Why In-House Scanning Doesn’t Work at Scale

Would you believe that working with a document scanning company is more cost-effective than attempting to scan an abundance of documents in-house? What you overlook are all the hidden expenses that are eating away at your bottom-line revenue. Take the following test and see why in-house scanning might not be working in your business’ favor.

1. How current is your scanning equipment and software?

The challenge with owning and operating your own office equipment is you can’t run efficiently with a one-time purchase. Your equipment will eventually wear down, become outdated, or break. The cost of this isn’t just in the repair, but also time loss, staff frustration and delayed or incomplete projects. You will also need to keep your scanning software up to date. 

Bottom line: Is maintaining equipment, project backlogs, and staff and customer frustration costing you more than you think?

2. Do you have staff trained and designated for scanning?

In-house scanning processes actually require you to hire or train staff on how to use the equipment and how to categorize and store scanned documents. Instead, are you using staff to scan when they should be spending their time in more productive work? Did you need to remove files from binders, or remove staples, paperclips or sticky notes that needed to be replaced after scanning? 

Bottom line: Are you paying your staff to be accomplish tasks they aren’t qualified to do rather than focusing on their revenue-building and core tasks?

3. Are you using valuable space for scanning?

If you do all your scanning and regular business in the same space, you’re using and paying for valuable real estate that should be used for your primary business. 

Bottom line: Are you limiting your revenue with lack of space when someone else’s space could be used to do your scanning tasks?

4. Is your scanner capable of your needs?

First of all, what is the quality of the output you are hoping to achieve versus what your scanner offers? Low-cost scanners have limited scanning quality, and the older they get, the more issues crop up. Secondly, do you find that you are having to send out large-scale scans because your scanner can’t handle them? Ask yourself, does it make sense that we are doing in-house scanning as well as a scanning service? Should we be doing that? 

Bottom line: Are you losing out on quality, or spending more to accommodate what your scanner isn’t offering?

5. Who is checking quality control?

When each documents is scanned, are you checking for legibility, completeness of detail, dimensional accuracy, scanner-generated speckle, completeness of overall image, density of solid black areas, and color fidelity? Are you ensuring all the documents have been scanned and that the finished product matches the originals? These basic standards of scanning take a good eye and valuable time.

Bottom line: Are you sacrificing the quality of your scanning by trying to do it yourself?

6. Do you have Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology?

This gives you the ability to search for keywords and phrases anywhere within your legal document. It’s a valuable tool and can save your staff a great deal of time. 

Bottom line: Is it costing you more because you lack the value of OCR technology?

Every business wants to find ways to decrease expenses in order to increase revenue, but sometimes choosing to do important tasks in-house can actually have the opposite result. Utilizing the expertise of an external scanning service will draw huge benefits for your bottom-line revenue, your staff, and your customer satisfaction.

Pacific Records is in the business of document scanning and imaging. We offer complete secure document scanning and storage done by our trained, experienced professionals. We can take the expensive load of in-house scanning off your shoulders and help your company be more efficient and effective. Just give us a call at (800) 685-9034 or by complete the form on this page.