Financial Series

Want to save $1000/month and reduce your average days in A/R?

Consider going Paperless!!

Have you ever truly considered the value of going paperless? In our computer-fueled day and age, despite a plethora of tools present that allow business to go virtually paperless, I keep seeing time and time again businesses that are wasting money, reducing efficiency and depending entirely too much on paper.

Look at it this way: You need to send invoices to your customers to get paid. If you send paper invoices through the mail like many companies do, you’re just flushing valuable dollars down the drain.

Example

If you print 1,000 invoices a month (50/day x 20 working days in a month), that’s approximately 2 reams of paper, as well as printer ink and wear and tear on your printer. Then you have to buy 1,000 envelopes and 1,000 stamps – that’s over $500! Then of course you have to waste labor hours folding the invoices, stuffing the envelopes, labeling the envelopes, stamping the envelopes and sealing the envelopes. If this takes your employee approximately 1 minute per envelope, that’s 1000 minutes or 16.66 hours per month – and that’s just in labor! If you’re paying this employee $12/hour, you just paid $200 for them to stuff envelopes, not to mention all of the money spent on office supplies and stamps. Wouldn’t you rather your employee spend 16.66 hours doing something more productive?

Other benefits

Regardless of the cost and time savings, going paperless is also valuable because customers feel more connected with you. They are able to communicate instantly with you electronically, giving them a better overall customer service perception of your business. Hopefully, this and the instantaneous method of transmitting invoices electronically will lead to faster invoice payment, meaning reduced time in A/R and reduced number of days that invoices are outstanding.

With sales orders, you can instantly e-mail order confirmation and receipts, which allows customers to review immediately their order for any errors, reducing the chance of shipping the wrong products and giving your business time to correct the error before the product ships out. You can also save all of these forms as PDFs and so can your clients. The paperwork can easily be accessed anytime without any need for rifling through files or mailing out a duplicate invoice because the first one got lost in the mail.

Think that sounds marvelous? Stay tuned for our next blog on how going paperless can also help you improve your inbound paperwork!