Last time around I spoke of using an online fax service and extolled the virtues of leaving your fax machine in the dust.  But, as I ended up, I told you that in order to use such a service that you would somehow have to get the document to be faxed onto your had drive.  I gave you three scenarios, but only gave details on the one…which is to use the company’s scan to PDF feature on the office copy machine.   If your office has one!

But, what if you are working from home?  What about working from Starbucks or your client’s home or office?  Do you have to drop everything and run to the office to send a standard fax?  Or go to Kinko’s????

Not if you have a Fujitsu ScanSnap.  The ScanSnap is an automatic document feeder scanner that scans to searchable PDF and drops the file right into your computer where it can be emailed or faxed using MyFax.

This is such a great machine that I am going to predict that if you purchase one it will change your life.  I like it so much that I bought 6 of them!  I have one in my office, one at home, one at my wife’s office, one that I sold to a former employee, one that I sold to the company (used by a transaction coordinator) and one that I carry in my brief case as part of my mobile office.

So let me tell you how it works.  You connect the S-510 (the desktop version) to your computer via a standard USB cable.  You then plug the device in to the electrical outlet, install the included software (just once) and you are good to go.  You can put in up to 50 documents and press ONE button.  The device wakes up the software on your computer and then it starts feeding the sheets through one at a time.  It scans BOTH sides of the document on a single pass and does so in COLOR.  The software automatically deletes any blank pages and straightens up any skewed documents, converts it to PDF and stores it in your my documents folder!  You can also set it to scan into JPG, so you can take that box of old photos and scan them to disk as well.

It comes with a full version of Adobe Acrobat (Version 7 when I bought mine), and some software to sort and classify your documents.

It comes in both Win2000/XP/Vista and Mac versions.  There is currently a $50.00 rebate in place, and if you buy yours from where I bought all of mine, there is no sales tax and they pay the shipping.  So, for the PC version you pay $345.00! (At the time this was written) The Mac is slightly more.  You’d pay more than that for the full version of Adobe Acrobat alone.

But wait, there’s more.  I mentioned that I carry one in my mobile office briefcase.  As small as the S-510 is, it will not fit in a briefcase.  Fujitsu came out with a portable model late last year, the S-300.  This one has a smaller capacity, only 10 sheets at a time, but it has all of the other qualities…scan both sides at once in color to PDF at the push of a button!

You can get it for $239.00 and you can also get a free carrying case, although mine fits in my briefcase easily.

You can go to http://drop.io/pacunion to download the spec sheets and the rebate forms.   Check www.MySimon.com and search for the Fujitsu ScanSnap S-510 and S-300 to get a list of merchants who are selling them.  Sort on the price column and you will see that CTIStore has the best prices and is 5 Star rated.  This is where I bought all of mine (one at a time over several months) and they were quick, courteous and delivered on time.

So, invest a little in your business.  Buy one of these and NEVER again stand at your fax machine suffering faxtration!