Web-based, online faxing eliminates waste and reduces costs. But why should anyone care?

The way fax machines (or office machines with fax capability) are sold today are as loss leaders. Meaning that a business fax machine vendor is willing to break even or lose money on selling it through Best Buy because the ink is designed to run out quickly – and the profit margins on fax machine ink cartridges can be 100% to 300%. Incidentally, a typical 4 person small office can pay three times the cost of the fax machine in the first 12 months of operation. So the cost savings of having a PC-based Internet fax service that runs over the Web is obvious (not to mention the trees saved) but the true price of not having Internet faxing capabilities is in what MBA’s call “opportunity cost.”

Internet fax services (also called “virtual fax” or “web fax”) let a user click twice to send a fax – and the sent & received record is digital. How many times have we heard, “can you resend that fax?” Or “let me run to our fax machine and check…” Already, law firms and medical offices have seen a surge in Internet fax services usage as a better, more compliant way to have sent & receipt records of fax correspondence.

The lack of being able to securely sign a Microsoft Word document and send it via Internet fax is mostly a thing of the relative past, as Adobe Acrobat now allows users to easily insert digital signatures (with automated date & time stamps) into most any document. Then a couple of mouse-clicks through the Internet fax service and that document is sent. One can send it to multiple entities and multiple recipients can have records of it. It also means that you don’t see employees waiting for a fax confirmation, loading pages into a machine, or hearing a fast busy signal when the fax machine is dialing out. Total up the minutes per employee saved each year and it probably adds up to a couple thousand dollars per year for a typical 4 person small office.

Which brings us to the most interesting element of Internet fax services – that they make fax documents a collaborative productivity tool for business. It sounds trivial, but once a small business turns to Internet Faxing, it’s like being able to keep in touch with your fax documents throughout your office much like the way Email allows better, faster group communications. And it will be the last time anyone in that office hears, “Did anyone get that fax?”