Internet Fax To Save Money and Increase Office Efficiency

By Brandi Armstrong

Many companies are surprised to learn that an Internet fax service leads to substantial savings and an increase in operating efficiency. These savings and efficiency occur in a few key areas.

Maintaining a physical fax machine can be expensive. It requires paper and ink or toner cartridges of some kind. All of these supplies, as well as the machine itself, require space. The space is in the form of storage for the paper and cartridges. The fax machine itself also requires a space where it is located. An Internet fax service does not incur these costs or require this type of maintenance and space because it is a virtual fax machine.

A physical fax machine requires a phone line, dedicated or otherwise. If a company receives a lot of faxes each day, a dedicated phone line is a necessity. That phone line is an additional cost to the company. An Internet fax service works without a phone line, dedicated or shared, because it transmits from a computer, via an Internet connection.

An Internet fax service transmits and receives faxes in digital form. The faxes are never on paper unless a business decides it’s worthwhile to print them out. The savings here are threefold. This saves on paper and printer cartridges while simultaneously saving on the space needed to store the hard copies of the faxes; it isn’t just a matter of only printing what a company wants to save and storing those. With an Internet fax service, even the faxes a business wants or needs to keep can be retained in digital form on a computer where they will be easy to search for and retrieve as needed. This results in savings on: paper, file cabinets, filing supplies, and the space needed for the file cabinets themselves.

With a physical fax machine, a business can receive faxes at only one location: the location where the fax machine sits. With an Internet fax, a fax can be received wherever there’s a computer with Internet access. This means that an employee who is traveling or otherwise out of the office can continue with whatever project they’re working on, even if faxes are involved. An Internet fax also allows an employee to send a fax from wherever that employee is working that day. There are no additional costs incurred for received and/or transmitted faxes. It’s all done to and from the employee’s computer without the need for hard copies or a physical fax machine.

Since all Internet fax transactions are in digital form, an online recor5d can be kept of all faxes sent and received – the entire fax history is accessible online. In the case of a laptop used by an employee at a sales meeting or conference in a different city, there is no need to call the office and get copies of the faxes re-faxed or delivered overnight. All the information is right there on the laptop. Faxing over the Internet results in easy retrieval, as well as an efficient way to send faxes as an attached page or by re-faxing of the digital document.

There are several ways greater efficiency is experienced throughout the company by faxing over the Internet. There’s no need to print a hard copy and go to a fax machine to feed pages through or to watch and/or check back to be certain they are sent without a glitch. Likewise, an Internet fax is received directly by the recipient, without the need for routing and delivery. Several employees that are working on the same project can share an Internet fax number and receive a copy of the faxes in lieu of multiple versions of a physical fax being made and distributed.

Internet fax services are “green.” They don’t use paper to print everything on the receiving and transmitting end whether it’s necessary or not. They don’t require ink cartridges that must be recycled. They don’t use a shredder to dispose of documents that are not wanted in physical form.

Upon weighing a variety of cost and time-saving factors, it’s quite clear that an Internet fax service is a logical solution when it comes to improving business efficiency and cost savings.

Learn more by visting Fax800.com.