We are living in an era where the trend is towards eco-friendliness and having as little impact on the environment as possible. As a business owner, if you want your business to grow and become popular in the customer base of the contemporary world, you need to show that your business is an eco-friendly one and that buying from you is a good choice for environment-conscious customers. One major way you can reduce your carbon footprint is by adopting the procedure of digital invoicing and leaving the age-old method of making and sending invoices manually. You can get your blank invoice template and customize it to your liking to make a professional digital invoice that has the potential of completely turning your business around and making it successful like never before. Furthermore, you can get your free digital invoice template downloaded from https://www.freshbooks.com/invoice-templates/word where you can get Microsoft Word digital invoice templates absolutely free.  

Take a look at the business world today, whether real physical stores or virtual shops online, you will take no time to notice the significant increase in the amount of effort and energy being invested into sustainable and eco-friendly business ideas. The business world is under pressure today to stay ahead and adapt to the ever-increasing number of social issues and trends being taken up and discussed at the international forum. While the trend towards sustainable and green technologies and products to save the environment is not new to recent years, it has never been more significant than it is today. Many enterprises are coming up with innovative solutions to help build a green future, a planet that the future generations can inhabit. They are taking this route to gain customer support and increase their business popularity as well as to reduce harm to the environment.

Well, you may be thinking about how only changing the way you invoice your customers can have an impact on the environment ..? Now you are going to know and you'll be surprised after reading this piece, that just be investing a little amount in digital invoicing, you can pave the way for business success and for a cleaner, greener planet Earth. Let's begin by discussing the first and foremost impact on the environment of using the manual/conventional invoice. 

Paper

Manual invoicing makes use of paper. Paper is made of wood. Wood is made of trees. There is a direct link between the conventional methods of invoicing and deforestation. World consumption of paper has grown 4 times in the last 4 decades. Now nearly 4 billion trees or 35 percent of the total trees cut all over the world are used in paper industries on each continent. Besides the paper you are thinking about right now, paper comes in many other forms too from tissue paper to cardboard packaging to stereo speakers to home insulation to the sole inserts in your shoes. Paper is used everywhere and this use of paper is not looking to decrease in the near future. You can take an initiative and make your business paper-free in an attempt to decrease the global paper usage when less paper is used, fewer trees are cut down. A typical paper invoice will have 2 or 3 pages on average, and if even if you print 100 invoices per day, which is a minimum figure for most businesses, you will be using 300 pages; doing so you will have printed enough invoices in a month to cut down a full-grown tree. The disastrous effect of this is magnified many times when thousands of firms use manual invoices for everyday business. Move to digital invoicing, save those trees, save the planet.

Energy used in Printing and paper used in Envelops:

And not just the paper you print your invoice on, you also use paper envelopes to send your invoices in, an envelope makes use of paper equivalent to one page and that adds to the total paper usage of your enterprise in only the department of invoicing. Now when you print the invoice, you are not only using paper, you are also using ink and electricity to do this job. You could have easily avoided all this use of important resources and used digital invoicing, which is a cheaper, easier and greener option. Let's talk about the ink cartridges that you normally use to print your invoices in greater detail these printer cartridges not only make use of natural resources such as oil and iron ore to be manufactured, but their ink and toner also contain volatile organic compounds that are harmful to human health and the natural environment. There are no two ways to go in this case, digital invoicing takes the win in every department; it saves paper, saves ink, saves envelopes, saves your money and most of all your precious time. 

Secondary costs related to manual invoicing

Whether you print your order invoices or write them by hand, one thing that stays the same is the means by which the invoice will reach your customer. The case where the customer is present on the spot and receives their invoice from the seller directly is an exception. But like most cases, the invoice will have to travel by road, rail or air to reach its destination. It is a calculated fact that even the smallest envelopes being carried by courier on the road contribute to the emissions of greenhouse gases, and when you send a lot of envelopes you have a larger and larger impact. Contrarily, you can use digital invoices, with whatsoever no link to any fuel usage and it has a negligible impact on the environment. 

Conclusion

If we were to compare digital and manual invoicing in terms of their impact on the environment, it would be safe to say that the impact of digital invoicing is not even 0.5% of the impact that results from manual invoicing. Customers now care more than ever before about the environmental impact of the products they buy, and companies following this trend are incorporating green business ideas in order to capitalize on this growing demand. Make your business grow green with digital invoicing.