What Exactly Document Imaging Entails, and Why You Should Take Advantage of It

Picture this: Your business is coming up on its 50th anniversary, and after much haranguing from your staff, you've finally decided the time has come to start doing things online. The only problem? 50 years worth of paperwork you've got filed away, none of which has been copied or even scanned into a computer. You've broached the topic with your staff, and even with the work split up, none of them is thrilled about the prospect of scanning and organizing literally thousands of documents in a new database.

Then, one of them suggests document scanning services. You stare blankly for a moment until she explains: there are businesses that will take on years worth of paperwork, scan each document as a PDF, and even create a meticulously organized database that will be easy to navigate and accessible to you and your staff from pretty much anywhere.

You're a bit skeptical, reminding her that there are anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 sheets of paper to sort through and organize, and she reminds you that this is what these companies are paid to do. She also explains some of the numerous benefits of using a scanning company: Cost efficiency: Say it takes a $25/hour employee five minutes to walk to a records room, locate a file, do what he needs with it, re-file it and return to his desk. At just four files per day, that's over 86 hours per year spent filing (and over $2150 in payroll). At 10 files per day, that shoots up to 216 hours per year (nearly $5500) — and that's for just one employee! It will take no time at all for an employee to search and find a file — plus there's no re-filing. An unnecessary cost is instantly slashed.

Disaster recovery: Whether you have paper or electronic documents, they're at risk to be destroyed. A fire, a flood, a break-in — in just moments all your hard work could be undone. If that's the case, you may be asking, what's the point of document scanning services? Document management systems will not only create an on-site database for your files, they'll also back up those files in a variety of ways (including off-site databases).

Access: It's easier than ever to allow your employees to work in a paper-free environment, thereby allowing them to work from virtually anywhere. Freak blizzard keeping your employees at home? You could give them the day off, yes, but you could also give them the option of not losing time — or money. It also allows any number of employees to access the same file at any given time — whereas you could find yourself making endless copies of a certain document just so all your employees can look at it.

Well, there you have it. Since you're probably wondering how you ever managed without a document scanning service, get a move on and hire one!

About the Author

Filescansolutions.com is a scanning services that offers a wide variety of services from medical records scanning to providing document scanning software.

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