With tigher budgets and higher expectations than ever, schools, colleges and universities are expected to achieve great things with less in a world where we increasingly need more and more. With very few solutions around to help to progress an institution that are actually low cost and offer quick returns, this makes it all the harder.
One consideration rarely concerned is that document scanning for education is a great way to get your organisation looking forward at a cost of next to nothing. And why is it such a great solution?
There’s lots of reasons but the main one is that your files and documents can be made entirely digital and searchable if you wish. This makes finding particular files and documents incredibly easy and after this the old paper based files can be disposed of securely.
This can lead to any number of advantages. You can be seen as a greener and more progressive environment because of a drastic reduction in paper use as well as, to a lesser extent, printers and printer ink which omit harmful fumes into the atmosphere (it may sound small but think of how many people at any one time are actually using a printer). On top of that you’ll also cut down on the costs of stationary and electronics such as printers and paper which is a big budget taker when it comes to schools and colleges. You can also save a considerable amount of space by securely disposing of any filing cabinets full of documents.
There is also the aspect that you are holding onto student files that go a long way back and you might simply be running out of, or have already run out of room to store them. Perhaps you’ve resorted to putting them into a document storage facility at a monthly rate. After all the files aren’t accessed often but when they’re needed they can be retrieved. However this is a potentially backward exercise both in terms of progress and the amount it actually costs. Getting all of those documents digitised makes them available to you at any time via your computer systems at no additional cost other than the initial scanning charges.
It’s also worth considering to enquire about a document management software to go with the newly digitised documents as these can be very low cost and in some cases free to educational organisations depending on the company. A good document management software can make a huge difference when it comes to handling and searching through student files and would be considerably better than doing a standard computer based search as it would be a lot quicker and will offer more accurate results.
You needn’t worry about accuracy of translating the documents from paper to digital either as these days OCR quality is superb especially through professional companies who have developed their own software to offer excellent results. Your documents can also be indexed in any way that you wish including student name, reference etc. and all documents should be able to be OCR’d with relative ease allowing you to search and find names, references, addresses and much more in a much better way.
Document Scanning for Education is a terrific way of modernising your school without the need for a hugely expensive solution. Scanning will often start at around 1p per sheet of paper here in the UK so it’s probably a lot cheaper than you might imagine it to be.
If you want to know more about educational document scanning, including how you could get a free piece of digital document management software, please visit our site.
