Embracing World Environment Day

Embracing World Environment Day Purple Lime

‘Time for Nature’ is the theme for World Environment Day 2020, which is tomorrow – and what apt timing for thinking about the role nature has played in our lives these past few months.

Many of us have noticed while out on our daily exercise, or whilst in the garden that the air is much clearer and the birdsong seems much louder since we’ve been in lockdown.

Indeed, one might argue that it’s been nature which has forced us to take this ‘great pause’…

The positive environmental impact of lockdown worldwide has been clear to see. Fewer cars on our roads and few aircraft in our skies, the fact that many industries are closed, all of which together have a detrimental affect on air quality. UK carbon emissions have dropped by 48% (DEFRA).

How can the way we work at Purple Lime – or the way you work – have an effect on the environment?

Working in a more eco-friendly way

During lockdown, like many businesses, we have been working remotely. Simply by doing this, we have already made our business more eco-friendly, and we were pretty green any way as our office was, is and will be paperless.

Around 67% of the UK population drive cars to work, and around 11% travel by rail.  Therefore an unexpected by-product of lockdown has been a drop in air pollution caused by traffic.

If any business continues in the future with even part of their teams working remotely, businesses could potentially save money and help with environment. It’s an even more serious consideration if protecting the planet is part of your company’s values.

Purple Lime is a company where technology has always been an integral and important part of our business. However we’ve recognised as tech advances, hardware updates are more frequent and we’re beginning to create a global electronic ‘e-waste’ problem.

For example, many unwanted devices can end up in landfill, or are shipped to developing countries and become a health hazard to their environment. Please consider that both at home and at work – there are many charities or social enterprises in most communities looking for computers, laptops, tablets and phones to upcycle and recycle.

Using tech in accountancy to support our green credentials:

We are proud to be able to support our clients to find ways to become more eco-friendly and having a paperless office is one way forward; the way to become efficiently ‘green’.

Our team are all trained to work with apps and online accounting, and our secure platform lives in the cloud. These technologies do away with shelves and filing cabinets stuffed to bursting with paperwork. Apart from anything else, they are a perpetual fire hazard!

No longer do we have to complete paper forms, or send out invoices and newsletters; now, all these data collection activities can be done on our phones and computers.

The development of smart phones and apps has helped reduced the amount of paperwork previously required, and more importantly, enabled businesses to connect to data in real time which has been hugely beneficial during lockdown.

Using the correct and secure technical products all this paperwork can be moved online. Among the apps we use in partnership with our clients are:

*FloatApp –  a real-time, visual cash flow forecasting app that links with Xero

*ReceiptBank –a bookkeeping App that also integrates with Xero. The app reads and extracts data from your receipts, invoices and other financial paperwork easily.

*Xero –  the cloud-based  accounting software.

We are ready to help you embrace tech in this way to support your green ambitions too. We can support you to plan, capture and report your financial performance through flexible cloud technologies. We can also train you on the best ways to work with the different apps and products. Alternatively, using these tech tools we can be your outsourced finance department.