Portable scanners can help your mobile users

by | May/13/2009

I carry a portable scanner with me everywhere. I can scan in receipts so my capable staff can bill clients. I scan in program evaluations to learn from valuable feedback from audiences where I speak. I scan anything important that I might need again.  When I used to collect business cards, I would scan them into my CRM customer relationship management system.

If you or users in your company travel, ask yourself if there are any documents they could scan to increase productivity and improve the service you provide your customers.

Most of the portable scanners are about the size of that cardboard tube that is “left over” after you finish a roll of paper towels. The scanner easily fits in a briefcase or other piece of luggage.

Many of them perform OCR Optical Character Recognition so you can copy and paste text into other applications. Some scanners even come with software that creates expense reports automatically.

This can even be part of the “Green” movement. If you want to, the next time you need to make copies of a document to “hand out” to a group of people, scan the document instead and send it electronically to the people.