office musings

There are a lot of small choices you can make in your working life that, when added up, can go a long way. A lot of those choices contributed to my super fantastic metric on our office's paper consumption.

Solertium is a software company. I think that you can make smart software choices to affect your bottom green line.

For example, take invoicing. I have always used e-mail to deliver our invoices, even back in the Cluestream days. I used to PDF our invoices from QuickBooks; last Spring we switched to FreshBooks, which takes care of emailing our invoices (and overdue notices). FreshBooks will also postal mail invoices, and on their forum I've been following a couple of threads on that topic. Frankly, I am baffled why people would choose to rely on postal mail for invoicing. Okay, maybe if you are a medical practice and are invoicing a large insurance company on behalf of a patient. But I get the impression that a lot of FreshBooks users are in some type of service industry; typically when you contract out a service, the employee or individual who orders that service is capable of paying or is in charge of approving/processing the invoice. Pretty much anyone who can order a service has an email address. Why not use it? Save paper. Save a stamp. Save gas. Save postal workers' time. Where is the mystery here??

I am proud that, with both Cluestream and Solertium, I have had the opportunity to work with some great organizations focusing on conservation, including Conservation International and IUCN. Our first conservation gig, way back in the day, was building e-cards. Yet another paper-saver! The majority of our software has enabled our clients to save a lot of resources, including an intranet that houses, among other things, the employee manual (no need to print that baby), and several applications that enable everyone to do lots of jobs via software, jobs that previously involved a lot paper.

Small businesses, especially, have the opportunity to take advantage of a lot of electronic resources. Opt-in mailing lists and Google Groups rather than direct mailing. Shared calendars via Gmail for scheduling. Websites and blogs for marketing. They can take out a smaller ad in the paper that references the business' website for more information - those truly interested will go that extra step and log on and look. And FreshBooks and email for invoicing. The only difficulty is learning about all the options, understanding how to utilize them effectively for their business, and carving out the time needed to sign up and manage using them.