A successful business should offer services or products of great value to consumers. It should also have a formidable team working together and driving success. Then, there’s another fundamental aspect of a successful business – managing costs by maximising profit and minimising expenditure.
Now, that’s a greatly simplified explanation. Yet, it’s not one that’s inaccurate. Let’s look at cost. Going green is a great way for any business to save money, whilst doing their part for the environment.
Today, you’d be surprised by the number of businesses that have decided to go green. This simple decision can result in substantial long-term cost savings, improve your brand image, and even motivate your workforce.
So, from choosing to streamline your expenses with receipt OCR to encouraging recycling, here are four straightforward ways that your business can save money by going green.
Use Mobile Receipt Scanning API to Manage Your Finances
As we move into 2018, it seems inevitable that mobile receipt scanning technology will emerge as the prominent way that businesses of all descriptions keep track of their expenses.
Using optical character recognition, apps of all descriptions enable people to take a picture of a receipt and then extract the data line by line, and then storing expenditure to a device or the iCloud.
Featuring high degrees of precision, lightning fast OCR and seamless integration, Tabscanner’s receipt scanning API allows personal and professional expenses to be tracked and stored with ease. No longer will your desk or pockets be crammed with receipts of all descriptions dating back weeks – or longer. All the information is easily accessible – and best of all, you can accurately track all your expenditure with ease.
Remote Working
Whenever you think of going green, there’s one change that can really make a massive difference to the swell of paperwork that can engulf an office – reduce the number of office staff.
Yet, businesses still need an appropriate number of staff to effectively service their clients, so why not give the option for employees to work remotely, or from home. Fewer people in the office means less upkeep – and that mountain of paper stacking higher and higher in the office will begin to disappear.
In today’s modern working environment, there are several online collaboration tools that businesses can use. Popular options include, Basecamp, Trello and Asana. Each of these platforms allow employees to have access to job tasks and send work across to an inbox once completed, making remote working a breeze.
Encourage Recycling
Getting everyone on board is essential to a successful green campaign – and businesses can make the campaign fun whilst engaging employees by thinking out of the box. Why not run a competition to see which employee can design the best recycling bin, with the winner being incentivised with a monetary reward?
McDonalds, one of the world’s most recognisable brands, took a very unique approach to employee engagement and marketing by using recycled materials to make a set of VR goggles. Now, we’re not saying this is the best idea for every business, but it certainly got employees engaged and thinking about recycling.
Encourage Power Saving
So, you’re already using receipt scanning API, allowed your employees to work remotely, and encouraged recycling in the office, is there anything else that you can do to help your office go green?
Why yes, there is. It may not seem as innovative as employing receipt OCR technology to manage your expenses, but the simple action of encouraging employees to practice power saving habits will contribute greatly to helping your business to go green.
Implement office practices that encourage everyone to turn off the lights at the end of the day or unplug devices, such as printers and photocopiers when not in use. This will discourage employees from unnecessarily printing out documents and wasting paper.
You can also use the natural light in the day to illuminate the office as much as possible, use power-saving modes on office computers and discourage the use of gadgets (though we do realise that for some offices, this may well be rather difficult!