Good things come to those who wait – this clearly also applies to the use of electronic bills. No matter how current a company’s IT equipment or networks are, paperless billing is still far from being the standard in travel management. Quite the opposite: the recently released AirPlus International Travel Management Study shows that a quarter of companies prefer old-fashioned paper bills. Another quarter relies on a ‘mixture’ of paper and electronic records. In Western Europe, almost 40% would not give up hard copies – it’s even over 60% in Germany. The reasons for this (especially in Germany) are the complicated laws and tax system which require all expenses to be recorded in paper form.

It appears that this devotion to paper will continue to endure – the number of companies that still work with paper bills has fallen by 12% to around 50% in the past 3 years, while the number of those who receive electronic bills has doubled to around 20%. Leading this trend are the countries of Australia, China, South Africa and Brazil.

But management consultants and software experts alike are surprised at the reluctance of companies in Europe and the United States to use electronic travel statements. Even though 80% of companies analyze their travel expenses (in some travel-intensive industries it is even 90%), only a third use professional software. That is despite the fact that more than half of the companies are of the opinion that using electronic bills and professional software would bring advantages through saving time and money. But apparently tight budgets and a lack of individualized evidence scare most companies away from making that investment.

In general the paper/ electronic question is met with an ‘either/ or’ strategy: 43% of the companies surveyed want to switch completely to electronic bills in the long run, and 31% wish to remain entirely with paper. Companies increasingly want to avoid a ‘mix’ of the two.

Nearly 1,500 travel managers from Europe, the USA, Mexico and Brazil, South Africa, as well as China, Singapore and Australia were interviewed for the latest AirPlus International Travel Management Study.

Do you remember? As a rule, it’s probably been one to two years – possibly even sometime in the last few months – since you’ve stood at the airline ticket counter with a many-page paper ticket, waiting until it’s finally your turn. Or since you lost sleep (or gained a few new gray hairs) over a misplaced ticket and had to deal with the all-powerful travel-bureaucracy gods. Today – unless you have to check larger pieces of luggage – longer waits at the check-in desk ought to be a thing of the past, just like fears of missing a flight because you’ve lost or forgotten your ticket.

Since January 1, 2008, thanks to the introduction of “electronic ticketing”, a new age has begun. Passengers now reach their airplanes faster, tickets can no longer get lost and money is saved. An e-ticket is a paperless electronic ticket that is stored in the airline company’s computer system. In order that travelers have a secure backup, they are sent e-mail confirmation about their reservation, but this is purely informative. On the day of their flights, they only need to identify themselves with their passport or ID card and are given a boarding card that allows them to go directly to the gate. In effect, this makes the passenger his or her own ticket!

Virtual tickets are also highly advantageous for airline companies. “On average, an airline company pays nine euros for a paper ticket – and only one euro for an electronic one,” says Bryan Wilson, project manager for electronic ticketing at the global air association IATA. If the airline industry exclusively used electronic tickets, it would save over three billion euros annually. It’s no wonder that according to IATA, 93% of all globally issued flight tickets are now issued electronically.

According to aviation experts, however, this is only one step towards significantly increasing the efficiency of air traffic. Just like the electronic ticket, comprehensive automatic check-in systems, radio systems for every piece of luggage and passenger controls using biometric data will soon increase overall airport efficiency. Until then, however, 30 million paper tickets that have not yet been issued must be collected and turned into recycling paper. And that will certainly be a great deal of work: they are stored at over 60,000 travel agencies in 200 countries.

May we ask you how you are reading this text? On your monitor? Or on paper?

You probably read shorter articles like this one on your monitor. But you probably frequently push the print-button to read articles that are longer than one page. Over 80% of Europeans and US-Americans do the same.

Paper can be touched – and in the truest sense of the word, grasped – while digital documents will always remain virtual. They can’t be touched, i.e. by penciling comments on them, paper-clipping notes to them or by personally marking the most interesting spots. Then there’s a psychological factor: the fear of losing data. Even if you can’t find the piece of paper with the cover letter right at this moment – you know it exists and you know you will be able to find it!

Such arguments are also used to explain a paradox. According to a study by Price Waterhouse Cooper, paper consumption in companies with e-mail systems has increased by 40%. People who receive an e-mail print it out. The consequences for companies are significant. According to Hewlett-Packard, all companies in the world spend approximately five percent of their total income exclusively on printing. Over two-thirds, according to a survey sponsored by Lexmark, don’t even know what their printing costs are. But a company with 100 employees prints around 100,000 sheets of paper per month – resulting in costs of between 40,000 and 120,000 euros.

Every year, nearly 700 billion sheets of paper are unnecessarily printed. In Europe alone, this means costs of 1.4 billion euros per year. Circa 655,000 tons of CO2 are consumed in the production of paper – for nothing.

In German offices alone, an estimated 800,000 tons of paper are printed per year. If one were to load a freight train with this amount of paper, it would be 600 kilometers long and consist of 40,000 wagons. Packaging artist Christo would be able to wrap the Deutsche Reichstag circa 100,000 times with this amount of material.

But there are highly sensible and efficient alternatives to this, for example, deployment of Electronic Document-Management-Systems (EDMS). EDMSs promote intelligent document-handling, because they use another approach in the creation of printed material: while the conventional distribution principle was always “print and distribute”, EDMS works according to the principle “distribute and print”. Documents are stored digitally as long as possible, then distributed, and only then, printed. This substantially reduces distribution and printing costs.