Reasons to Use Paperless Invoicing and How Your Company Can Start

Every year businesses produce tons of paper waste, most of which uses virgin paper and is never recycled. This has a huge impact on the environment and on your bottom line. By switching to paperless invoicing you can save yourself and your customers time and money while at the same time working to save thousands of trees. There are several options for creating paperless invoices for any sized business from a home office to a large cooperation.

There are a variety of great desktop publishing software choices that make creating invoices simple and easy. Additionally, you can find some very affordable software programs that are created just for this purpose and can range anywhere from $10-$40 such as My Invoices, QuickBooks Invoice Manager, and Nova's Invoices and Estimates Pro just to name a few. You could even use standard word processing software such as Microsoft Office to create your invoice. Which ever program you use, make sure that you can save your invoice as either a .doc file, .pdf, or a graphics file so you can then send it to your clients as an email attachment. Alternatively, you could copy and paste the invoice directly into the email itself.

One of the benefits of this method is that you have total control over how the invoice looks and if you ever need to provider a hard copy of the invoice for any reason you can easily access it and print out a copy; otherwise this lets you take care of billing and your invoice needs with no need to waste paper or spend money on postage.

PayPal has quickly become a standard part of doing business and if you are using their service to collect payments, they have a very easy to use invoice creator that will generate your invoice and automatically send it to your customer to request payment. Simply log in to your account and click the “REQUEST MONEY” tab; under that then click “CREATE AN INVOICE” fill out the information and send it in its way. This is simple and has the advantage of giving the customer an immediate way to pay the invoice.

If neither of the two options above seem to suit your needs, there is always the option of using a paperless invoicing service to handle the invoices for you. Generally these companies also provide a variety of other services to help your company go paperless. A benefit of using these services is that you never need to to worry about a system crash on your computer wiping out all of your records since they handle storage and back up to keep your records safe and secure. A few examples of these services include Pay Simple, Go To Billing, and Invoice Quick. Most of these services are simple to use and over the course of the year will save you a lot of time, money, and effort.

Regardless of which method of paperless invoicing that you use you will save yourself a lot of time and effort in having invoices printed and mailed while saving a lot of money as well. Paperless invoicing is likely to generate a quicker payment from your customers and provides you with digital records that will be a lot easier for you to keep track of for future purposes and tax time. All of these great benefits while reducing thousands of tons of paper waste and protecting the environment. Paperless invoicing is not only smart business, it is a great way to make your business greener.

Useful Links:

Invoice Quick

Go To Billing

Pay Simple

My Invoices and Estimates Deluxe