Why Pay to Have Documents Scanned?
As the owner of ScanWorks, I am regularly asked this question by prospective customers in businesses of all types and sizes: why should I pay hard-earned money to have my documents scanned when I can store them indefinitely and just find them when I need them?
That’s a great question and business owners needs to consider the following, whether they are in fields of medicine, law, real estate, manufacturing, insurance, etc. The exact answer to the follow will differ, depending on your field, but they all play a role. So let’s consider the following:
How much money does your business spend retrieving documents from their storage location?
If you add up the amount of time spent per week and multiply that by your hourly rate or theirs then multiply that by 52 weeks per year, you are going to be shocked at the dollar value attributable to all that searching. I understand that it is not all that hard to contemplate paying your staff for time spent this way because it just gets folded into their regular paycheck and it is an entirely different matter to write a check to ScanWorks, but consider this– if your staff does not have to spend their time hunting down paper documents, how many other services could they perform that result in direct billable services to your customers?
How Many Other ‘Hidden’ Costs of Paper Do You Incur?
Take at this chart:
| Description | Per Item | x 2500 |
| Purchasing paper files | $.50 each | $1,250/yr |
| Cost of time spent creating a new files | $3 each | $7,500/yr |
| Cost of time spent pulling files for client office visits | $5 each time | $12,500/yr |
| Cost of faxing documents from files as a result of client requests | $.05/page | $125/yr |
| Cost of postage to send documents from files as a result of client requests | $.45/stamp | $1,125/yr |
(Statistics from study conducted by Partners HealthCare Systems)
How many of these costs do you unnecessarily incur? If you scanned all of the documents in your existing files and boxes, you could reuse the ones you have already purchased. The cot of continuously purchasing file folders, file jackets, expandable files, and storage boxes adds up. If you could email document requests instead of incurring faxing and postage expenses, you could realize regular savings as a result.
In addition, how much money do you spend on storage? Do you pay for an off-site storage unit? If you have on-site storage, could you convert that space to other uses that could increase your bottom line?
When you add together all of the indirect and hidden costs together, you will find that the cost of having your documents scanned pales in comparison. ScanWorks offers flexible payments terms and will work with you to fit document scanning into your budget. We believe every business deserves the benefits of having their documents scanned and deserves the value that electronic access to their records brings.
Please call ScanWorks at 330-322-2988 for further information or for a free sample scan of your records. Or click here for a Quik Quote.