A scanner helps eliminate the paper in your practice

Scanner Options Abound

By Isaac M. O'Bannon

With the continuing push toward the “paperless office” (or at least the “less paper office”), the scanner is becoming an integral component of modern accounting and tax firms.

But just as with any othertechnology purchase, many factors should be considered prior to making the investment. If your office is replacing an existing machine, you have the advantage of knowing what features you depended on most, as well as what has failed.

For the first-time buyer, the task is a little more detailed, so you need to know the purposes for which you’ll get maximum use of the machine and how much you’ll be using it. The good news for both types of buyers is that scanners do not have to be a major financial investment, but they can help an office increase productivity when implemented as part of a paperless office initiative.

Your Business Process

The obvious answer to what you’ll be using the machine for is scanning. A better definition of common imaging work in an accounting or tax practice, however, is the scanning of primarily documents (as opposed to photographs) — digitizing them so that they don’t have to go in a physical file cabinet, making them accessible by more than one person at the same time.

Documents can also have indexing and search capabilities, and some of the data can even be pulled into accounting and tax programs without having to re-key the information.

In an office setting, how you plan on managing your documents will affect the kind of machine workflow. For this column, I decided to look at desktop that would be installed at workstations, and each professional would be responsible for feeding in documents for their clients. While this requires purchasing several scanners, reliable small business scanners are priced in the $250 to $400 range.

The alternative is a system where a single, professional production scanner/printer is set up on the network, with most scanning duties assigned to one or a handful of assistants. Professional production machines range in price, but go into the $15,000+ range. Some offices choose a combination of these systems.

OCR

At the most basic level, a machine works like a photocopier, with the output being a digital file that is usually an image. While simply having a snapshot of a document provides some value, greater benefit is realized when the data in the scanned document can be searched and edited just like a word processing file.

The greatest value to accountants and tax preparers will be when document management software in these fields makes use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for direct integration of form data into preparation or accounting software. OCR will allow this to happen, and common documents could be scanned with the software knowing what each line is and where to route it.

OCR is not built into the machine, but rather a process included with specialty software. In short, OCR breaks down a document into an abstract, with only the actual data from the page (removing visual elements such as logos and graphics).

The OCR software then creates the document index, providing a searchable electronic version. In an office that traditionally receives a lot of text documents that have to be manually entered into the system, a good OCR function will justify the cost of the machine by itself.

Types Of Scanners

While there are several kinds of scanners on the market, from handheld to slide scanners, the two primary types for office use are flatbed scanners and sheetfed scanners.

scanners look similar to an older photocopier, with a lid covering a glass top upon which documents are placed. This type of scanner takes up more desktop space and each sheet must be manually placed on the imaging surface.

Optional automatic document feeders, which can cost as much as the scanner itself, allow the machine to hold up to 100 pages and self-feed, making this model the most suited for professional firms. Another positive attribute is that flatbed machines are better at scanning small items such as photos than sheetfed models, and they can be used to manually scan bound documents, which a sheetfed model cannot do.

Sheetfed machines, on the other hand, have the advantage of being able to handle more documents at one time than a flatbed without a document feeder. These work like and often resemble a fax machine, taking less desktop space and allowing several unbound pages to be placed in the feeder tray, with each sheet being pulled across the imaging mechanism.

Sheetfed machines are generally better at higher volume scanning of letter or legal-sized documents but do not handle small items very well.

Multifunction scanners combine a printer and sometimes a fax. Since they are usually limited to one task at a time (print or scan or fax), they are not as productive when used as a networked device. But on individual workstations, this can save time running to the printer, the fax or the scanner.

Quality Control

Resolution capability is one of the primary pricing factors of the machines. Models made primarily for scanning photographs require higher DPI (dots per inch) resolution. Although accountants and tax professionals will occasionally need to scan photographs (a useful addition to asset management), most data will be in document form, so the resolution capability of the machines takes a backseat to the OCR capabilities of your software. This is good news, because it keeps the price down to a range affordable to any practice and means that most off-the-shelf models are adequate for office use.

Software

One of the primary purposes behind the purchase of a machine in a professional office is to reduce paper. Virtually any machine can do this. But what the professional is really wanting is a more efficient way of dealing with client data. This is where software takes over. While there is simple OCR software and freeware programs that come with a scanner purchase, professional firms need document management systems that create and organize scanned data and data pulled from other programs.

The result is a virtual library that is searchable and, with some systems, can interact directly with other software like accounting and tax packages, sharing data as needed. Dozens of general document management programs are on the market, as well as a handful of systems designed specifically for the accounting and tax professions.

Speed

Although the speed specifications listed by manufacturers on scanners are not all that reliable, the good news is that, since most items scanned in an office are text-based, black and white documents that don’t require high resolution, most machines will perform reasonably under these situations.

Pricing

Dozens of scanners are on the market with prices ranging from well under $100 to well into the thousands. One of the most popular small-business class models is the Brother 6800, which is available for less than $300 and includes printer and fax functions. There are a number of scanners in the same price range (and less) from Canon, Epson, Visioneer, Microtek and HP; all are well-suited to most practices.

Don’t waste too much time searching for the perfect scanner; most will perform well in an accounting and tax office setting. Reading this column was a start. Now select one that has received good reviews, is in your comfortable price range, and is able to do what you need it to. Then feed it. Set up your business process so that it gets used in the most effective manner possible — when documents come in. A scanner won’t help you if you don’t use it.

Mr. O'Bannon is the technology editor for The CPA Technology Advisor.

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