As more people work from home and more small businesses get rid of their big multifunction printer-scanner-copy-fax-machines it can sometimes become difficult to digitize your paper. While a free scanning app on your phone is enough for single pages or documents, when it comes to medium or large scanning jobs you may start looking for specialty help or access to dedicated hardware. When you need professional services to help you with scanning, you will often need to find which local companies offer scanning services to their customers.
The biggest question on everyone’s mind is How Much Does Document Scanning Cost?
The pricing can be pretty opaque at times so we are here to clear up many many price misconceptions and called up local stores and post some of their rates here online to compare.
Below are some large national chains where we surveyed the local branches because most prices are not listed online. You will need to check the businesses in your area to find out your specific pricing, the below guide should give you a rough idea of what to expect from brands like Staples, FedEx, UPS Store, OfficeDepot/OfficeMax, as well as a few unconventional places you may find scanning services or self-service hardware you can rent or use.
If your project is particularly large, like bulk scanning, archival scanning, where you are looking to digitize many boxes of paper or an entire archival room, then you may want to consider a Professional Imaging Company like TierFive who offers Document Scanning services.
There are over 5,000 UPS Store locations and each is a franchise that is individually owned and operated. Depending on the store they will each have different services and prices lists for the services offered. The following rates are an average of different locations that we surveyed/
Scanning Costs – Most locations will charge around $2 to scan the first page and $1 for each additional page (front and back). They did not offer scanning as a self-service but did all the scanning for you with delivery via email or copied to USB media for you.
For more information find a UPS Store location near you.
FedEx has than 2,200 FedEx Office Print & Ship Center locations and there may be one in your area to visit. Most FedEx Office stores have a combination of employees and self-service kiosks for scanning documents.
Scanning Costs – Using the self-service kiosk will cost $0.45 per minute to scan and can be sent to you via email. To have an employee scan your documents for you will cost $0.89 per page and they will put it on a CD or thumb drive for you.
Documents that are larger than a standard 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper may need to be scanned by an employee.
Office Depot is the largest office supply chain in the world and including its OfficeMax locations, they have over 1,200 stores. They offer self-service scanning and you can have your files delivered via email, cloud download, or USB.
Scanning Costs – Scanning your documents will cost $2.99 for the first page and an additional $0.25 per page for each page after that. If you sign up for their rewards program, you will get 10% back whenever you use their copy, print, and scanning services.
Staples is a retail office supply and business-to-business services company. Through their Copy & Print department, they also offer scanning services as well as self-service machines that you can use with a credit or debit card.
Scanning Cost – Self-service costs .25 for it to be scanned to a pdf and .25 for it to be saved to media, totaling .50 cents a page. If you want an employee to scan it, it costs $2 per page. If you sign up for their rewards program you will get 5% credit back for in-store services.
Many business-class hotels include a Business Center that may offer a variety of copy and print services to business travelers. Some of these services may be complementary to guests while others may be paid. They may even offer some of their services for non-guests for a nominal fee. When traveling for business it may be a good idea to call the front desk and ask about the services they offer.
Libraries are a great place to get documents scanned. If you have a library card and no outstanding fees, you may be able to get help scanning small documents. Many public libraries charge small fees around $0.10 per page, but it will vary based on each institution. It would best to call your library beforehand to find out the services and fees they charge.
If you have a particularly large, or just enough size that it doesn’t make sense to use a retail store, you can always outsource this task to a company that specializes in document scanning. Just leaving the process to the experts who already know what they’re doing and can often have the job done much cheaper than doing a project in-house.
Scanning Cost – TierFive provides a convenient Online Quote Estimation tool to get a rough idea of what your project might cost. The exact price may vary based on specifics, like the size of the project, the document prep required, and optional services like optical character recognition (OCR) and data entry but prices can range anywhere from 3.5-10 cents per image.
Outsourcing the task to a company with lots of experience ensures that your documents are treated properly, nothing gets missed, you won’t directly be paying for internal staff to train other staff on accessing, saving, sharing, editing, the documents, and plenty of other benefits. We have over 15 years of experience to help you achieve your project goals.
To learn more about what TierFive offers feel free to check out our Document Scanning page. Once you are ready, contact us or give us a call at +1 (888) 547-2267 for a free consultation
