Document imaging is the conversion of a firm's paper into filed, numbered, searchable pages, and it goes wrong in the same two places for every small firm: the backlog is never sized, so the project stalls in week three, and the filing rule is never set, so the scans form a digital pile beside the paper one. The free document capture worksheet on this site sizes the backlog in pages and scanner hours, the daily scanning minutes, the retrieval hours the imaging replaces and their cost, and the pages a retention period keeps; Batesio Pro applies the filing rule to every page on arrival and holds the archive. Whatever a regulator requires of the imaged copy, and whether the paper may then be destroyed, is the adviser's to confirm.
Size the backlog in boxes and hours
Twelve boxes at the worksheet's default of 2,500 pages is thirty thousand pages and, at forty pages a minute, twelve and a half hours of scanning. Count one opened box, replace the default, halve the scanner speed if the documents need preparation, and the project has a week attached to it rather than a hope.
Set the filing rule before the first page
Client, matter, Bates number and retention date on every page as it lands, asked for by the capture screen rather than added by a person at the end of the week. A scan-to-folder rule produces a second backlog, digital this time. Batesio Pro asks for the four on capture and files the page at once.
Plan the archive the retention period keeps
A hundred and fifty pages a day over two hundred and fifty working days at a seven-year retention is over a quarter of a million pages held at once, on the defaults; the archive must be searchable and exportable at that size. Dropbox, cited below, prices a Standard team plan at $15 per user per month for storage; the archive is the record that finds the page.
Questions people ask about document imaging
Can the paper be destroyed after imaging?
That is the regulator's and the adviser's call for each class of document; the worksheet sizes the imaging, not the destruction decision.
What does document imaging cost a small firm?
The scanner, the hours the worksheet prints, and the software; against them, the retrieval hours saved, which the worksheet also prints from your own counts.
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