My life is on my Mac (and on an external hard drive in case my mac should decide to take an extended ‘holiday’.) My work documents, tax documents, personal documents, photos, music, movies – it’s all there, and that’s the way I like it.
So imagine my irritation at the fact that one company insists on delivering paper invoices to me – no, not in the post but via a driver….I mean wtf? Excuse my language but I don’t get it…..let’s take a look at the process: The accounts department prints out ONE sheet of paper (which was an electronic pdf by the way) then places the ONE sheet of paper into an A4 envelope *sigh* and then affixes ONE label with my name on it onto the envelope. Said envelope is then handed to the driver who then drives it over to me and makes me sign for receipt (oh, did I mention the invoice is for about R95.)
What a process? Cost of paper, envelope, sticker, driver, petrol – PLUS the paper wastage factor. Aaaargh it makes me want to scream.
I run a digital, paperless company. On the odd occasion I may print a lengthy document that requires physical editing – other than that – nothing! My accountant knows this and at the end of each month I provide her with a pdf binder of all my issued and received invoices, that’s how I roll…and she respects that (and I suspect secretly loves it, certainly beats shoe boxes full of slips.)
As far as I know, and please correct me if I’m wrong, in this day and age I don’t think it is a legal requirement to receive or submit paper invoices so stop sending them to me, the labour / paper wastage / cost factor really annoys me. I don’t want them.
Filed under: Rant | Tagged: delivery, environment, invoices, paper
I agree on the paperless thing. I know MTN offer this as an option, and yet most people don’t know this because it is not well advertised. Companies should be proactive about utilising simple online programmes to generate invoices that don’t need to be printed!
FNB print your statements on an A4 page on both sides, and as a result only use a couple of pages at most. Another one of the Big 4 Banks prints their statements on 1 side of A5 papers, and as a result you get a stack of them each month. It is not only the annoyance of having paper invoices still in this day and age (when even techno-morons like me can do this all on line!) but the fact that unnecessary printing means wasted paper. And so it leads back to the way we are treating our environment…