FreshBooks greens your business with transitional services

Anytime there is a platform shift, the market benefits from transitional services.

Lately there has been a bit of interest in how FreshBooks helps businesses green their business processes. For the most part we help businesses use less paper, but FreshBooks has a green impact in other ways too.

Let’s start with how FreshBooks reduces paper. First, and most obviously, by enabling FreshBookers to email invoices, that’s a big savings right there. You might argue that our snail mail service promotes more paper usage, but I see that differently. Why? Because we help people transition from sending all their invoices by mail to sending no paper based invoices – or next to none.

That’s just invoices, how else do we save paper? If you send estimates/quotes with FreshBooks, your clients can accept them and we’ll even time-stamp them for you. This saves your client the hassle of sending an approval by fax with a signature. Our time tracking service (please pardon the ancient UI) and expense tracking service cuts down on paper time sheets and expense reports for employees, while our support ticketing system cuts down on formal work orders over the phone, work on a note pad and manual order taking.

All in all that saves million of pages a year, but I’d say the biggest impact is more indirect. FreshBooks is a transitional service in that we enable people to work remotely, work from home and/or telecommute more effectively . The consequence of this is less driving of cars, and when you cobble together all the kilometers of driving the entire FreshBooks community, the impact is significant. It’s also another great example of how FreshBooks is a transitional service that is helping people move from the traditional “work in the big old office setting”, to working outside of it.

That’s potent stuff; we’re very proud of it.