Clarkson Companies

Now almost any office can run more smoothly with document imaging.

First: Capture the information with document imaging. As you feed pages into a scanner, they are converted to electronic images of the paper documents. These images become digital files on your computer.

Second: Start managing images instead of shuffling papers. Suddenly, virtual paperwork can flow electronically, using familiar software tools. You can file documents online. Just imagine being able to search any document by name, date, or text string! Seconds later the document you need is open on your computer screen. Without the nuisance and wasted space of paper files, you can operate faster and at lower cost with greater security and improved service levels.

Next: Look at all the ways document imaging can help you. Just see if you recognize how any of the following benefits of document imaging can remedy typical situations you might experience in your office:

• Save space and expenses. It’s time to buy more filing cabinets—again—or be overwhelmed by a landslide of file folders.
• Improve security and control. Someone has ever lost, mislaid,—or even worse—misfiled a document or record.
• Eliminate out-of-file problems.You just wasted twenty minutes tracking down the right file.
• Use your network instead of paper.Intra- and interoffice communications keep you running to the copier and fax machine.
• Streamline your records management digitally. You’re wondering how to comply with new government paperwork regulations.
• Enable document sharing. When two people need to refer to the same document at the same time, one of them loses.
• Improve office productivity and job satisfaction. People are robotically keystroking data from forms when they could be serving clients.

If any of the above opportunities for improvement sound familiar, your office is a prime candidate for the benefits of document imaging.

Welcome to a better way to deal with paperwork.

Document imaging is to paper what email is to letters—a faster, more efficient way of doing business.

Like it or not, there’s no doubt that email has accelerated text-based communications. The benefits of email are possible because it replaces a physical information process (paper/envelope/stamp/delivery or print/fax/ pickup) with an electronic process. Actual delivery takes place in Internet time.

Email is good for many things, but we still use lots of paper documents—more every year, according to industry studies. Keep in mind that the true value of a piece of paper is its content—including text, annotations, and signatures. Document imaging grabs all of that information and turns it into bits and bytes. Stored on a hard drive or CD, the content is accessible to authorized users virtually anywhere in a digital heartbeat. A given document can be printed and mailed, faxed, or even emailed as an attachment or a link.

Your on-ramps to imaging are paved and ready to go.

Document imaging is not a new idea. Back in the 1990s, paper-intensive companies in insurance, healthcare, and investment management were among the first to get on board. By taking control of the hundreds of thousands of incoming documents received daily, they got a rapid payback of their million-dollar-plus systems. If document imaging proved its worth in these highly accountable industries, you can be confident it’s a safe bet for you.

What’s new about document imaging today is scale. With continuing innovation and the falling price of technology, implementing a solution doesn’t take a million dollars. Even small offices can afford to implement document imaging. You probably have most of the essential hardware components, including computers and a network, in place and paid for already. Chances are all you need is a properly sized document scanner and the right software to take advantage of document imaging.

Streamline the ways you do business.

Digital document imaging can help you tame your paper tigers in many ways.

• By reducing the amount of paper you deal with.
• By eliminating the transport of physical documents within and between offices.
• By making it easy to backup and archive records.
• By consolidating access for multiple workers.
• By enabling the uploading of documents to a central repository.
• By lessening the time to distribute incoming documents.
• By providing password-controlled access to sensitive or private information.

With document imaging, you can separate the process of managing documents from physically filing pages into file folders and file drawers. Instead, your document database will create and maintain the relationships between disparate documents that enter your system over time. The software keeps track of where all of the documents are kept, building virtual folders according to your indexing scheme.

When you need to review the Sarah Jones case file, for example, your system will locate and return a list of all of the documents associated with Sarah Jones. They could be bills, correspondence, copies of checks, explanations of benefits, and doctors’ reports, among other documents. If there was just one document you wanted to check, you could identify it by date, account number, dollar amount, or name. Or you could request a virtual file folder to be delivered to your desktop. Either way, the imaging system can do in seconds what once took you minutes or hours.

Simplify your daily to-do list by adding document imaging to your plans today.

Whether you’re an owner, office manager, or IT service provider, it’s easy to see how working with digital documents can be much more efficient than plowing through paper. To be effective, your document imaging solution should be integrated with the other computer systems in the office. Clarkson Companies, your value-added reseller and systems integrator can help you select the scanner and software combination that matches your needs. You may be pleasantly surprised to find a solution that’s specific to your industry or office workflow.