Document imaging is an essential service that businesses require these days. Paper documents are unwieldy and open to many kinds of risks, in addition to slowing down business processes. Hence they are converted into digital documents using document imaging.

Digital documents can be integrated into the electronic workflow and this can speed up business processes. Electronic documents can be accessed over the Internet from anywhere with an Internet connection and hence global corporations would find it an ideal solution for document management.

Document imaging can be done in-house, or entrusted to outside specialists. Document imaging pricing will be significant in either case. Even if you do it in-house, you have to incur several kinds of costs.

We now look at the factors that determine document imaging pricing.

Quality Requirements

If you only have a few A4 sized, typed or printed paper documents to handle, a simple and inexpensive desktop scanner might be enough to handle your document imaging requirements. Such a scanner might even come with a basic OCR – Optical Character Recognition – software that will convert the character images on the scanned document into computer readable text.

However, this solution will prove far from adequate if you have to handle handwritten, foreign language and other documents of varying quality and characteristics. Brightness, contrast and other parameters might need to be adjusted while scanning different quality documents. Otherwise the result might turn out to be completely unreadable.

The varying quality will also affect the OCR process. The software might interpret non-standard characters, such as handwritten characters, wrongly and produce meaningless results. Highly sophisticated and expensive OCR software can become necessary to handle the varied kinds of documents you deal with.

Quantity Considerations

While the simple desktop scanner can handle a few documents, if your business generates a large volume of paper documents, converting them into digital documents quickly will require heavy duty scanners that can automate some of the tasks involved. Such equipment would cost far more than the desktop alternative.

The costs are likely to be increased further if you have to handle varied quality documents. You might have to go in for more expensive equipment that can automatically adjust scanning parameters to the document. Alternatively, you will have to hire expert staff who can do the adjustments manually to suit individual documents.

OCR software will also cost higher if it has to handle varied types of documents, and also produce results in differing character formats such as ASCII text and rich text.

Incidental Services

Where the volume and variety of documents are significant, costs will be increased by incidental services such as the following:

• Handling multipage documents will involve removing the bindings, scanning each individual sheet (single side or both sides), sorting the scanned printouts and original sheets in the original order and binding them again.
• Systematic handling of documents received from various departments and persons to ensure that they are tracked, worked upon and returned in a dependable manner.

The factors outlined above can result in widely varying document imaging pricing, or costs.