Are Internet Faxes Really More Efficient?

There is so much hype over the internet faxing method. So much so, that it is sometimes blinding to the fact of whether internet faxing is more efficient than traditional faxing or not. The truth is that it really depends on your starting situation. If a company has a traditional fax machine that they use once or twice per week - internet fax will probably not help them to reach any more efficient level of work production than before.

If however, the business is regularly sending and receiving faxes - in the vicinity of 3 or more per day, internet fax software may be able to offer incredible work efficiencies. Why is there such a definite line between internet fax being a help or a hindrance? Let's find out.

Internet Faxing In Low Volume Businesses.

Unless you like the idea of sending a fax via your computer, a company which only utilizes the faxing facility 2 or 3 times per week will probably face inefficiencies from internet fax. That is because by the time you scan your document in to the computer, fiddle around with the saving options, export your file to the faxing software, find and type in the number of the recipient, and then hit the send button - you could have done it manually in a real fax machine twice.

Therefore, for low volume fax businesses, sticking with the traditional fax machine system is probably best.

High Volume, Repetitive Faxing.

Think for a moment about a business which sends out a large volume of duplicate faxes. Perhaps they are order forms, confirmations, newsletters, or and such mass produced document.

Now imagine a secretary sitting at the fax machine, feeding the same page through and through the machine, over and over again - so that the fax eventually gets distributed the the 200 or so intended recipients. The likelihood is that they will be there for the better part of a day.

Hence, this is the best situation for internet fax software to take over. To illustrate this alternative, the secretary would only scan the document once, followed by the selection of all the phone numbers to send the fax to. Having done this, the fax software would automatically send the same loaded document to all the recipients, whilst everyone could get back to other work.