What is Document Scanning?

Document scanning is the process of digitizing paper documents – converting them from paper format to digital images or text through the help of high-speed scanners. Document scanning is a powerful tool that can revolutionize your business and offers many economical and qualitative benefits to your organization and employees. By utilizing document scanning services, you’ll reduce costs, secure your information, and maximize productivity.


What is the Purpose of Scanning a Document?

Scanning documents has many purposes that will help you for decades to come. Digitizing documents and images essentially keeps all your information in one place, while also keeping it password-protected and secure. With document scanning, it’s easy to share documents with co-workers and clients, keep track of everything, and easily locate files within seconds when you need them.


Who Can Benefit From Scanning Documents?

Anyone can benefit from scanning documents, including business owners and managers who:

  • Want to digitize information
  • Save money
  • Make information more accessible to employees in a secure manner
  • Reduce space
  • Maximize employee productivity 

What is the Process of Document Scanning?

Document scanning involves certain stages that help businesses and organizations take advantage of going paperless without spending time and money that can be invested in other areas. The process of scanning documents involves the following stages:

Preplanning

A document scanning professional will walk you through every process of document scanning from document shipping to indexing and completion. By speaking with a document scanning representative, you’ll receive an estimate for the services, as well as an ETA of when the work can be completed.

Document Shipping

After you ship the documents to the professionals, they take inventory using an error-free inventory system.

Document Preparation

Highly-trained preparation staff prepares the documents for scanning by removing staples, repairing torn pages, separating important records, and seeking out hindrances in order to make the scanning process as efficient as possible.

Enhanced Document Scanning

After the documents have been prepared by the preparation staff, they are sent over to the scanning department, where high-quality commercial scanners are used to scan them.

Indexing and Data Capture

This stage involves indexing the documents after they have been digitized. This stage allows each document to be easily searchable with keywords using OCR (Optical Character Recognition).

Quality Review

This stage involves reviewing scanned and indexed documents by a Quality & Assurance team.

For those with a very small number of documents, you can visit a document scanning location after scheduling with a sales representative. 

Furthermore, if you need a document during the scanning process, it can easily be located, scanned and emailed to you. This offers a seamless transition for your business to operate without interruption.


Benefits


Cost Control

Digitizing paperwork eliminates the need for warehouse space, enabling you to reduce costs on storage, office supplies, and printing. The cost of document scanning services will depend on a few factors, such as the number of pages being scanned, the types of documents involved (books, maps, backfiles, journals, hand notes, etc.), the number of obstructions involved (including wrinkles, staples, clips, and any general wear and tear), and if any additional services are required (such as shredding). Either way, you save money in the long run.


Maximize Productivity

Scanning paper documents and going completely paperless increases the speed at which you and your employees are able to obtain any file from storage. Instead of spending hours searching filing cabinets for specific paperwork, you and your employees can quickly locate documents by simply searching for each document’s assigned keyword. With scanning services, digital files are indexed using specific single names for files and/or extract various fields of information from an image to create layers of folders to recognize the files.

Additionally, company documents that are digitized not only provide an extra layer of security to your files but they limit the potential for documents becoming lost or damaged, saving you and your team time.


Saves Space

Paper documents can quickly take up a lot of storage space, which ultimately requires extra money to pay for all that space. However when you digitize everything, you need a lot less space and therefore, are spending less money on storage and office square footage.


Improved Security

Document scanning is a highly-secure process. Scanning professionals take great effort to ensure all documents and information is protected both cyber-wise and physically. At Turn Source Imaging, our facility is equipped with security cameras, motion sensors, and firewalls that help us monitor how our employees handle clients’ documents. Furthermore, we’ve built sufficient security into many of our processes, such as inventory tracking and project timelines to mitigate any idle time. In addition, every project we take goes through a strict chain of custody and we comply with the privacy laws of HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations).

Digital Transformation

You can scan any type of document with a document scanning service - This includes documents that contain both text and images. Resolutions can be scanned that range from 200DPI to 1200DPI, depending on the file size and original image quality. A sample scan can also be provided upon request.


Ease of Access to Information

Scanning saves everyone time by providing ease of access to information. Employees can quickly locate the specific paperwork they need rather than manually searching through filing systems for hours. When files are properly indexed, documents can easily be searched and accessible through a computer or other devices they are stored on.


Downsizing and Relocating

If you’re moving or downsizing to a smaller space, physically having to relocate all that paperwork is a huge headache (and not to mention it takes up a lot of valuable time). By digitizing your documents, you don’t need to worry about where to store all that paperwork in your new office or what to do with it. A professional document scanning service can also shred your documents once they have been scanned.


Staff Working Remotely

With an increasing number of people working remotely since the pandemic, digitizing information through document scanning is more important than ever. Employees need to be able to access paperwork and files that they otherwise cannot access in an office. Furthermore, that information needs to be secure, so that only individuals who need access to the information have it.

Outsourcing To Document Scanning Services

Digitizing documents can seem like an overwhelming task, especially if you have hundreds of thousands of documents. That’s where a professional document scanning service can help. Document scanning professionals have high-quality scanners that are able to scan any type of document needed and have expert knowledge for ensuring your documents are secure.


Tips For Getting Started

Trying to digitize documents yourself is a massive undertaking. Not to mention it can take weeks or months to physically scan everything, and then protect and safely store your files. But by using a document scanning professional service, all the hard work is done for you in a short amount of time.

Ready to get started with document scanning professional services? Follow these simple tips:

  • Decide which documents you want digitized
  • Sort and organize the documents to the best of your ability
  • Contact TurnSource Imaging - We’ll take it from there!

Document Scanning with Turn Source Imaging

Effortlessly convert your paper documents into a usable digital format with Turn Source Imaging. As southern California’s leading document scanning service, we offer convenience, efficiency, and savings to individuals, businesses, and institutions. We’ll create a tailored plan that meets your budget, turnaround time, and expectations.

Ready to get started?

Frequently Asked Questions


TIFF files are frequently used among graphic designers and photographers who need to edit images without comprising the quality of the images.
Newly-scanned documents are either converted to PDF or TIF file formats. However, we can also convert the images or texts to other formats, such as Word using OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which is able to read and extract texts from any image. Meanwhile, the most common format is the PDF, which makes the documents easily searchable by their keywords.
The name of the files or how you can easily locate them after they are scanned and indexed will be explained to you before or upon the scanning commencement. It is a simple process which any individual should know or learn within minutes.
Yes, they will! We scan documents in resolutions ranging from 200DPI to 1200DPI – depending on certain factors such as the file size and picture quality. You can always request a sample when we commence scanning.
This depends on what you want us to do with them. You may choose to have them returned to you or shredded/destroyed for a very cheap fee.
Yes, like the other services we offer, we also charge for shredding your scanned documents at your request. Shredding, when compared to scanning, is relatively cheap.
Yes, we offer on-site services. This service is customized and requires special charges due to the extra labor and time. You can Contact Us to discuss more about this. We will respond as soon as reasonably possible to discuss the process, including how to inspect the office location.
Yes, we do! We scan documents in black and white and in their original colors. This will be discussed during the consultation call we have with you. Please, Contact Us now to schedule a free consultation.