Going Paperless

While logging into one of many online accounts used in daily management of our business, I am presented with the above call to action, “Simplify your life by going paperless.”

R.BIRD has been testing the paperless office promise since 1987 (does anyone remember Wang Laboratories?). Instead of simple, going paperless has become exponentially complex.

Why? “Too Many” Too many options, too many players, too many incompatibilities, too many break-points. Too many variations on the theme. No standards.

Our company banks with JPMorgan Chase (a.k.a Chase, a.k.a. Chemical). We were among the very first to sign our business accounts to Chemical - largely due to promises of paperless bank transactions, including online bill-paying. When online bill-paying services first became available, we were there. We set up a batch of online bill payments, excited about the promise of savings in time and cost.

Soon, we received calls or late fee notices from all of the vendors we had paid in the new, paperless way.

We called the bank to inquire and we were told, “The ‘person’ responsible for online bill payments has been sick… so… online bill payments for that week had not been processed.” Please, tell me more. “When you submit an online bill payment request, an email is sent to the person responsible. That person then prints out the email copy, writes out a check as described, puts the check in an envelope and mails it to the payee.”

How very, very, cutting edge.

When it comes to workflow, we’ve come along way since then. But, not so far when it comes to the payment sender’s convenience.

Cut to present day. The deluge of paper continues.

Not so long ago I set out, once again, in an effort to conquer. Any and all vendor accounts that offered “paperless” billing and payments were acted upon. We assigned billing to one email address and payments to either a credit card or checking account.

Less than two billing cycles later, the disconnects began to appear. Our bank changed its ABA transit number; the credit card expiration date changed; the vendor name changed; the “person” responsible for e-payments recorded the account number incorrectly; there was a security compromise (please change your password); our ISP’s spam filter blocked authorization notices… et cetera.

Now, we are forced to counter-check all accounts where online payment is setup to be sure that the payment was made, received and recorded. This effort requires a minimum of 4 hours every week - half of one day. When we find an error, it’s double or triple the time needed to make the correction on the receiving end plus the corrections in bookkeeping.

Going Paperless Is Not Simple

So, why all the come-ons? Listen: It’s all to the advantage of the receiving end, not yours. Banks, insurance companies, credit card companies - even small businesses - spend $millions creating, sending, receiving, processing, copying, storing and retrieving paper. Like us, they would love to eliminate the paper cost, the steps required to manage it, the people-hours it all eats up and - above all - the costs that bite at gross income.

The $5 reward offered to account-holders in the ad above is easily recovered in a fraction of the first year. Meanwhile, you and I will likely continue suffering the burdens and frustrations of Going Paperless.

At R.BIRD, today, we’re making most payments with checks on paper and postage stamps. No errors reported.

There are 3 comments so far | Post a comment

paul said:

the biggest thing i’ve found with going paperless is digital organization. i receive 90% of my statements (bank, cc, etc) via email, so i have to remain meticulous about categorizing and saving them in a fashion that makes it easy for my bookkeeper & accountants to handle them when i send all the files over (along with all my digital invoices).

for all the companies that don’t offer digital statements i simply do printouts of the necessary screens in Adobe’s PDF maker, and then save those PDFs.

Richard Bird said:

You’re exactly right, Paul. When I attempt to go all digital with banking stuff, I find myself bogged down in managing the notices, confirmations, reminders, statement links, et cetera. It becomes, ultimately, unmanageable. Back to original post.

Scott said:

And when you go paperless and need to access account information from the past year it is rather interesting that the banks do not allow you to go back that far and make it very convenient to order past statements and charge you a fee of ih say $7 per statement. I am talking good old Bank of Amerika