From Day 1 we said the aim of billFLO is to completely eliminate the paper invoice.  However, up until now we havent detailed how we are going to achieve that. Well, seeing as we launched the full version of billFLO recently, I think its time to elaborate on why we think billFLO will be world changing.

Every time two companies complete a commercial transaction, purchasing data needs to be passed from the seller’s accounting system to the buyer’s system, via an invoice. Think about this for a second, every time a company buys or sells something, an invoice is generated. Most of the time this invoice is in paper form (about 100 Billion annually). 

Here’s a couple of numbers to give you a sense of the cost of invoicing:
1. Studies show that it costs $14 to get a paper invoice through its lifecylce. At the level of the US economy, that works out as almost 2% of US GDP.
2. 40 billion pieces of paper are wasted every year in the US on paper invoices. That number suggests the world as a whole wastes 120 billion sheets of paper every year on invoices…or 13 Million Trees
3. Imagine the carbon emitted by moving 13 million trees worth of paper invoices around the world, every year.

Up until a couple of weeks back, 99% of business were limited to using a paper invoice and a human to get the data out of one accounting system and into another. Over the years, various different attempts have been made to eliminate the paper invoice from the process, including EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) and PDF invoices. All have failed for various reasons; EDI is too complex to implement for most companies and PDF invoices work for the seller but have to be manually entered into the buyer’s system.

So, rewinding to two years ago, Alec and I were looking at this problem thinking we could solve it.  Despite the fact that many had tried before us, none of the products we looked at had the potential to be ubiquitous. We figured, if we could deliver a solution that made it easy for any size of business to quickly send, receive and import electronic invoices, that product could become a de-facto standard.

billFLO achieves this quite simply by allowing users to email machine readable invoices straight to their customers who can import them straight into their accounting system. Any business can install and be using billFLO in minutes. This usability opens up machine readable, electronic invoices to every single email enabled business in the US.

Time will tell whether our vision will become reality, but by launching billFLO we know we’ve taken the first step on the road to eliminating the paper invoice.