When the IT guys get on top of the hackers and IT programs that dont work and waste peoples time then you might get the trust from business to use your facilities.

I use an online service called FreshBooks to easily bill my customers online. It just works, and my customers seem to have no problems using the site either. It's a very simple setup.

Small businesses, sole proprietors, and even individual consumers can use paperless/electronic billing that doesn't even require using an e-billing service like those mentioned in the article.

I own a one-man design firm. I've been emailing PDFs to invoice my clients for at least 10 years, and never had a complaint.

Granted, that probably doesn't prevent some of my clients from printing them out on their end, but I'd submit that it's their own poor internal systems that are the problem in that case.

My next step will be to see how many clients would be comfortable paying me via PayPal. That way they don't have to send me a paper check in the mail, and I don't have to mail or hand-deliver that check to my credit union anymore.

I also receive invoices and receipts by email and the web all the time, and I never need to print those out. I just save them as TXT or PDF files to a folder on my hard drive called "receipts 2008", and them go through them when tax time comes up.

In fact, I rarely have to print anything at all anymore. I probably only turn on my printer about 5 or 6 times a year.

Checkout the blogpost on http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/idol/2009/03/31/green-it-give-your-custom... to see which other companies offer green incentives to their customers.