Protect the environment with paperless accounting

22. March 2022

Discussions in our BLU DELTA team are mostly dominated by ‘nerdy’ AI topics like NLP, deep learning and accounting topics. But every now and then our idea of improving the world comes through, where we all refer to the paper saved by our BLU DELTA technology. The automated capture of financial documents (invoices, orders, delivery notes, etc.) is undoubtedly the key to CO2-saving document processing.
But what does the actual paper production ‘cost’, and how many of our valuable resources can actually be saved with our AI system?

In order to find an answer to this question, I sat down at my laptop, started a short research and created a simple calculation, which I present below.
Paper production is really expensive from an environmental point of view (see infographic). The good news is that in Europe we are currently achieving a recycling rate of 72%.

Applying this to one of our projects gives a good idea of how much more environmentally friendly using the OCR system is. Before the integration of BLU DELTA, the company processed around 250,000 paper invoices. On average, an invoice has about two pages and we assume that the company acts in a resource-saving manner and uses recycled paper. The numbers in the chart below refer to the remaining 28% of resources as we assume recycling is carbon neutral.
The paper-based workflow has been switched to a digitized process, where AI plays the driving role in automation. The suppliers now also send the invoices digitally, as this saves costs and effort for both parties and also protects the environment. By going digital, 500,000 pages of paper have now been saved.

Of course, these invoices are also copied, transported and enveloped. All this is not part of this calculation, but it can be assumed that the resource consumption is multiplied by it.
Paper is something so commonplace that, just like with electricity, water or meat, you no longer think about how much energy is required to finally put it in the printer. Data and facts can help to repair the relationship to these things and the humility before them.
Digitization, made possible by our AI-based iOCR system, counteracts this unnecessary waste of resources. The efficient extraction of data from a wide variety of documents and the sustainable training of the AI through machine learning supports the preservation of our most fundamental capital, Mother Earth.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~cushman/courses/engs171/Paper.pdf

http://www.conservatree.com/learn/EnviroIssues/TreeStats.shtml)

https://www.standardcarbon.com/2008/06/do-you-really-need-to-print-that-the-carbon-footprint-of-copy-paper/

https://handel-mittelstand.digital/publikationen/e-rechnungs-gipfel-2018/

BLU DELTA is a product for the automated capture of financial documents. Partners, but also our customers’ finance departments, accounts payable clerks and tax consultants can use BLU DELTA to immediately relieve their employees of the time-consuming and mostly manual entry of documents by using BLU DELTA AI and Cloud.

BLU DELTA is an Artificial Intelligence by Blumatix Intelligence GmbH.