Tips for Fast & Efficient Document Scanning

Tips for Fast & Efficient Document Scanning Here are some important tips and tricks to make your document scanning process fast and efficient.

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In the present digital world, document scanning has become an important process for every organization. As business organizations grow, the volume of paperwork and files produced each day also increases. Managing these records can be a challenging task due to storage space limitation. What is more important is that these documents must be made readily available whenever and wherever needed. Digitization that starts with document scanning services and conversion is an important step towards streamlining documentation and freeing up valuable office space. Going paperless and digitizing documents helps organizations save time and effort, and improve efficiency.

Digitization of documents facilitates small businesses to access vital business data using advanced technological devices such as laptops, smartphones and tablets and prevents loss of important data as well. Document scanning is an important requirement for efficient document organization and management. Outsourcing the digitization process to a reliable and reputable document scanning company enables to capture, manage, store, and deliver important information and organize data in a systematic manner. In addition, other prominent benefits of digitization include • • • • • •

Allows automation of manual processes Provides better access to information Provides measurable and tangible productivity improvements Saves time and helps improve customer service More office space Secure document storage

Here are some important tips to keep in mind before initiating the document scanning process – ✓ Understand what you are scanning – Before beginning the scanning process, it is important to decide which documents to convert into digital format and where to store them. Generally, frequently-accessed documents benefit the most from being converted into digital format as they can be easily and quickly shared at the click of a mouse. Once they are digitized, it is important to store these files in a safe place. Consider investing in an online document management or enterprise content management (ECM) application to ensure seamless access to your files. On the other hand, if you are scanning your records for disaster recovery purposes, make sure you have portable media such as hard drives or DVDs with enough disk space to hold your digital files. ✓ Sort, organize and prepare documents - Sorting, organizing and preparing documents before scanning is essential for a successful scanning process. Since business organizations have huge volumes of documents that are difficult to handle, it is important to name and save every document accordingly. Saving documents as PDF files is an ideal way, which allows searching using keywords.

Torn and dog-eared pages should be straightened and repaired. Remove staples, paper clips and sticky notes from files. www.managedoutsource.com

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✓ Select the right file format – To access your scanned documents, choose a specific file format that is compatible with your document management or ECM system. Scanned documents can be converted into various file formats such as PDF, GIF, TIFF, JPG and PNG. Portable document format (PDF) is the most widely used and compatible file format that can be easily viewed and edited across a wide range of platforms. On the other hand, if your PDFs need to be searchable by keywords or phrases, optical character recognition (OCR) must be performed during scanning. Before starting the scanning process, it is important to verify file format requirements and confirm conversion at key points. ✓ Store multiple copies of files – Maintain multiple copies of scanned files and store them in different locations. Apart from keeping these documents in a central database or hard drive, copies can also be stored in the cloud. This is advantageous because if one system malfunctions, the files can still be accessed from other systems. ✓ Check for accuracy and quality – Verify that the captured information is converted accurately. Make sure that every image is properly indexed, has the correct resolution and is fully readable. ✓ Select the right resolution – Always check to see what DPI (dots per inch) is being used as this will affect the resolution. Setting higher DPI will result in larger file size. For black and white documents, the lowest acceptable resolution is 200 dots per inch (DPI). The regular scanning resolution is 300 DPI and for important documents with fine print, 600 DPI is possibly good. ✓ Use State-of-the-art Scanners – Purchase flat-bed or document fed scanners according to your requirement and preferences. Document-fed scanners can scan many pages at a time, whereas Flatbed scanners scan one page, one side at a time. When a whole stack of paper documents are fed into the scanner, it scans one page, one side at a time. ✓ Standardize naming convention – A descriptive and properly named file allows users to learn more about the document content without having to open the same. The naming convention should – • Provide better access and retrieval of electronic documents • Recognize the content of a document from a list • Allow sorting of documents in a logical sequence (for instance – version, date) • Help keep track of versions of documents While evaluating the document scanning process, it is important to analyze both shortterm and long-term needs of your business. Take adequate time to study your documents and understand how they will fit into the specific business cycle.

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