Improving Office Productivity: Get the Most Out of Your SMB Toolbox

Who among us hasn’t used a screwdriver as a paint can opener, a hole puncher to remove the seal on a bottle of oil, or even a makeshift chisel? The common tool’s stated purpose is to turn screws so they either fasten two or more objects together or release them. Yet we are always finding new and interesting uses for it.

When it comes to technology, if anything, the opposite is true. We tend to purchase powerful tools that can perform an amazing array of functions, then we limit what we do with them. If you’ve ever looked at the Help function of your word processing software and scrolled through the table of contents you know what I mean. It can do all these amazing things, and most of us essentially use it as an expensive typewriter.

That’s the way most people approach their Internet fax service as well. They sign up so they can send and receive faxes through an email account, and that’s all they do with it. Yet your Internet fax service can actually be a powerful productivity tool – if you use it to its fullest. The following are some ways it can help you reduce labor, lower costs and become more productive in the workplace. Best of all, they’re all included free in the cost of the service.

Convert paper to electronic documents. Businesses generate a lot of paper. All that paper needs to be sorted, indexed and filed. Of course, sooner or later you’ll hit the limits of what can fit into physical file cabinets, and will either have to add more (along with the space for the additional cabinets) or pack older files into banker’s boxes and ship them off to a rented storage facility. And if some paperwork is accidentally mis-filed at some point, finding it in the sea of paper can be brutal.

An Internet fax service not only cuts down on new paper (since all faxes come in electronically) but can help convert old paper files into electronic files as well. All you need to do is fax each paper record to an Internet fax service account. The service will do the rest.

Share information efficiently. Trying to read a fax of a fax of a fax can be like taking an inkblot test – you think you know what you see but it’s really just a guess.

With an Internet fax service, sharing faxes is easy as hitting the “forward” button on your email client. Most Internet fax services also allow you to have faxes sent to multiple email addressed at once – which means if you’re part of a team that needs to distribute faxes, sharing is handled automatically.

Let you work remotely. Let’s say you had to go across town for an important client meeting. You’re expecting an important fax back at the office. If you’re using a fax machine, that means you have to trek all the way back to the office to A) see if it came in and B) deal with it if it did. That’s a lot of time spent traveling that could be put to better use.

With an Internet fax service, you can stop anywhere you can get an Internet connection to see if the fax was sent and to manage it. That could be the local coffee shop if you need a Wi-Fi connection to connect to your email account, or even the parking lot of your last appointment if you’re using a smart phone or smart phone application. You also have the option of storing faxes and commonly used fax templates online so you have access to them from anywhere. Having that remote capability makes it a lot easier to plan your day, and may save you enough time to have a personal life too.

Integrate with popular applications. With a fax machine, when you’re ready to send a document you first have to print it, then load it into the machine, dial the number and hope the line isn’t busy. Even fax modems and some services require you to open their interface and move the document there in order to fax it where it needs to go.

A good Internet fax service will have a way of integrating with applications such as Microsoft® Office and Outlook®, OpenOffice, Intuit® QuickBooks, Google Docs and other small business tools so you can fax documents from within the application. The best will also include printer drivers that allow you to print your faxes from within any Windows-based application – similar to those used in Adobe Acrobat. If you regularly create documents that require faxing, this capability can save you a lot of time, effort and frustration.

Recover from disasters. A few years ago when Hurricane Katrina hit, many businesses lost all their records due to flooding. What would you do if that happened to you? Especially if six months later you were required to pull the contents of a file for a lawsuit or tax audit?

An Internet fax service can help protect you in a couple of ways. Most of the better Internet fax services will store all your faxes online for free for an entire year. If a disaster does strike, you don’t even need your own PC or laptop. All you need is any computer with an Internet connection and you can get all your faxes back. And if you have a disaster recovery site, you can get all the records you’ve stored back – something you can’t do with paper.

While using a screwdriver for a hammer may not be ideal, the concept of using your business tools to their fullest is. If you want to save time, save money and increase efficiency on a daily basis, make an Internet fax service a key part of your business toolbox.

About the Author:
Sam Wehbe is the product marketing manager for MyFax (http://www.myfax.com) the world’s fastest-growing Internet fax service. MyFax is a part of a suite of services from Protus, provider of the highest quality Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) communication tools for small-to-medium businesses (SMB) and enterprise organizations, Campaigner, an email marketing solution with advanced automation features and my1voice, the cost-effective, feature-rich virtual phone service.

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