Continuing with our practical guide to a paperless office, and following on the article discussing paperless signatures, this post explains document scanning, PDF editing and faxing without printing/carrying any paperwork.
Scanning
Often clients will have documents that need to be scanned and forwarded to a third party, either as an 
email attachment or as a fax. 
Without deploying often-expensive scanners, the most practical method is to scan a small volume of documents involves using a smart device (eg. iPhone or an iPad). Camera shots and an appropriate app will produce PDF’s of very good quality. A very good app is Genius Scan + ($5.49, IOS & Android). It allows camera shots of documents and on the spot editing and saving in your cloud storage provider (eg Dropbox). Multiple pages can be scanned to a single PDF by simply taking consecutive shots and adding to an existing document.
Editing
PDF documents are typically made so that they cannot be edited. Unless specifically protected against editing, PDFs can be edited using specialised software. These solutions can reduce size of most PDF files, replace/remove/insert pages, annotate PDF documents and create fillable PDF forms. We have tried the following and they can all do the job well:
- Adobe Acrobat Pro (expensive $282)
- NitroPDF (solid, lack of PDF reduction feature, $159)
- Bluebeam Revu (a very good solution, pricey $219)
- Foxit Phantom (good solution and the best value, $89)
Note that most of these solutions run on PC only. Mac’s own Preview can annotate and modify PDFs to some extent. PDF Escape is a free online editor with some editing capabilities and good form creation functionality.
eFaxing
In some instances fax is still the only method of communicating with the clients/banks/third parties. There are numerous
providers of eFax solutions in the market, most typically quite pricey when faxing a large volume of documents. We recommend Telecube as a great provider of VOIP and an affordable eFax provider.
Contact us today (1300 660 760) if you would like to discuss how xSource uses these processes in providing loan processing, bookkeeping and CFO services to hundreds of customers in Australia.