It was not that long ago that every company had storage rooms filled to the brim with boxes and boxes of invoices, receipts, contracts, and other documents necessary to run a business. For years, there have been scanners available, but many businesses stuck to using paper. While paper is good for many uses in the workplace, the reality is that it is inconvenient. Below is a list of reasons why a document scanner (Made by the same companies that made the barcode reader that you use all the time) could be a valuable purchase for your business.

1. Ease of Accessibility

Navigating a storage room to locate a specific form can take hours (Or all day, depending on the size of your company), not to mention it is frustrating. Instead of being at your desk doing your actual job, you are rifling through endless file cabinets and folders before finally finding what you are looking for. After the purchase of an industrial document scanner, that storage room of papers could fit on a microchip. To locate a specific form, you would merely need to type a few words into a search bar and you would have it on your screen in a matter of seconds. Scanned forms can also be uploaded to the cloud to be accessed from multiple locations, rather than having to mail important documents from one place to another. One (Or several) purchases can make your company more efficient and save you money. Even if you have to scan a driver’s license or passport, you can purchase a license scanner or passport scanner. The same companies that might produce a barcode reader and document scanner also produce other ways to increase ease of accessibility, such as mobile payment options and RFID tags. Many companies already utilize these methods (23% of field service workers use mobile payment options, while 17% use RFID).

2. Safety of Data

Many documents are strictly confidential and, in paper form, require supervision. Warehouses of documents require companies to hire teams of security to keep their information safe. While it may be smart to keep hard copies of a few essential documents, the purchase of a full page scanner or half page image scanner could make those costs unnecessary (Your security team can focus more on keeping personnel safe). Also, if your important documents are not stolen, they could be lost. According to a study done by the Gartner Group, 15% of all paper documents are misplaced while 7.5% are lost completely. That is a lot of data that can be protected by a document scanner. If your company has a high volume of papers that need scanned on a daily basis, you could also purchase a stand alone document scanner.

3. Waste and the Environment

Deforestation has been a concern for many years. Much of the drive to cut down forests is the need for paper. Having a document scanner can help to reduce that need. An estimate has said that the average office worker in the United States will use about 10,000 sheets of paper every year. Many corporations rely on scanners made by companies like Peripheral Dynamics. Many say that Peripheral Dynamics makes the best of many products such as the barcode reader, document scanner, and many other types of scanners.