Online Fax - Part 3

Using FaxFile

July 13, 2015/in Online Fax /by KateH

FaxFile is a free app that works with both iOS and Android devices, and allows you to send PDF, doc/docx, and photo files to fax numbers in the U.S. and in Canada.

There isn’t a monthly subscription cost, but you do need to buy fax credits. Credits are available through either the app store for iOS or the Google Play store for Android. Credit purchases range from $2.99 (for 50 credits) to $49.99 (2,000 credits). A typical fax is 10 credits per page, so if you’re planning to send a high volume of faxes it makes sense to buy more credits at once to save money.

Installing FaxFile is easy – just find it in your phone’s app store, install, and you’re ready to go. To send a fax, make sure you have enough credits (you can purchase them directly from the app), then hit the icon that says “send fax.” You’ll be prompted to select files and add recipients. To add photos, either browse your existing photos or take a new photo and add it to the queue. For documents, open the app that’s home to the document (for instance, Dropbox or Drive) and use the “open in” command to send a copy of the document to FaxFile.

You can either add recipients from your contact list, or enter a fax number directly. Should the fax fail, FaxFile automatically retries without charging you extra credits.

FaxFile will also let you add a cover page, although you may have to install FaxCover, which is also free.

And that’s it – your fax should be on its way, all from your mobile device. FaxFile wins points for its ease of use and good transmission quality. However, it’s not the cheapest way to send faxes from a mobile device. If you fax regularly on the go, you might get a better deal by using an online fax service that includes a smartphone app.

5 Alternatives to a Fax Machine

July 8, 2015/in Online Fax /by abbymarshall

Even the most staunchly anti-fax entrepreneurs will end up needing to fax something over the course of their careers. Luckily, there’s no need to panic if you’ve already tossed your machine. This diverse group of pay-as-you go online services and mobile apps will resolve any faxing emergencies you might encounter—and, as a bonus, will assist in keeping your office green! If you find you’re still curious about fax machine alternatives, feel free to explore options like subscription and free services as well.

Pay-As-You-Go Online Services

If your faxing needs tend to fluctuate, the pay-as-you-go online service offered by GreenFax might be your best bet. This entirely cloud-based plan allows you to send faxes from any device with email or web access. GreenFax boasts lifetime storage as well as fax broadcasting capabilities for the times you need to send a document to more than one recipient. The send-only pay-as-you-go plan starts at $10. Depending on the prepaid amount you select, faxes can be sent for as little as five cents a page and the credits never expire.

For occasional sending and receiving, look no further than Innoport Express. Users can send faxes worldwide with this service. On the receiving end, faxes are delivered directly to the Innoport Express user’s email inbox by use of a temporary fax number. This service also offers the option of receiving faxes as encrypted PDFs, which is great for transmitting sensitive documents. Prices start at $1.95 for both sending and receiving faxes.

Mobile Apps

FaxBurner is an app for those who need to send and receive faxes on a relatively infrequent basis. If you know someone will be faxing you, just activate the app and it will assign you a fax number to use for up to 24 hours. Once the fax is received, FaxBurner stores a copy on your phone and sends one to your email inbox as well, covering all your bases. It even features a free plan: 25 outbound pages and 5 inbound each month. If you need a consistent fax number (or more pages), plans start at $9.97 per month.

For specifically outbound faxing needs, however, turn to JotNot Fax. This straightforward mobile app simply sends PDF documents to the fax number of your choice and notifies you once the fax has been sent. Faxing credits are accumulated via in-app purchases, with prices starting at $0.99 per credit and $14.99 for 20.

If you do happen to be a print-oriented faxer, there is also Breezy. Like JotNot Fax, this is an app for those who are sending rather than receiving. However, Breezy is one of the few printing apps that also operates in a faxing capacity. In short, if you’re on the hunt for a faxing app with bonus dual functionality, this is the one. Breezy’s fax credits come in packs, starting with 10 for $1.99 and going up to 100 for $19.99.

All three apps support Box and Dropbox integration for extra on-the-go functionality, with JotNot Fax and Breezy providing options for Google Drive as well.

Signing Up for eFax With Your HP All-In-One

July 7, 2015/in Online Fax /by KateH

HP makes a line of printers, the All-In-One series, that are set up to link users directly to an eFax account. The printers that support eFax are the Envy 110 and 114, The Photosmart 7510 and 7515, and the Photosmart eStation.

The partnership allows you to get limited free faxing through the HP printer – 20 free incoming or 20 free outgoing pages per month – or to simply use the printer’s touchscreen to send faxes through a paid eFax account.

You can either sign up for eFax through the printer, or sign up separately through eFax and use the account with the printer. Which method you choose depends on your faxing needs.

If you’re looking for low-volume faxing and will use 20 pages or fewer each month, it’s probably easiest to sign up through the printer’s touchscreen. As long as the printer is connected to a wireless network, it should only take a few minutes to get a fax number.

It’s also possible to use the free account that comes with the HP and eFax partnership on the eFax site, separately from the printer. However, some users have complained that eFax automatically charged them for an upgrade when they used the free version. Based on reviews, HP did work with those customers to resolve the issue.

If you think you’re going to be doing a higher volume of faxing through your printer and eFax, it makes sense to sign up separately through eFax and use your account with the HP printer. Some HP users complained that signing up for a paid account through the printer was difficult.

eFax has two paid subscription tiers, Plus and Pro. Plus includes 150 inbound and 150 outbound pages per month for $16.95 per month, or $14.13 with the annual discount. The Pro plan includes 200 inbound and 200 outbound pages each month for $19.95 per month, or $16.63 with the annual plan.

HP did have an issue with its eFax-supported printers earlier this year that left customers with the eFax models unable to use eFax to send faxes from their printers, although incoming faxes were not affected. As of April 2015, HP has said it has worked with eFax’s parent company, j2 Global, to identify and fix the problem, which was due to an updated security protocol.

Glitches aside, the service has been well received by both eFax and HP customers. The partnership made it easy to send Internet faxes through a well-regarded fax service provider, and offered a great deal for would-be faxers who didn’t need enough volume to be interested in a paid subscription.

Using OneSuite to Pay-As-You-Go

June 16, 2015/in Online Fax /by KateH

There are myriad services to pick from when considering online fax options, from feature-rich plans that fit almost any industry’s needs to services that fit an individual’s budget. For users who may need to provide a fax number and receive faxes, but rarely need to send them, OneSuite’s pay-as-you-go plans offers a very inexpensive online fax solution.

OneSuite’s Fax Plus plan runs $2.95 per month, and includes unlimited incoming faxes. To send faxes, users have two options: you can use WebFax, OneSuite’s browser-based fax platform, or OSFX driver, a downloadable program. WebFax works with both Macs and PCs, and OSFX driver works only with PCs.

OneSuite charges each sent fax by its transmission duration, in 1-minute increments. Rates for toll-free and lower 48 U.S. states are 2.5 cents per minute. International rates vary from 1.8 cents to 4.8 cents per minute.

The two fax platforms OneSuite offers are similar to each other, although WebFax supports a few more file types. Both OSFX and WebFax support all the standard file types, including Microsoft Office, Adobe, and image file types. Only the OSFX driver will let users create a fax cover page.

The service also lets you monitor outbound fax records going back 90 days, and lets you receive faxes in up to five email addresses.

Incoming faxes go to a user’s email address. To send faxes, you go through whichever platform you’ve set up.

It is worth noting that the company has received bad reviews for customer service, with some users complaining that there was a significant lag in time between paying for initial service and getting their accounts activated.

Five Great Free Cloud Services

June 4, 2015/in Online Fax /by KateH

More and more services are moving to the cloud, from faxing to management tools. While many have subscription models, there are also a lot of free versions of cloud services that can help with organization, communication, and productivity. Here’s a look at five of the top free cloud services out there.

Dropbox: storage

Dropbox’s free account comes with 2GB of storage, on the smaller side compared with other free services. But it’s a very solid service that’s widely used. It allows you and your coworkers to access and edit files or documents stored on the cloud, and it will automatically sync files. Launched in 2008 by two MIT students, Dropbox was one of the earlier players in cloud storage.

The storage and sharing service has mobile apps available on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Blackberry, and Kindle Fire devices, making it very easy to access your account.

Trello: management/productivity

There are a lot of productivity and task management tools out there. We like Trello because it’s very visual, very detailed, and very easy to use. It’s a free service, although you can upgrade to Trello Gold for $45 annually, or get it free by inviting new members.

Trello lets you use boards – as many as you want – to organize anything from your kids’ extracurricular activities to product management. Within each board is a set of lists, onto which you can add cards. You can color code those cards, add notes to them, assign them to people or teams, and drag them from one list to another as a task moves through a sequence of events. In print that may sound overwhelming, but the interface is simply-designed and intuitive. Trello also lets you upload files from your computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and OneDrive.

Google Drive: backup and collaboration

Google Drive offers an impressive amount of storage and syncing for free. Along with its companion apps Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, it offers an office suite that lets you create documents, edit, save, and collaborate. It offers an impressive 15GB of space for free.

Since it is a Google product, some people are uneasy about data and privacy. If that’s a real concern, it might be better to go with a syncing service or office suite that makes anonymity a priority. You can even build your own cloud with devices like Transporter.

Otherwise, it’s hard to beat the services you get with Google Drive, since it offers significant free space, real-time collaboration, and document creation.

FaxZero: faxing

FaxZero works best for individuals or businesses with limited faxing needs. On the plus side, the free service has a simple interface and is easy to set up. It does brand cover pages, but you can opt to pay $1.99 to have a clean cover page. It supports DOC, DOCX, and PDF files, but you can only attach three files at a time. You can send three pages at a time, and up to five faxes per day, for a total of 15 pages per day.

However, you can only send – not receive – faxes with this service.

FreshBooks: finance

FreshBooks bills itself as “cloud accounting.” It really shines with invoices, and gives users a lot of flexibility in creating them. An invoice list shows you the status of every invoice, and you can personalize invoices with tear-off stubs, a logo, and customer messages.

FreshBooks also lets you track time and expenses. One nice feature is that you can take pictures of receipts with your smartphone and attach them into your expenses. You can also assign categories, and import expenses by connecting to your bank or PayPal. Time-tracking can work for individuals, or for teams.

FreshBooks does not let you do account tracking or payroll, however, so it’s probably best for smaller businesses.

image via Creative Commons

Which Top Cloud Storage Service Is Best for You?

May 27, 2015/in Online Fax /by abbymarshall

It’s getting downright impossible to ignore the growing advantages of cloud service technology. Think about the benefits to wirelessly syncing and organizing important information across all of your devices—you’ll never leave another crucial document at home! These services also simplify collaborative projects, offer extensive resources for sharing and storing media, and even integrate with other applications for a truly streamlined experience. Read on to see which of the big four is right for you.

Box

This cloud service offers a reasonable amount of free storage right off the bat (10 GB). Box’s major downside is the free account’s file upload size, which clocks in at just 250MB and makes media storage potentially problematic. However, Box’s collaborative nature is a significant bonus, as it provides a secure, organized interface for task and deadline management and even allows for the assignment of editing and viewing permissions. If fax integration is what you need from your cloud service, RingCentral offers online services for sending files directly from your Box account. You can also give the HelloFax app a try—it allows you to send, receive, and sign faxes, all without ever using an actual fax machine. Storage plans for this cloud service start at $5/month.

Dropbox

A big pro for Dropbox is offline availability of data, as the service syncs with a local folder on each of your devices. Files can be shared regardless of whether the receiving party is a Dropbox user or not, which is another bonus. Those interested in the collaborative aspect of the cloud service will benefit from the 30-day edit backup feature, which saves earlier versions of each file. Unfortunately, Dropbox offers the smallest amount of free storage on this list (2GB), but you can “earn” more through referrals, tutorials, and the activation of certain features. Dropbox is another cloud service that integrates with HelloFax and RingCentral’s virtual components. Storage plans start at $9.99/month.

Google Drive

If you have a Gmail account, you already have access to Google Drive’s 15 GB of free storage—easily the largest amount on this list. Email compatibility is another significant advantage for Drive, as Gmail users can save an attachment to the cloud with a single click. Drive should particularly appeal to fans of other Google services, as its syncing ease extends to Google Docs and allows for live project collaboration. Drive is additionally compatible with RingCentral and HelloFax. Storage plans start at $1.99/month.

iCloud

In addition to the free 5GB of storage, iCloud features bonus services such as Family Sharing (though limited to Apple products). Users can save any file to iCloud and access it across multiple apps and devices while benefiting from the automatic sync of all edits. ICloud provides a functional service for Apple consumers, but prospective users should note that faxing with iCloud is slightly problematic. The service is not compatible with RingCentral and has no app equivalent to HelloFax. Users can employ email-to-fax services or traditional fax machines in conjunction with iCloud, but the other three services on this list ultimately offer a more streamlined process for your faxing needs. Storage plans start at $.99/month.

How Do Neat and ScanSnap Compare?

May 20, 2015/in Online Fax /by KateH

If you are a regular online fax user, chances are you also use – or could be in the market for – a document scanner.

Document scanners, unlike the scanners that are attached to printers, quickly scan large volumes of documents, receipts, or business cards, and what’s more, can send them to email, cloud storage, mobile devices, or directly into documents. For anyone who’s interested in going paperless, these devices are a big help.

Two of the most popular document scanners come from Neat and Fujitsu. Neat offers two document scanners, the NeatConnect, and NeatDesk. NeatConnect goes for $499.95, and the Desk for $399.95. Fujitsu also offers a few ScanSnap products, including a contactless scanner and USB scanner. Here’s a look at how they compare, side-by-side. For this comparison, we focused on NeatConnect, which has more features and a similar price tag, next to ScanSnap’s $495 iX500 wireless desktop scanner.

Size

Both are very compact; the ScanSnap comes in at 11.5 inches by 6.5 inches, and the NeatConnect is 11 by 8.7. If every inch of desktop space counts, the ScanSnap wins here, although it weighs slightly more; just over six pounds, compared with NeatConnect’s five pounds.

Connectivity

Both devices can send scans to a wide range of destinations.

NeatConnect will let you send scans to Microsoft Word, Dropbox, Box, GoogleDrive, Evernote, and OneNote. When you buy a NeatConnect you’ll also get a 90-day free trial of the Neat Cloud service. It’s worth noting that there are a few applications – like Excel, Quicken, and TurboTax – that you can only send scans to with this service. Prices on that service range from $60 to $240 annually, depending on how many users you have. The Neat Cloud service will also sync with your mobile device.

ScanSnap also send scans to computer desktop applications, as well as cloud storage programs including Dropbox, Evernote, GoogleDocs, Salesforce, CRM, Chatter, SugarSync, and SharePoint. Like the NeatConnect, ScanSnap will synch to mobile devices.

Features

Both are Mac- and PC-compatible, and both have received high marks from reviewers for ease of use right out of the box. Both are also wireless, which means you can scan without your computer.

ScanSnap has a few notable and time-saving features, including recognition of paper orientation, which means it turns documents the correct way. It removes blank pages, straightens crooked images, and crops documents. It also recognizes business cards and receipts, and automatically puts their information into databases. ScanSnap uses something called Optical Character Recognition, which lets you search for a document you’ve saved by words in that document. The ScanSnap will scan up to 50 sheets at a time.

NeatConnect doesn’t have the same document-straightening feature, but it does include different slots for various sizes of paper and documents that help keep them straight. It’s also won praise for making clear scans of creased and stained paper. Like ScanSnap, NeatConnect extracts data from your scans in order to make it easy to search for them. It also lets you create spending and expense reports, and share (and comment on shared) folders and items. It will scan up to 50 sheets at the same time without the paper tray, or, with the paper tray, up to15 business cards, 15 receipts, and 15 letter-size documents at one time.

Out of the box, Neat does a few more things than ScanSnap, like rotating images. However, ScanSnap comes with software that lets you access additional features, including Adobe Reader.

Both of these scanners are similar in price, features, and performance. One of the biggest differences between them is that NeatConnect works best if you’re willing to buy into the entire Neat environment through its cloud services. It will do things like automatically classify forms, including tax documents, but you have to pay for that service. If you don’t need those features and don’t want to subscribe to a cloud storage solution, ScanSnap is a great choice.

Mobilize Your Office Using These Seven (Nearly) Free Tools

May 13, 2015/in Online Fax /by LeoW

Birds have the gift of flight, so the smart ones use that gift to follow the comfortable weather year-round. Humans solved the mystery of air travel a century ago, but most of us still choose to bear brutal winters and scorching summers. For many of us, that is because we have responsibilities that tie us to our homes. If the responsibility that is tying you down is your business, you can use these seven tools to throw off the shackles by creating a mobile office and leave bad weather behind.

The Seven REALLY Inexpensive Tools to Take You Mobile

Phone.com: Port your business phone number into Phone.com, and untether yourself from your on-premise phone system. Phone.com has the lowest starting price ($10/ month) of any cloud phone system, so price is not your obstacle here. The company offers high quality service and will provide you with features like auto-attendant, unlimited extensions, metered or unlimited VoIP lines and phones, online fax, mobile apps, etc. You can either handle all your calls with your mobile phone or simply plug-in your VoIP phone to any Internet connection and take calls as if you were at your desk in your home office.
Google Hangouts: For some meetings, a phone call isn’t enough. In those cases, use Google Hangouts to setup a video conference for up to ten people. This service is completely free and requires no software (besides a web browser), but is somehow still extremely reliable.
Team Viewer: If you have a desktop at your office that has some programs that you don’t want to put on your laptop, but you occasionally need to access, install Team Viewer. This program allows you to login to that computer from your laptop from anywhere in the world. Team Viewer offers a completely free personal license.
Mailbox Forwarding Inc: Physical mail is pretty hard to eliminate; fortunately virtual mailrooms allow you to minimize their limitations. Mailbox Forwarding Inc, will receive your mail (you’ll have to use one of their mailing addresses), scan the envelopes and send you the images. You then review the images and decide what you want them to do with each piece of mail. Your options include shredding, opening and scanning, forwarding, and even depositing checks on your behalf.
iDrive Backup: In order to ensure that you have access to all your digital files, sign up for iDrive Backup and install it on every one of your and your teams computers. iDrive charges based on total storage, not number of computers, so this won’t drive up the cost. Once your files are backed up, you can access them from any computer or smartphone. iDrive charges $45/year (less than $4/ month) for up to 1 Terabyte of storage.
Dropbox: iDrive will back up all your files and make them accessible, but it’s cumbersome to use for files you want to edit and then make available to your team or on other devices. For those files, use Dropbox. Dropbox is not the cheapest (iDrive Sync is the cheapest), but it is by far and away the most reliable. Keep all the files that you plan to access and edit regularly in your Dropbox folder and share them across your devices and with team members. Dropbox Pro accounts are $10/ month for 1 Terabyte. iDrive might seem redundant, if you’re using Dropbox, but we’ve had bad experiences trying to add all our company files at once to Dropbox (caused the computers to run slow), and Dropbox Pro can’t be installed on a server.
Trello: No matter how small your business, you will be engaging in projects with other people. Trello is a very simple and free project management system that allows you to keep yourself and your teams organized.

A Step By Step Guide To Porting a Fax Number

April 22, 2015/in Online Fax /by KateH

If you’re interested in signing up for an online fax service but are hesitant because you don’t want to change your established land line fax number, there’s good news: many services allow you to port over your existing fax number. Porting a fax number simply means transferring an existing fax number in to a new provider. That way you’re set up with a new service that saves you the money you were spending on a landline, and no one faxing to you or receiving faxes from you will know the difference.

Here’s what that process would look like.

To quickly learn which online fax services offer fax number porting, visit FaxCompare Internet fax list page and select the feature filter box marked “fax number porting.” This will automatically rule out any services that don’t offer that feature.

You can get a closer look at the differences between each company and plan by clicking the “mark to compare” box beside each service provider, for up to five comparisons at a time. You then can see individual plans side by side, like this:

Once you’ve browsed the information about each provider and selected the one you want to sign up with, click the red “visit website” button to go to that provider’s site and sign up.

Depending on the provider, you might be able to sign up with a free trial, or go directly to whichever plan you’ve selected. Either way, you’ll be asked to provide your payment and contact information to get started. Once you’re signed up, you should contact customer support to start the process of porting your existing fax number, either by phone, email, or a chat. Many services will initiate the offer of a chat to answer questions during the signup process.

Let the provider know that you want to port your existing fax number into the service. The representative will request your number and will verify that it is portable before setting up the porting. Typically, in order to port an existing number into a service, you must first verify that the number is eligible for transfer, and that transferring the number won’t affect other services or contractual agreements you have with your current provider.

You might be asked to fill out a request form, but the new provider will handle the actual transfer. The process may take up to a few days, after which time you’ll be notified that the porting is complete. And then you’ll be up and running!

Six Tools (Besides Online Fax) To Help You Go Paperless

April 17, 2015/in Online Fax /by LeoW

At some point during my last office move, probably while I was trying to find a place for the 15th box of paper archive files, I decided that it was time to make the transition to the “paperless office.” To be clear, a “paperless office,” does not literally mean that I no longer use paper. In fact, I still regularly print things to read and mark up, and I currently have a stack of paper documents on my desk.

Instead, a “paperless office” is better defined as one that has a digital copy of everything and doesn’t archive paper files unless absolutely necessary. This cuts down on the need for file cabinets and the space that they require as well as making the files more accessible. The text of scanned and digital files can be easily searched and made available at a moment’s notice through any laptop or smartphone.

The biggest advantage of the “paperless office” is that it makes me nimble and flexible. If my accountant wants to see receipts from charitable contributions, I can gather and send them in less than a minute. If my bank wants to see a tax return, I can send it to them from the airport. Finally, if I decide I want to get out of the Texas heat for a couple of months in the summer, all I need to bring with me is my laptop to maintain full access to my office.

If you want to “go paperless,” a good first step is to switch to an online fax service (which this site is obviously designed to help you do). Here are some other tools/ services will also help.

Mailbox Forwarding, Inc offers virtual mailroom services for $15-$30 month. The company assigns you a mailing address (they have them available in California, Michigan and Florida) that you can use as your business mailing address (they provide registered agent services in those states). They’ll receive and scan the envelopes and put them on a secure web portal where you can view the images and decide whether you want them to open & scan, forward or shred the mail.
HelloSign is an eSignature service that offers free accounts for infrequent users (like me) and reasonably priced plans for people who need more than 3 signed documents per month. For people who use Gmail or Google Apps, HelloSign has a plugin that adds an option to sign documents directly in the Gmail interface. It’s very convenient.
Fujitsu Scan Snap iX500 is the best personal document scanning hardware available, and it costs around $450 (but it includes Adobe Acrobat X Standard for Windows which normally costs $200). It scans both sides of the document, uses ultrasonic detection to identify overlapping pages, and makes typed text searchable. I’ve been using this just about every business day for 2 years, and I can’t imagine working without it.
The Fellowes DS3 shredder is a great way to dispose of sensitive documents after you’ve scanned them. Fellowes is one of the most respected shredding brands on the market, and you can get the DS3 on Amazon for about $80.
The Genius Scan+ smartphone app is a great tool for digitizing documents when you are away from the office. The “+” version that I use is about $7, but they also offer a free version that might be enough. Genius Scan+ does a great job of enhancing and cropping the scans and has a very easy process for storing the documents as PDF’s in Dropbox.
Dropbox is the smoothest, most reliable cloud document service available. If you want to be able to access and share your scanned files from anywhere, I highly recommend storing your files in Dropbox. A free Dropbox account will store up to 2GB of space, but, you’ll probably get addicted to the service and chew through this limit in the first year. However, Dropbox Pro is only $10/ month and gives you up to 1TB of space (that’s 1,000 GB). Even through Dropbox keeps backup copies of your files, I also recommend using iDrive to create an additional backup of your files. It’s a nice security blanket in case something catastrophic happens. iDrive has a free plan that can handle up to 5GB of storage and their Personal account is $45/ year for 1 TB of storage.

Once you stop the flow of new paper files, you’ll eventually want to get rid of the ones you currently have. I used a local document scanning company to handle that, and I had a great experience. I’ll write more detail on how to prepare your documents for scanning and select a good service in a future post.