Bill.com Green

Stop paying by check

You can reduce the environmental impact of your business by paying your vendors electronically instead of paper checks. If you pay 20 bills per month electronically instead of by check, you would conserve the following in one year:

• 1 lb of paper
• 7 gallons of wastewater prevented from discharging into lakes, streams and rivers
• .4 lbs of waste
• 7 lbs of greenhouse gases prevented — equivalent to 8 miles not driven in your car
• 1 sq foot of forest preserved from deforestation
• .1 gallons of gas saved from switching to electronic direct deposit

Similarly, you can save by paying your employees by direct deposit and reimbursing your employees expenses electronically.

Eliminate paper invoices

Switch to electronic billing and statements and see the difference you can make! If you started sending 20 monthly bills electronically, you could conserve the following in one year:

• 7 lbs of paper
• 117 lbs of greenhouse gases prevented — equivalent to 118 miles not driven in your car and 6 gallons of gasoline not consumed
• 21 sq feet of forest preserved from deforestation
• 64 gallons of wastewater prevented from discharging into lakes, streams, and rivers
• 2 gallons of gas saved from delivery of mail

Also, request electronic invoices from your vendors too!

Eliminate servers with SaaS applications

The Software as a Service (Saas) model helps your business reduce its carbon footprint. Instead of thousands of customers individually operating thousands of servers and the power hungry facilities to serve those servers, the SaaS model centralizes data center operations to use less equipment and a small fraction of the supporting facility costs.

There can be up to a 20 to 1 savings in electrical power consumption for deploying SaaS applications vs. running the same application on premise. SaaS saves hard dollars through reduced hardware, software, labor, and energy expenditures.

Replace your file cabinet with a tree

Use digital storage solutions to cut paper and reduce clutter. According to Office Depot, one 100 Megabyte zip drive can store the contents of a four-drawer filing cabinet, and one CD-Rom can hold nearly a roomful of paper! Many businesses still use hundreds of file boxes for all their information, creating more paper waste, and information is hard to file, organize, and retrieve.

Once you scan and convert your files into digital format, the paper documents can be shredded and recycled. Not only have you reduced your impact on the environment, you and your colleagues have instant access to your archived files. Information at your fingertips! Digital documents can save hundreds of trees per year for your company. And wouldn't that tree look pretty in the corner of your office instead of your filing cabinet?