The process is started by preparing your documents to be picked up. Place the material in boxes, and slap a label on it. Easy enough, right? We will schedule a time for us to pick them up. If it makes more sense to ship the boxes to us, we will arrange for that instead. Upon arrival of the material to our processing center, they are entered into our own internal workflow system to ensure accurate tracking and management of the scan process from start to finish.
Let's be honest...your paper files are probably not as neatly organized as you'd like to think. Torn edges, random staples, crumpled pages, terrible photocopies...these are the normal things we come across. We meticulously go through each page to assure there is no information being covered by post-it notes, folded corners, staples, paperclips, and we will "flag" specific pages that need to have extra attention during scanning. This would include color photos, pages with very faint print, or material that is torn or fragile.
After the paper is prepped, it is sent to one of our scanning facilities. We use high-speed scanners to take digital snapshots of each page. A scan technician is present 100% of the time to monitor the quality of the images being produced. For text based documents, we generally scan bitonal at a resolution of 200 DPI. This produces an accurate representation of the original source. In cases where color is important to the integrity of the document, we can also scan in full color or grayscale. We are also able to handle both single sided or double sided pages, commonly referred to as simplex or duplex. Our goal is to achieve an image that is just as good as the original, if not better. With advanced image processing technologies, we are able to crop, deskew, filter out image noise, and drop out color that interferes with the readability of any particular page. This produces great images that preserve your documents and files just the way you need them. All images undergo a quality check to ensure we captured the best representation of your important documents.
Each unique document is "indexed" or tagged with unique information that will be used to retrieve it later. This can be something as simple as a last name, or as complex as 10 fields of information from the document. The complexity is up to you.
All images processed by us are backed up free of charge. We provide both DVD archival, as well as daily internal backups of images hosted on our online document retrieval solutions. Your files are safe with us.
After a box has went through the process, it is not necessary to keep it around. While some clients choose to have their material returned after scanning, most opt to have it destroyed. We securley recycle the paper, eliminating the need to store it forever.