Going Paperless and need a Document Imaging Service
December 25, 2009 5:20 PM   Subscribe

What document imaging company do you recommend that is user-friendly, cheap, and secure?

I need a service that will scan and OCR approximately 1000 pages of personal records. I can do the OCR'ing if that significantly affects the price.

I am considering using Pixily.com, however their prices are ridiculous. If I get one of their monthly plans and send in an extra envelope each month, it would amount to 0.29/page for one-sided documents. Ouch!

I'm looking for a service in which I can trust their security procedures because these are personal docs including taxes, bank statements, investement reports, etc.
posted by Merlin144 to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
What are the benefits to digitizing this data? I've read that 99% of long-term-stored data is never accessed. And 1,000 pages can't take up too much room.

An aside: get onto paperless services asap. How silly for your service providers to commit this data to paper, just for you to have it redigitized. That's waste x 2.
posted by bleeb at 6:48 PM on December 25, 2009


There are only a few limited options and I haven't tried any for security and cost reasons. One option is hire someone in your town to do it. The other is place an ad and hire a college student, they are usually fun but can be immature with the data. At the end of the day someone else's eyes are going to look at it if you aren't going to work with it, so choose wisely.

I would buy a fujitsu or a cannon duplex scanner and then use that the OCR software you have. An ADF period just works wonders.
posted by iNfo.Pump at 8:39 PM on December 25, 2009


Have you considered scanning it yourself? With a Fujitsu ScanSnap auto-feeding at 15 pages per minute, the actual scanning would only take about an hour. [OCR, however, will take longer]. There would be few security concerns, since everything is happening in your house/office. And an auto-feeding scanner is a very useful thing to own.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 3:44 AM on December 26, 2009


Response by poster: Forgive my lack of background information. I have a scansnap S1500, love it, use it all the time. This is for my mother, who doesn't have the capability to do the scanning herself.

bleeb, thank you, yes I am already managing 100% of incoming paper in a digital manner.

I appreciate the suggestions of doing it myself, however this is not an option. What services have you previously used that can do this for me? Thanks!
posted by Merlin144 at 12:05 PM on December 26, 2009


I would actually consider shooting an email to some local insurance claims processing companies and asking them a similar question. My absolute first job was with a company that processed water-damaged hardcopies of insurance claims for digital scanning. They might have the capability to recommend some local companies that take contract work.
posted by carlh at 2:00 PM on December 27, 2009


Response by poster: Follow-up and resolution:
I had my mother mail me everything and scanned it myself. Only was about 5 reams, took about 4 hours with staples, folds, etc.

For ongoing statements etc, I use EarthClassMail.com and just have everything scanned on an ongoing basis with them. :)
posted by Merlin144 at 12:31 PM on January 25, 2010


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