How Online Faxing Can Benefit Your Business
While cost efficiency in operating expenses is a huge part of any business success
, it can be absolutely crucial in the survival of a new business. With all of the options available to help you streamline your business and help your office run as efficiently as possible, some of the seemingly smaller factors can wind up having the greatest long term bearing on your business. A good example is the evolution of fax technology. If your business is still utilizing traditional paper-and-ink, dial-up fax machines to receive documents, switching to online faxing can benefit your business.Traditional fax machines use a printer, paper, and ink to print out copies of visual data (documents, photos, contracts, blueprints, receipts, orders, etc) distributed over a phone line. Online faxing services offer an easy and affordable way for your business to deal with faxed information without being subjected to the many shortcomings of traditional fax machines. Lets review some of the benefits.
A Green Choice
Old fax machines are notorious paper wasters and landfill fillers, using one toner cartridge after another to spew out mountains of printed sheets, which then need to be sorted, collated, distributed, and filed away in cabinets (taking up ever more space). An online faxing service provides your company with a phone number and an online interface (often via the companys website) that help you receive and manage all of your faxes. Documents that are faxed to your business (using the number provided for you, which will usually be toll free or local, depending on your business needs) are automatically converted to a digital file format and stored on the interface as an email attachment. The attachment can then be forwarded from your companys interface to any number of email addresses are required. This scenario uses no paper or ink, allows you to quickly distribute the digital document without having to print up a single copy, and takes up much less storage space (if any at all).
Easy Access
When you receive a document via traditional fax, it is printed out and filed away in a real hardcopy folder. Searching for important information from your incoming faxes means you need to physically sort through all of your paper-and-ink files until you stumble across the data your require. An online fax service automatically stores all of your incoming faxes in an easily searchable and sortable archive--allowing you to peruse and search hundreds of documents instantly--through something as simple as an email keyword search from your laptop or phone. And because the data is accessed via the Internet, all of your faxed documents are only as far away as the nearest online connection.
Online Faxing is Scalable
This is especially important to keep in mind if you are operating newly developing business. While online faxing services are usually offered for an affordable, flat monthly fee, the cost may be even lower depending on the needs of your company. This means that a smaller company requiring only moderate faxing services can often get a lower monthly charge that only increases in proportion to the business growth. In addition, the eco-friendly aspect of online faxing is not only good for the environment, its also good for your finances. By eliminating the costs of paper, ink, extra phone lines, the fax machine itself, and repair, online faxing can really help you keep your costs down.
Saving Time
Initially, it might not seem like the time taken to receive a fax printout and either file or distribute it (or both) is significant enough to have an impact on your overall productivity. However, those small time wasters rapidly add up throughout the year, as well as the time spent printing, collating, photocopying, sorting, redistributing, and even re-faxing the document. Online faxing offers an easy and efficient way to catalog your received faxes online, as well as a way to instantaneously access and forward the documents via email. The time saved can be readily invested into areas of company growth, such as customer service or product development for example, strengthening the overall quality of your business.
More Options
In the old days, if your office fax machine broke down you were out of luck until it could be replaced or repaired. Many online faxing providers offer things like a toll-free customer service hotline to help you work through any fax issues that you may encounter. Even better, a lot of the providers offer this as a 24-7, round the clock courtesy--insuring that youll never get stuck in a jam. Other options you may encounter are pricing plans (set number of faxes vs. unlimited) or larger data-transfer rates if your business requires particularly large, hi-resolution, detailed-oriented documents related to things like graphic design and media arts.
As a comparison, you wouldnt trust a single dial-up Internet connection to handle your companys network, would you? Of course not. Not when there are infinitely faster, more adaptable, and more efficient options available. Trusting your fax needs to traditional analog fax machines is no less ridiculous in this day and age. If youre not yet taking advantage of an online fax service, its high time to reap the benefits.
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