For various reasons – including the need to have business customers sign bits of paper – the fax machine hasn’t been killed off yet. Despite this need to deal with dauds of dead deciduous, small businesses appear to be railing more than ever against the expense involved.
Dedicated fax machines today are relatively expensive pieces of kit to run when you consider the cost of a phone line rental, consumables such as paper and toner cartridges, not to mention the purchase/replacement price and maintenance.
One small businessman I know called me the other day with a quick query. His elderly fax machine was out of toner and he had just discovered supplies of the obsolete cartridge had dried up. A client needed to send a fax to them urgently, did I have any suggestions?
Within five minutes a quick fix was in place courtesy of a free fax to email trial. A temporary measure, for sure, but job almost done. All that was required next was a quick call to the client with the new fax 0871 number and everyone was back in business. The fax appeared in the company’s in-box as an email attachment, which they then saved to their hard drive and printed out in the normal fashion, completely by-passing the semi-redundant fax machine.
Later, a follow up call revealed that the small business was now considering switching over to an email to fax service as this would work out significantly cheaper than replacing their standalone machine, especially if they could do away with the separate phone line it required. For now they could use the fax machine for sending and use their new fax to email service to receive client faxes. Maybe not the most elegant of solutions, but a workable temporary means to secure a continuing and reliable fax capability.
What, though, are the faxing options for a small broadband-enabled business?
The answer is another question, what volume of faxes do you handle?
High volume
High volume faxing that is time or commercially-sensitive is probably best served by a dedicated standalone machine, but take into account phone line rental and consumables, the cost of ownership. Modern fax machines can double up as photocopiers and are smaller and quieter than they used to be. A downside is that fax machines often have to be shared between several people, so there could be security issues around customer information if you are not immediately able to collect the fax or wait for it coming through.
Send only
Even with broadband, it is still possible to fax documents directly from the computer screen with a few caveats. Firstly, you will need to run a phone cable from the phone port of your computer to a socket on a non-broadband enabled phone line. Secondly, this will only work if your computer has an internal, external or software modem that isn’t routing your broadband.
Software like MS Word has a Send To menu option under File. Normally, this includes Fax Recipient. If not, check that there is a fax driver installed by going Start/Control Panel/Printers and Faxes. Fax software is not always routinely installed but can be by doing a custom install from your operating systems installation CD. In Windows, fax capability is an optional component and can be installed from Add or Remove Programs in Control Panel. Click the Add/Remove Windows Components button and follow the wizard’s on screen instructions.
For safety’s sake – and if at all dubious about the process – first create a restore point by going Start/All Programs/Accessories/System Tools/System Restore. The default on the first screen is to restore the computer to an earlier time, so click the radio button beside Create a restore point and proceed as directed. When this is completed, it is possible, though not desirable, to make a pig’s ear of the confusing Windows Component interface and have the safety net of being able to return everything back to the way it was before you started tinkering.
With on screen faxing, the weakness is in sending documents that are on paper. The workaround in this instance is to scan the document in. The scan can then either be copied and pasted into a word processing document or faxed as a separate document.
Fax to email/email to fax
There are literally hundreds of virtual faxing services around these days. The norm is for users to be issued with a non-geographic national or local rate number to receive faxes that converts the sender’s message into an email attachment and forwards it to the designated email in-box. Terms, conditions and prices vary from service to service. Some charge for faxes received, others for outgoing messages or charge a yearly subscription. Suffice to say, read the terms of service carefully to find the best deal to suit your volume and pattern of fax usage.
Check out this Google search on “fax to email services” and this informative article from telecomsadvice.org.uk
