How to Simplify Your Faxing

I hate fax. I can’t believe we’re still using a fax machine. It’s time to share our documents using collaborative tools or, at a minimum, email.

But, I’m not willing to die on that hill. I’ll save my anti-fax rant for another day and simply accept that we lawyers still use fax and it isn’t going away anytime soon.

We can, however, make this archaic process easier for ourselves.

Years ago we shifted from receiving faxes on a fax machine to receiving them on one of our servers. We installed software and coordinated it with our email and all inbound faxes were routed to our users email boxes. That worked great and we continued with that system for several years.

Taking that step allowed us to avoid running back and forth to the fax machine, keeping it stocked with toner and paper and dealing with the question of whether the fax actually went through.

At some point the fax server got old and died and the software needed upgrading. We decided to shift our faxing from our own server to a hosted system so we could avoid server maintenance and software fees.

We considered eFax and myfax and ended up going with myfax based on cost factors. We’ve been using myfax for a few years and all is good.

We’ve found that what were paying myfax amounts to considerably less than we were paying for the fax software, hardware and upkeep.

One thing we did, which might make sense for you, is that we used our own phone numbers for fax and forwarded them to myfax. That way, if we ever decide to change vendors, we can simply forward those numbers to the new vendor rather than having to switch numbers and reprint business cards.

Our phone vendor makes it easy to buy the numbers and forward them to the remote location at a very small fee. We get twenty numbers for $3 per month.

If we’re going to be stuck with fax for a while longer we might as well make the best of it.

Related articles:

1. Lighten Up – Technology Audit
2. How To Spend Your Money (New Solo Week – Day 5)
3. Is December The Only Month When Your Financial Data Makes Sense?
4. Dial2Do.com – Really Useful Voice to Text
5. Ditching Your Phone System

Post written by Lee Rosen on September 22, 2009 in Technology