Why Are You Overpaying for Faxing in a Digital Age?

Show Generation Z a photo of a fax machine and they will have no idea what they are looking at. In today’s digital age, fax machines have become relics of an era when mobile phones were the size of a brick and people walked around with pagers hanging on their belts. Since then, email, file sharing solutions, e-signature services and online collaboration tools have made it much faster and easier to share documents, reducing the need for traditional faxing.

And yet, as outdated as they may be, fax machines continue to be a persistent fixture in a large number of businesses. This is particularly the case in industries such as healthcare, financial services, government, and manufacturing. While these industries rely on them regularly, others keep them around only for the occasional document transmission.

Regardless of how often your business sends or receives a fax, the costs of analog faxing are becoming much too expensive and can vary dramatically. Some businesses pay up to $300/month for a single dedicated line, including associated tolls and long distance charges. This cost balloons when you take into account multiple lines across several locations. One of our clients reported paying $6,000 for 20 analog fax lines across 5 locations! And that doesn’t even include most of the additional, unpredictable costs associated with faxing.

Hidden Expenses of Analog Faxing

• Long-distance, local toll and international charges. These charges are billed per minute and can add up very quickly, turning a $50 fax line into a $300 monthly expense. Some businesses even find that sending a fax to another suburb of the same city may incur long-distance charges, depending on how local call areas are defined.
• Fax machines break. A lot. And when they do, they must be either repaired or replaced, both of which can cost your business significantly. The annual charge for the repair and maintenance of analog fax machines can easily run in the hundreds of dollars per device. In addition, many telecommunications providers have ceased to install, manage or maintain their copper phone lines, leaving your fax line unsupported.
• Even if your business only receives an average of 10 faxes a day with 5 pages per document, toner can cost you as much as $260 each year. If the toner malfunctions, the number could be much higher.
• We usually don’t think of paper as a significant expense. But even with the previous example of 50 pages printed per day, the cost of paper can add up to around $200 a year. Multiplied over several fax lines and office locations, mere paper can absorb a good chunk of your budget.
• Fax machines are left on all of the time, whether they are in use or not. In a business that uses multiple devices, faxing can add to your already large electricity bill.
• Junk faxes. Unlike junk mail or spam emails, each unsolicited fax costs you and your organization money. You are paying for each incoming document, as well as all the auxiliary costs such as toner and paper.
• Lost productivity. One of the most ridiculous costs of analog faxing is the amount of time wasted and productivity lost while trying to send a document. The process may include standing in line at the community fax machine, dealing with busy fax numbers, emptying out backed up fax trays and waiting around for confirmation reports to print out. In addition, with digital archiving becoming more widespread, your team is also charged with scanning all the documents and properly disposing of paper copies.

All these hidden expenses of faxing have two things in common. The first one is that they are unpredictable. This forces businesses like yours to estimate (aka. guess) their faxing expenses instead of knowing exactly how much they will have to pay. Secondly, with modern technology at your fingertips at a fraction of the cost, all these expenses are a waste of company resources.

E-Faxing Reduces the Costs and Headaches of Analog Faxing

E-faxing is an easy way to provide your team with the ability to send and receive faxes without breaking the bank. E-fax lines cost as little as $19 per location, and include none of the hidden expenses of analog phone lines and outdated fax machines. With an e-faxing solution that sends and receives documents over an internet connection, your team can easily send and receive documents from any email account, eliminating the need for including hardware, toner, paper, or electricity in your budget.

With no physical fax machine in place, you no longer have to deal with any of the headaches of traditional faxing either, such as hardware maintenance, paper jams, busy signals or waiting by a fax machine. In addition, your team can send documents from anywhere and any device connected to the internet by simply using their email account, increasing their productivity on-the-go.

With advanced data encryption technology, e-faxing is also one of the most secure ways to transmit sensitive information, even in industries such as healthcare or finance. It safely transmits large files, such as patient forms, signatures, authorization forms and more. Every organization needs a safe and private tool for transferring confidential data and e-faxing provides an inexpensive solution to protect your organization.

S-NET’s e-faxing service costs as little as $19 per location and provides all the conveniences associated with cloud-based solutions.

What are you waiting for? Throw out your outdated fax machines and switch to e-faxing. Contact us to set up a complimentary consultation.