If your business is like most, you have a lot of paper documents. Believe it or not, in this digital world, paper documents are still the primary way businesses store and share information. But managing all those documents can be a daunting task. Here are a few tips on how to scan thousands of documents quickly and easily.
1. Invest in a Good Scanner
When it comes to scanning and managing large volumes of documents, a flat-bed scanner won’t do the job quickly.
If all of the documents you need to scan are on standard-size paper, your best bet is to purchase a sheet-fed scanner, also called an automatic document feeder. If that seems too far out of your budget, don’t fret. There are rental programs available for businesses that only need a fast document scanner temporarily!
If you have over-large documents, such as blueprints, you may need a more robust scanner that can accommodate wide formats and standard-sized documents.
Most sheet-fed scanners can scan at speeds of 30 pages per minute (ppm) or more, with higher-end production scanners able to process 140 ppm or 70,000 documents per day. If the documents you need to scan are double-sided, you’ll need to ensure the scanner you choose has the capability for duplex scanning.
2. Create a Document Scanning System that Works for You
Before you begin scanning, you need to create a system for organizing the scanning process. Consider how you want to batch your paper documents in order to ensure that each page and every document is scanned, and organize each document or set of documents in the order they should be scanned.
You can batch documents chronologically, from oldest to newest or vice versa. You can also batch documents by topic or category, or even alphabetically. You may even end up having main categories within subcategories.
For example, suppose you have a medical practice. In that case, you could have a main category of the patient name, with chronological subcategories or topical subcategories for different types of documents – medical records, imaging files, billing statements, etc.
You will also need to determine which of your employees will be responsible for scanning documents and assign batches to each with a communal tracker so each employee can see at a glance what has already been completed and what still has to be done. If an employee has to spend more than a few minutes figuring out where the last person left off, that’s an inefficient waste of time and resources.
Another important step is to prepare the documents for scanning before the project begins. Remove any staples so as not to damage the documents or your scanner. This will allow the actual scanning process to proceed efficiently.
3. Use a Digital Filing System
It’s important to ensure your scanning program can help you organize your electronic documents and keep them easy to find. Without a digital filing system to help keep your electronic documents organized, your thousands of scanned documents could end up in one folder with file names comprised of random alphanumeric characters.
You may be able to find what you need using a basic search, but the search process will be time-consuming and frustrating, especially if hundreds of documents meet your search parameters. You don’t want to have to take the time to look at each document individually to find the one you need.
Fortunately, Go Find It has a solution.
With Turbo Owl, you can scan documents directly to specific accounts, departments, or clients with our unique barcode system. You can also store your scanned documents in our data warehouse to save you the trouble of manually entering information. Our system allows for bulk uploads of multiple documents at a time, giving you the ability to scan and upload thousands of documents quickly and productively.
Turbo Owl also lets you review scanned documents you are uploading to ensure accuracy. If the documents you are scanning include emails, we have a tool for including email attachments to streamline the storage of email conversations. Additionally, our organization system is compliant with many industry requirements, including HIPAA and FINRA.
Click here to request a demo of Turbo Owl, and find out how to scan thousands of documents and organize them all with ease and efficiency.
