Page 141 -

W h a t Y o u C a n D oh a t Y o u C a n D o
112
112 P P a r t I I I : a r t I I I : W

Faxing
Of course, receiving incoming faxes is also a source of paper. Even worse, you never know
who is going to be sending what, and you never know if it’s something you want to keep.
There are a number of applications and services to which you can subscribe that will
automatically take whatever is being faxed, convert it to an e-mail, and send it to you. Once
you get an electronic version of the fax, you can decide whether or not you want to keep it.
Also, what if you’re out of the office and a fax that you need comes in? By using a service
such as MyFax (www.myfax.com, or Link 6-1) or Maxemail (www.maxemail.com, or Link 6-2),
one can check your e-mail remotely and view the fax.

Paperless Billing
More and more companies are offering paperless billing as an option for their customers.
For instance, all your customers have to do is log on to a website like the one shown in
Figure 6-2, and they can pay their bill each month.
Rather than print and mail monthly statements, companies simply send a reminder e-mail
to customers, who can then pay their monthly charges online. If you are not leveraging the
Web and e-mail to some degree, consider that it might be time to give it a try.
Complete paperless billing simply might not be feasible for your organization. There
may always be some element that you simply need to send as a paper bill. Document
process automation firm Esker asked 150 North American billing and invoicing managers
about their companies’ billing practices. They discovered that 28 percent of customers
refuse to accept any invoice that doesn’t arrive via snail mail—Esker, 2007.
But it isn’t just money and paper that is saved by paperless billing. The Esker study also
showed that many of the businesses who adopted paperless billing didn’t do so to save
money or trees. They just wanted to save time. Many organizations spend a lot less time on
the task of billing because they don’t have to go through the effort of physically mailing bills.
However, the same Esker study revealed that half of the companies interviewed had not
considered paperless billing. The study further revealed that, on average, three employees
spend 106 hours per month generating and mailing bills. The time it takes to generate the
invoices accounts for 15 percent of that time. The remaining 92 hours are spent on printing,
envelope stuffing, addressing, and mailing the bills, as shown next.

Time Spent with Paper-Based Billing

Time spent generating invoices
Time spent preparing, stuffing
envelopes, and mailing

Another study by Javelin Strategy and Research showed that if every U.S. household
paid their bills online, 16.5 million trees a year would be spared. Beyond paper, bills involve
envelopes as well as trucks and planes to transport them all over the world.