Websites 4 Small Business Newsletter
1 September 2006

Throw Away The Fax Machine - A Guide To Online Fax
by Kimble Young

Have you ever felt like throwing the fax machine out the window? 
Well you may not know it but you can, not literally please.

There have been services available for some time which allow you to 
take your fax needs online and save yourself the hassle of 
wrestling with the fax machine.

Any provider should be able to supply you with a basic fax-to-email 
service. You are usually assigned your own fax number and any faxes 
sent to this number are then attached as an image file to an email. 
That is then delivered to your email account. You will need to keep 
your fax machine for sending faxes but you can set it to not answer 
the phone and keep it on your main business line.

Most but not all fax services also provide a facility to send faxes 
by email, web or straight from the desktop. This feature can be 
utilised to send invoices or forms to customers without first 
needing print and then fax the document. Fax-to-email allows you to 
compose an email to faxnumber@provider.com and attach each document 
you want to be faxed. You are then notified by email when your fax 
is complete.

Traditionally enabling your business to fax has meant ordering a 
separate phone line and number and purchasing a fax machine or fax 
software for each user. Which is an expensive proposition for a 
communications channel that is still essential but often rarely 
used these days. With online fax services these costs are all 
rolled in to a single monthly fee which is paid to your fax 
provider. Often this fee is just a fraction of the cost of phone 
line rental alone. Add the savings in paper and ink and using an 
online fax service starts to make a lot of sense.

If your customers fax through a lot of forms that you need to 
process and archive you'll know how tedious it can be to flick 
through a whole binder just to find a specific fax. With an online 
fax service your fax correspondence can be filed along with all 
your electronic correspondence.

Points to consider when choosing a provider:

* Do you receive your own dedicated number? Some virtual office 
providers for example will place you on a shared number and your 
faxes may be seen by anyone.

* File formats: Make sure the provider can email you in a format 
that suits you. Most will send in a common format like PDF but 
others may use obscure formats that require special software to 
read.

* Do they have a method of sending faxes that suits you? Some will 
offer you a choice of methods; ranging from basic email-to-fax 
through to desktop clients which will allow you to "print" directly 
to a fax.

* Is there an area code that will be local for your customers? Even 
if you are a regional business you may want to consider a 
metropolitan fax number if your customers are located there. Remember, 
you now have the choice.

There are some things to be aware of when switching over to online 
fax:

The first is that a fax machine makes a copy of a piece of paper 
and that online faxing makes a copy of an electronic document. 
You'll no longer be able to rapidly scribble out a note and fax it 
anymore. However, you can just as rapidly send a quick memo by 
email-to-fax or through a fax printer. Filling out a form that has 
been faxed to you is no longer simple but it can be done by opening 
the fax in an image editing program and typing with the text tool.

The second caveat is that you may be used to signing almost every 
fax you send, this is no longer possible as there is no paper 
stage. The author recommends that if you have access to a scanner 
you can scan your signature and save it as a black and white image 
ready to be inserted at the footer of every document you type up.

All in all if your staff don't use the fax machine much, or use it 
for a lot of repetitive work, then faxing online can save you a lot 
of money in ink, paper, communications costs and most importantly - 
productivity. If you can't give up the routine of walking up to the 
fax machine with a piece of paper then you might still consider 
online faxing; but only to receive your faxes. Remember to turn off 
the auto answer feature of your fax machine. 

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About The Author

Kimble Young is the product development manager for Fax Online an 
Australian online fax services provider. He has many years experience 
in the communications and Internet industries.  
http://www.faxonline.com.au  

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