Good advice on scanners

One of the benefits of Bill.com is that we make it easy to go paperless by allowing businesses to digitize bills by using a simple fax machine (every Bill.com account gets a unique fax number as part of the monthly service fee). However, once you really get going we think it is a greeat idea to invest in a good scanner.

CPA2Biz points out in a blog post, as does Alexandra DeFelice that good scanners will make all the difference for accounting firms entering tax season, but also for any business in our opinion. 

A couple things we recommend in addition to their good advice:

• Speed is good. When dealing with bills you often have a lot of pages and don't have time to wait.
• Get a scanner that supports automatic Duplex scanning. Many bills are double-sided. You do not want a scanner that makes you flip the pages to scan the back pages. many scanners like the Fujitsu Scansnap will automatically detect and scan both sides of a document while not scanning blank pages.
• Get a scanner that supports "scan to email". Services like Bill.com make it easy to automate workflow and avoid having to handle and file documents on hard drives and corporate document management systems. If your scanner can automatically send a document to an email address you avoid having to save a pdf document on a host computer and then figure out what to do with it. You simply program the scanner to send documents to Bill.com and you never have to worry about the local document....it's filed automatically for you.

Paperless is the future. While you can get cheap scanners, in our experience spending a little more money (even only a few hundred dollars) will pay off by saving a lot of time and frustration many times over.

Comments

[Jeremy]

Fujistu ScanSnap S510 - these are awesome. We have 2 in our small office. Read reviews on Amazon to see how people love these. We couldn't live without them and use them everyday on our path to becoming paperless.