Outsourcing Scanning? How to keep the cost low.

Be organized. Communicate to your scanning vendor how you access your files now. The lookup process can be made more efficient as the documents are digitized. The first conversation should be about finding documents and accessing the information you need in your documents once they’ve been scanned.

Make sure files are “index ready.” Make it easy for your vendor to find and identify the key indexing data inside the documents. If you’re not sure what this means for your particular records, this will be the second topic of conversation.

Sort your documents. You can pay the vendor to do record analysis for you, but typically you can do this step for less money.

Surrender the mess. Sometimes getting organized requires scanning everything first. In these complex cases, doing the imaging first may be the only answer. For example, if you have to touch every paper and do thousands of refiles before sending your records for scanning, it’s probably cheaper to do that work once the records are electronic.

Scan only current or active files. If you have to keep it for regulatory reasons, but likely don’t ever need to access the record, don’t scan it. We can store it for a lot less money. You just want to scan the documents you’re most likely to retrieve later.

Scan newest documents first. The newest docs are always the most active. By scanning them first, we save you the most labor. We may quickly reach a point where we realize we can stop scanning the historical records, as there have been NO requests for them.

Outsource when you lack the right equipment or skills. High-speed equipment and staff that’s experienced in records management can get the job done faster and for less money. Temps and college-aged relatives could drag the job out until the money is all gone or worse, render the whole effort useless if you can’t access the documents digitally later the way you hoped. It takes years of honing processes to get to the point of very low defects in imaging. We are already there. Save your bucks by outsourcing scanning.

Published by Melken Solutions, LLC