“Going Green” is not a new concept. The increasing popularity of electric vehicles (EV), energy-efficient appliances, and sustainable packaging are a few things helping consumers reduce their carbon footprint in everyday life. It is just as crucial for organizations to practice energy management and sustainability.
Assessing current processes and practices is the best way to explore where you could benefit from going green efforts. One easy place to start is by automating accounts payable processes.
In this blog, we will look at the environmental impact of paper checks and how digitizing paper processes can help improve sustainability for businesses.
The Problem with Paper
Have you ever considered the carbon footprint of a paper check? European company CompteCO2 calculated the entire lifecycle of a check – including paper production and transportation – and found it to be roughly 15g of CO2 per check. Additionally, in 2024, the Federal Reserve estimated almost three billion checks were cut.
Let’s do the math.
15g of CO2 x 3B Checks = 45 BILLION Grams, or 49,000 tons, of CO2
What does 45 billion grams of CO2 equate to in terms of flights? 750 flights from New York City to Los Angeles (figuring 65 tons per flight). If these calculations hurt your brain as much as mine, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has created a carbon footprint calculator to assess your household impact.
Listed below are the additional environmental costs of paper checks.
- Manufacturing consumes a staggering amount of energy
- Chemicals used to create checks can pollute the environment
- Mailing and delivering checks require carbon-emitting trucks and planes
- Depositing checks requires drives to the bank
- Cleared checks add to waste and landfills
Eliminating paper checks can help organizations go green, and the easiest way to eliminate them is by digitizing how accounts payable payments are made.
Conservation Through Automation
Automating accounts payable (AP) payments to vendors and suppliers helps increase the efficiency of clerks and staff while reducing the resources needed to process each payment.
As mentioned above, paper checks are a major culprit. Automation platforms replace checks with more ecological virtual cards (no plastic) and ACH (completely digital).
Virtual cards and ACH eliminate the need for printing checks, meaning less paper is used, and fewer trees are cut. These payment methods are faster, less expensive, and more secure than paper checks, enabling vendors to be paid on time and using fewer resources.
A benefit of using virtual cards and ACH, many payment companies offer rebates based on the transaction amount. Rebates can, in turn, be used for organizations to focus on new go-green initiatives.
Powering The Shift to Digital
Integration
Payment automation platforms work better when they fit into existing workflows. Whether using an ERP, utility management software, or energy monitoring software, seamless connectivity enables realtime updates of transaction information and payment statuses. Integrations support the elimination of separate platforms, manual entry, and slower processes.
Implementation
Complicated, resource-intensive processes are not conducive to energy management. Standing up an automation platform should be optimized for efficient implementation. From digital agreements and contracts to electronic signatures, going green can start at the very beginning of the implementation process. Prolonged, drawn-out implementation practices increase energy and time usage, so going live quickly is a matter of high importance.
Scalability
Automating vendor payments should be an easy decision, but it is essential to consider the ever-evolving nature of technology. You don’t want to set up a program to discover in a few months that you need to reinvest time, energy, and resources into updates. Vendor payment platforms must advance as quickly as technology.
Security
Organizations often enlist multiple providers in an attempt to protect themselves from all flavors of fraud. Having to manage and maintain relationships with multiple providers leads to inefficiencies that can drain resources and increase costs. Vendor payment platforms that take on payment security eliminate the need for separate providers while protecting every payment.
Environmentally Friendly Payment Platform
While environmental and sustainability standards vary between organizations, they can easily be applied to accounts payable processes for more efficient and less resource-intensive processes.
REPAY is dedicated to corporate sustainability and is constantly evaluating ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) initiatives to improve our solutions.
Our secure payables platform automates the entire vendor payment process to reduce resources – and, in turn – the environmental impact – that outdated processes entail. We integrate into your existing ERP or energy monitoring software to support decarbonization goals.
Help your organization – and AP team – go green with REPAY.