integrated, and built on a platform that has been running inside real nonprofit organizations for over fifteen years. When you work with Keystone Shared Services, you're not getting someone's opinion about how your back office should work. You're getting the actual system we built because we needed it ourselves, operated by the team that built it.

Working with Keystone Shared Services

What if we only need help with one specific function?

That's a common and entirely valid starting point. Many Keystone Shared Services engagements begin with a single area of highest pressure.  You might have a particular need with respect to revenue cycle management, financial reporting, or budgeting.  We assess that need holistically in the context of your overall finance and IT environment and can expand our support easily over time as trust is established and additional needs become visible. The model is designed to meet you where you are, not to sell you a package you don't need.

What does the process look like from first conversation to ongoing services?

With Keystone, the engagement follows a clear, staged sequence — and you control how far it goes.

1. Discovery: a conversation to understand your organization, priorities, and pressure points

2. Assessment: a structured review of the areas that matter most, resulting in a clear picture of your current state

3. Recommendations: practical, experience-based recommendations tailored to your organization

4. Planning and Implementation: if you move forward, we define the right path together

5. Ongoing Shared Services: for organizations ready for continued support, the engagement extends into an embedded partnership

You don't have to commit to the full model to start. The assessment is valuable as a standalone deliverable, even if the relationship ends there.

You work primarily with I/DD organizations. Can you help us if we're in a different part of the nonprofit sector?

Keystone Shared Services was built inside the I/DD sector, and our deepest operational expertise - Medicaid billing, eligibility management, revenue cycle management - is specific to that space. For I/DD organizations, that depth reflects our shared knowledge we’ve gained over the past 30+ years of Medicaid billing.

For nonprofit organizations outside the I/DD sector our tools are purpose built for Medicaid fee-for-service and Medicaid managed care billing and revenue cycle management.  Outside of Medicaid, we’d partner with you to ensure any tools or processes reflect the funding-specific intelligence required to minimize rejections, maintain compliance, and keep things running smoothly.  

Of course, Mission + Strategy, our strategic capacity building group, offers a broad range of assessment, capacity building, and operational supports which draw on the same underlying expertise and is designed for the broader nonprofit sector. The first conversation will help identify where in the Keystone ecosystem you'll find the best fit.

What do shared back-office services cost?

With Keystone Shared Services, pricing is scoped based on the specific engagement. Your organization’s size needs, and systems complexity all impact pricing. We don't publish a rate card because the right engagement looks different for every organization.

What we can say: the cost of Keystone Shared Services is designed to be benchmarked against what it would cost to build, staff, and maintain the same functions internally. In most cases, the comparison favors the shared services model significantly, particularly when you factor in the depth of expertise, platform stability, and the leadership bandwidth that gets freed up.

What if it doesn't work out?

We take the question of fit seriously before we begin. The discovery and assessment process is specifically designed to surface potential misalignments early — for your organization and for ours. We'd rather have an honest conversation about fit before committing to an engagement that isn't right for either party.

The engagements that don't work are rare. The more common story is an organization that starts with a targeted assessment and finds the relationship valuable enough to continue expanding.

What's the first step?

A conversation. No commitment required, no RFP process, no pressure. We start by listening — to what you're navigating, where the pressure is, and what you're hoping to build. From there, we'll tell you honestly whether and how we can help.

If you're ready, reach out and let's get the coffee first.