Making Fax As Effortless As Email

April 3, 2009 at 5:09 pm · Filed under Communications, Fax and tagged: invoice, statements

Up until fairly recently, integrating fax into your business application, whether general purpose accounting or ERP, was not a trivial undertaking. There are lots of good network based fax applications around, and one of the better ones is GFI FAXMaker. If you’ve got the technical skills onboard and have the phone lines already, this is a good product to go with. It can act as a printer driver or ‘route’ your email and convert your attachments into documents suitable for faxing automatically.

The downside of products such as this is that they are not necessarily easy to set-up, and there is a cost involved in maintaining them. New machines get added to a network as older machines get retired, and extra work has to be done to get the faxing working. And then we’ve also had clients who have had mysterious problems with fax hardware cards, and issues of that sort. (In other words, the usual sorts of problems people experience when managing a technical environment.)

A greatly simplified approach is to farm off the duty of faxing documents to a web service. We use UTBox but there are others to choose from and they generally work in similar ways. With a web service such as this, you email them what you want faxed, and they handle the technical details of converting that email into something a fax machine can understand at it’s intended destination. If the fax doesn’t make it to it’s intended recipient, an email is sent back to you notifying you of the problem.

The way this works is that the fax number is placed in front of the UTBOX web address like so:

‘number’@fax.utbox.net

but other than that, faxing is no slower, and certainly no more difficult, than sending a regular email.

You can also use the same web based fax service to receive faxes. In this case, they arrive in your email outbox as scanned documents.

One thing to consider is the pricing for such a service. Usually the service provider will charge a relatively ‘flat’ 6 monthly or annual fee, but that will typically cost considerably less than a monthly dedicated fax line rental. One thing to watch, though, is there is usually a small fee charged per page send. So if you are in the habit of sending out faxes that are a dozen or more pages in size (such as catalogues) this may not be an economical way to go. But if you typically send faxes that take the form of invoices or statements of 1 or 2 pages, then the cost per fax sent usually turns out to be modest.

The other important factor to consider is whether your accounting software or business application is aware of web based faxing services and can provide some internal support for them. For example, using our CAPITAL application suite, you define a ‘fax server’ send string like so:

$fax$@fax.utbox.net

and then when sending faxes, you only need to enter the fax number. Using the above codes, CAPITAL will reformat the number into the format required by the fax service automatically. Just tick ‘Fax’ instead of ‘Print’ and type in the fax number–if it’s not retrieved from your customer or supplier record by default, although normally it would be.

Keep in mind that a fax based web service may require you to include both the country code and the local area code in front of the fax number. For example, CAPITAL can make this easier by allowing you to specify a default international country code for all your numbers.

But even if the business software you are using, or your email software, doesn’t support any of these enhancements, typing the fax number plus the UTBOX web address manually, will still be faster than walking over to the fax machine!

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