There are always a few things that make the project a little more difficult to handle. As you move forward with your project, and if you are planning on continuing to digitize onsite documents, keep some of these best practices in mind.
Scanning services advise against using glue sticks to secure paper- it gets stuck on the machine, and isn’t very reliable when or if the glass heats up. Stick to using tape for all your receipts and other, smaller documents.
Try to unfold papers or receipts, and send all documents in either manila envelopes, files, or stacked in the proper format. That way nothing gets misplaced misfiled or indexed improperly.
Avoid stapling your documents multiple times. Large amounts of staple holes make it difficult to feed the paper into the scanner- which can cause it to be double-fed, and could result in an additional per-page charge.
Try to avoid grey or dark colored paper when you print your documents. Documents with dark to light contrast are very difficult to scan. If you do happen to have documents that have darker backgrounds, it might be beneficial to have them copied or re-printed on lighter color paper to ensure that you get the best resolution and readability once they’ve been scanned.
Here are the first 3 steps we recommend for your scanning project to streamline the process for all you DIY’rs.
Step 1: Prepping
The first step in the process is prepping. When prepping for document scanning you want to make sure all of your paperwork has to be separated in order to go through the scanner the right way. There can be no staples or paperclips either- you want to make sure that if they were stapled previously that you pull the pages apart so that they don’t stick together.
You also want to make sure that all of your pages are flat and not wrinkled so that they can go through the scanner without jamming it. Once you have all of your pages separated, you can put them into a neat file so that you have a nice stack of paper to put through the scanner.
Step 2: Scanning
The next step you want to focus on is scanning. If you’re planning on doing it yourself, you really want to keep an eye out to make sure that all of your paperwork goes through evenly.
Keep in mind that the scanning process can take a little while to complete because all of your information is being uploaded onto your computer or your cloud service. Depending on how large your project is, you may need to allocate a certain amount of time per day to handle it. You can also hire a document scanning service to help you get everything done quickly and to save you the time and effort of having to do it yourself.
Step 3: Indexing and Organizing
Once all of your paperwork is scanned into your system, you can start the indexing process to make sure everything is organized the way you want it. You wouldn’t throw all of your paperwork into a box and mix it in with all of your other boxes, so you don’t want to do that with the documents on your computer.
