Report: environmental benefits from efficiency

The Federation of Finnish Financial Services has just released a report on research of carbon footprints and time savings comparing paper invoices and electronic invoices. While research like this has been conducted before, this report takes well into account also the time and resources spent on processing electronic invoices and clearly differentiates between sending and receiving invoices.

Here are the highlighted findings:

• The carbon footprint of a single electronic invoice from sending to receiving is 150 grams. The carbon footprint of a paper invoice is 450 grams. Thus, switching to e-invoicing cuts 67% of the carbon emissions associated with paper invoicing.
• 60% of the carbon impact of paper invoicing comes from processing time and manual labour. Only 40% of the carbon impact comes from paper and physical distribution of the invoice itself. Thus, environmentally the benefits of e-invoicing are primarily from the efficiency of the invoice. This makes sense, since the beginning and end processing of a paper invoice do not enjoy scale economics like the production and distribution of the physical material do.
• As a result of less manual processing, the people involved in the invoicing process felt their work to be more rewarding and more enjoyable. 

You can read the whole report here. (link has been temporarily down, please check again if it doesn't work for you now)