I’ve worked in lots of different capacities in lots of different kinds of offices – newspaper, insurance, food brokers, you name it. Always, though, the office had your standard put-the-paper-in-and-press-the-buttons fax machine. Until now. These days, in the bookkeeper’s office where I currently work part time, we use e-fax. This means that instead of an actual piece of equipment, our faxes travel to the recipient online. So instead of having to buy a fax machine, my boss spends about $20 a month to send faxes via the internet.
This confused me at first. How does it work? How can you fax physical pieces of paper over the Internet? How do you receive documents? Now that I’ve worked with it a few times, I understand (and will explain) the answers.
E-fax is very convenient if what I want to fax is a document I just typed in Microsoft Word – all I have to do is open the fax software and paste my document in, or attach it to a cover page like I would attach something to an e-mail. And the cover page itself is simply a template with lines you type in. But if someone hands me a piece of paper and asks me to fax it to Ms. Whomever, I have to scan it into the computer, turn the scan into a PDF document, and then attach that to the cover page of the fax. It’s enough to make me ask the guy in the office down the hall if I can use his fifty dollar piece-of-crap fax machine.
Incoming faxes arrive in our e-mail, though the sender can fax documents from any fax machine by dialing a number, just as if they were sending it to a regular, old-fashioned fax machine. The incoming e-faxes I like just fine. I want to claim that e-faxes don’t waste paper, but usually you end up printing out the fax anyway.
The $20 a month we spend for e-fax covers a certain number of incoming and outgoing faxes. After that you get charged for each one – but we’re a small office and I don’t think we’ve ever exceeded the limit. Does it cost us more money than conventional fax machines? I’m not sure. I don’t know what fax machines, rolls of fax paper, and ink cost these days. I do know that with e-fax, I don’t mess around with paper jams.
On the other hand, e-fax does have its glitches. I’ve seen a lot of unsuccessful transmissions, and sometimes there isn’t a lot you can do but wait out the problem. If I need to fax something in a rush and this happens, it means going to the guy down the hall again. The good thing is that if the fax doesn’t go through, they’ll send us an e-mail to tell us so. And at any time you can check a history of faxes both sent and received, which is convenient.
I think overall it’s a matter of personal preference. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. If I had my way, my dream-office would have both – but then that wouldn’t be very economical or practical, would it?
This article has been submitted in affiliation with http://www.Facsimile.Com/ which is a site for Fax Machines.
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