Roland Greco, an adviser, recently wrote me for assistance in dealing with the mountains of paper in his office.
His question cut right to the chase: “Can you recommend a good scanner and software to fix this problem?”
I've received the same question from advisers over the last couple of years. What's more, Mr. Greco's firm is fairly representative of the small-office environment shared by many other advisers.
At his firm, Jacobi Capital Management LLC, there are three registered investment advisers and four assistants. They manage $425 million in assets, and their broker-dealer is
LPL Financial.
My goal this week is to help Mr. Greco and any other advisers who are looking to buy a scanner.
There are many types of scanners out there, ranging from low-cost — some for as little as $100 — flatbed models that do one sheet at a time to bigger multifunction monsters that double as copiers. These can cost thousands of dollars.
I will focus on moderately priced hardware that costs about $500. (I will cover additional scanning and document management software in next week's Tech Update column.)
To create a smart buying strategy, I spent some time talking to my former colleague, M. David Stone, the longtime lead analyst for printers, scanners and projectors at PC Magazine.
He said anyone buying a scanner needs to ask themselves some basic questions:
• What do I need to scan?
• How many documents do I need to scan a day?
• In what type of format does the document need to be?
At a minimum, most advisers need a machine that can scan 15 pages per minute and has an automatic document feeder that can hold at least 20 sheets of paper.
“If you scan five or 10 pages a day and you are thinking about a scanner that has a rate of one page per minute, that doesn't sound so bad, but on the other hand, such a scanner isn't going to cut it if on balance you are scanning 500 pages a day,” Mr. Stone said.
Additionally, advisers, who typically are multitaskers, will want an automatic document feeder that will scan the entire stack of pages while they're doing other things.
It's key to pick a scanner with an ADF capacity based on the number of pages in the typical document you expect to scan.
The next thing to think about is whether you want to end up with a searchable file that is in the ubiquitous portable-document format (PDF, created by Adobe Systems Inc. way back in 1993) in which case you want a scanner that does fairly fast optical-character-recognition scans (all the models referenced below fit into this category).
“In that context, Canon is the only company that I've seen whose scanners will actually scan an OCR as quickly as they scan an image file” such as a photograph, Mr. Stone said.
Finally, you will want to consider if the bulk of what you're scanning is going to be two-sided documents, which will require a scanner that meets this need, referred to by vendors as duplex scanning.
Scanners that support this allow scans of both sides in one operation (the same way a copier handles two-sided originals). Otherwise, you will have to reload the scanner to get the other side and then handle getting the scanned pages back in order using additional software.
The following are short descriptions of several document scanners suitable for a small office or work group that have been highly rated by Mr. Stone (we'll provide links to full reviews at PCMag.com in the online version of this story).
Canon's DR-2580C came out in 2005 but is still around and is still considered a fast document scanner (24.5 pages per minute in testing) that is good at producing searchable PDFs. It also has drivers that allow it to work with most any scanning and document management software available. Shop around and you'll find this model online for around $500.
The
Epson WorkForce Pro GT-S50 came to market last year and fits a nice niche in the market in that it is small enough to fit on a desktop to use as a personal sheet-fed document scanner and is tough enough to serve the needs of a small office or work group. It has a 75-page ADF, is fairly fast (22.7 PPM scanning to PDF files), supports duplex scanning, and its software drivers allow it to work with most any available scanning and document management programs. The GT-S50 can be purchased from Epson for $500.
The
Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 is more attractive and a better fit for a lot of office décor, according to Mr. Stone. It also boasts a 50-page capacity for its ADF and is fairly fast, achieving 21.1 PPM in testing. Unlike the other models mentioned thus far, Fujitsu doesn't provide a standard driver that will let you use the scan command from within external programs; you have to go through Fujitsu's scan utility, but there are work-arounds for this.
According to Mr. Stone, this is a first-rate business card scanner too.
You can easily find this model online for around $450.
[Want more info about these scanners? Click on the links below to see Mr. Stone's reviews of these three models for PC Magazine]
Canon's DR-2580C
Epson WorkForce Pro GT-S50
Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500
E-mail Davis D. Janowski at [email protected].
