Spend Wise and Save More on Your Digital Conversion

Spend Wise and Save More on Your Digital Conversion

A digital conversion has may rewards including: recapturing floor space, improving efficiency, maintaining compliance, and reducing the ongoing costs associated with paper. Spending wise on the front-end (aka spending a little more) could avoid paying more overall, and on an ongoing basis. It’s important to consider the difference between initial costs and total costs. Scanning your records for a steal could end up costing way more than anticipated.

Before starting your digital conversion project, take a few minutes to better understand the initial and total costs, what to look out for, and how to budget for your project.

What Is Digital Conversion?

“Digital Conversion” is the process of converting hard copy records and/or digital images into usable, electronic files.

The majority of digital conversion projects are hard copy to digital: scanning the hard copy records and converting them into electronic files. The most common hard copy records are Paper or Mocroform based.

• Paper records – Paper records include folders and boxes of physical documents, bound books, large format engineering drawings, and index-card sized card stock files, among many others.

• Microforms – Another common form of hard copy records are microforms, which include microfilm, microfiche, and aperture cards.

An additional quasi type of digital conversion is reprocessing electronic images and/or files to extract information. Although electronic images and files are already “digitized,” they become much more useful when information is extracted, and the files are better organized and accessible.

What Are the Differences Between Initial Costs & Total Costs?

Initial Costs

Initial costs (aka upfront costs) are the easy-to-see stuff, such as individual prices for scanning paper pages, indexing file names, project fees, and so on. They’re what you can tangibly make sense of without too much trouble.

For example, if you have 200 boxes of paper records and you’re given an estimate for $250/box, it’s easy to figure out that you’re going to pay around $50,000 for the project.

Total Costs

Total costs are the sum of what you pay initially and over time; said another way, it’s what it’ll cost you overall.

For example, let’s say you have 250 rolls of microfilm with 300 files per roll. You pull records from the rolls an average of 3 times per day for requests.

Trying to “save” money by keeping indexing simple and just having one PDF per roll named by the roll label, you’re looking at a project of about $12,500 ($50/roll x 250 rolls).

Indexing every file (250 files per roll) would add around an additional $30/roll, for a total project price of $20,000.

Instead of initially spending an additional $7,500, let’s assume you decide to keep the indexing very basic and only index by the roll name. In some cases that may be fine. However, accessing the files a few times a day becomes costly.

Every time you look for a record, it takes you about 15 minutes because you have to find the correct PDF file then scroll for the exact file(s) you need. At 3 times per day, this is 45 minutes per day, or 195 hours per year! If you pay employees $20/hour, that’s $3,900 per year spent pulling records. In less than two years, all that money you “saved” by not fully indexing is costing you $3,900/year. On top of that, this time is not available for more productive activities and employee moral could suffer due to having to perform menial task.

Note: Costs in the above examples are an approximation and not guaranteed. Every project is different and actual cost will likely change once all project elements are finalized.

Examples Of Initial Costs

Below are some initial costs you should budget for in your digital conversion project:

Setup fees – This covers the groundwork for getting your project set up, tested, and running.

Scanning prices – The per-unit price to digitize your items

Logistics – Transportation for pickups, deliveries, shipping, and electronic transfer of data (such as an FTP site).

Indexing – Indexing is the file naming and organization of your electronic files.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) – OCR is an additional step performed on files that enables full text search capabilities.

These are a few of the more common initial costs. These costs are quantifiable and one-time charges.

Examples Of Total Costs

Below are examples of total costs you could run into as the project goes forward:

Indexing  – Indexing is an upfront cost, but if not done correctly, or thorough enough, could also show up as a total cost. Initial Indexing must support your needs. eBizDocs helps you evaluate what amount of indexing is appropriate for your needs.

System storage and maintenance – If you’re storing or hosting your own records once they’re digitized, the system maintenance and oversight will be an ongoing cost. eBizDocs will package your files for import into your existing system and offers hosted and on-premises document management if preferred.

Time – Saving a few dollars now can quickly spiral into spending much more later, if all the factors are not considered. eBizDocs understands the hard parts of digitizing, processing, and organizing your images and files. Working with eBizDocs helps you avoid being pennywise and pound foolish, by doing your project right the first time, and avoiding the headache of fixing it later.

Next Steps

Let’s start a fact finding, no obligation, conversation about your goals and objectives.

Call eBizDocs today (866) 816-1217 or send an email to [email protected]

Take the next step by starting a fact finding, no obligation, conversation with eBizDocs about your goals and objectives.