For many years, faxing has continued to be one of the most trusted, used, and reliable means of exchanging important and confidential correspondence between businesses. There used to be big and space-eating fax machines, but now, those are replaced by the cloud. With so many personal and business activities being done through software and in the digital space, it’s just fitting for fax machines to catch up in the form of digital faxing.
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Times are changing, and businesses have to consider making big changes to keep up. Like any change in system or software, this one’s a major one to make, but also one considered worth doing. There are many compelling reasons to prove how digital faxing can help businesses perform better in their daily operations.
If you’re one of those institutions who are still committed to sticking with their traditional fax machines, this read is for you. Here, you’ll get a hold of a few reasons and advantages of sending and receiving fax messages over the web, mobile application, or a service like eFax online fax service.
1. It’s a proven secure method of exchanging information.
Technology comes with a whole myriad of advantages, but many threats are also associated with it. One of these threats relates to data and information breaches. If you’re concerned about that, you have protection in the assurance that digital faxing stands as one of the most secure methods of exchanging information, even on an online platform.
The comparison here is with that of traditional fax machines. These have huge, open doors to leaking sensitive documents. It’s often hard to track who sent and received specific messages without the ability to create different accounts for different users.
Digital faxing, on the other hand, is proven to be more secure. It maintains and addresses privacy-related concerns while integrating directly with third-party applications that provide accounting packaging, customer relationship management software, and the like.
When an individual sends an online fax, this message is explicitly routed to the set location. This works to be a layer of protection so that no one can randomly pick up those messages by mistake. This fact reduces the likelihood of information breaches and sending a fax to the unauthorized or wrong recipient.
2. It minimizes any security risk.
Security risks are everywhere, even in an establishment that still relies on manual processes. For instance, when sending fax messages, it’s easier to have potentially unattended fax messages left on the machine. That message may contain confidential information that now falls in the hands of the next employee to use the fax machine, who may be unauthorized.
This situation doesn’t exist with online faxing. There’s no chance of having confidential messages lying around physically. Users have to log in to send and receive digital fax messages, which means they have the authority to do so with the password they input.
3. It’s affordable.
This third benefit is one that’ll create buzz and excitement among entrepreneurs. Tell them that something is affordable and that in itself will get them excited. Whatever opportunity a business has to cut on costs, they’re more likely to take it, given how today’s economic milieu can be challenging. The lower the costs and expenses, the higher a business’s profit margin is, which also means more stability.
With that, digital faxing solutions are often significantly cheaper than traditional fax machines. With the latter, you have to invest in fax equipment. This need needs to be present with digital faxing solutions. You only need a smartphone or a computer (which businesses already have) and then pay for the subscription fee, both of which still translate to lower costs.
Another area of cost reduction in digital faxing is the installation itself. As with any hardware, it can be more expensive to install traditional fax machines, given all the equipment it comes with. These costs include purchasing the fax paper, ink, energy consumption, and the phone line to keep the fax machine running.
All those costs are eliminated with digital faxing. There is no paper and ink needed to send messages. For businesses that rely heavily on sending fax messages to send correspondence across various locations, this essentially amounts to significant cost reduction.
4. It takes away the need to use a physical fax machine.
While this may be quite an obvious point, the benefit derived here comes with the fact that there’s no need to use a physical fax machine. This also means there’s no more lining up to use it. This situation is evident in businesses that use their fax machines but don’t have a lot yet, to meet a proper fax machine-to-need ratio. The line to use a single fax machine in the office can be long, especially during peak office hours.
Productivity in an office is significantly affected when time is wasted by employees falling in line to use a fax machine. That time spent on the line could have been used for more important business activities.
By switching to digital faxing, you can eliminate any potential downtime. Digital faxing allows everyone in the company to have their private fax numbers assigned to them. This enables the user to log in to their account directly from their smartphones or gadgets, removing the need to share a common fax machine to complete this task.
5. It’s a speedy file sharing solution.
Sending files by e-mail already works quite well, but even that can slow down when the file shared is quite large. Depending on how heavy the file is, you may have to resize it before sending it or uploading it to a drive. Doing this can affect the quality of the file and can be time-consuming.
For that reason, consider digital faxing as another file-sharing solution. It can send large, heavy files that can’t be sent via e-mail. The message sent through digital faxing can include files, diagrams, sketches, and drawings. Instead of uploading a large file first before sharing it via email—which is time-consuming—digital faxing can easily send any file to one platform or software.
6. It can be accessed from anywhere.
Another reason digital fax reigns supreme over traditional faxing is that the former is more accessible. It can be done and accessed anywhere, as long as there’s a stable Internet connection to allow the user to complete any task that involves faxing.
This feature resonates well with the nature of today’s business setting, where being on the go is the norm. Gone are the days when reporting to work meant the usual manner of reporting to a physical office. This accessibility means employees can send and receive files wherever they may be, thus increasing productivity and speeding up the completion of specific tasks that may rely on the information sent through fax. This can also be considered as a solution to streamline business operations as more workers can have to option to finish tasks remotely.
7. It’s very convenient.
Even those still learning the ropes of cloud-based transactions will find that sending a digital fax is very convenient. It doesn’t take much time and effort to master, which is another advantage for businesses that send fax messages multiple times a day.
All you have to do is go online to the software, app, or website, create an account, log in, and then anyone can proceed with sending and receiving messages.
8. It’s more environment-friendly.
Going green is given more emphasis among all industries today. Therefore, businesses are looking for more sustainable solutions to keep their business operating while reducing their carbon footprint. Businesses may be bound by corporate social responsibility towards the location they operate in. Hence there is a need to start fostering eco-friendly practices. One is being more mindful of your business’s dependence on paper.
Fax machines can be one of the top culprits of paper waste in an office, as they can print messages automatically, even if it’s spam. It’s also hard to reuse the other side of the paper, so essentially, once the message has been received, the paper used to print that fax message has no other destination but the trash bin.
That’s a lot of paper usage on fax messages alone. Sending fax messages online is likened to e-mail messaging, where there’s no need to print the file to get the message across. With that, you can limit the files being printed in your office only to the most vital documents.
The bottom line.
Yes, faxing is still a thing. But, in this modern day and age, you’ll want to opt for something faster and more reliable. Traditional fax machines may suffice, but there’s something even better, this time in the form of digital faxing.
As explained above, there are many benefits when using digital faxing, starting with the ability to send and receive fax messages in any format.
Now, you can finally eliminate that bulky fax machine taking so much space in your desk and switch to more modern solutions.
The list above should give you enough viable reasons to do so.
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