Little portable scanners are remarkably versatile. Take a portable scanner with you the next time you attend a convention or a trade show and see how much information from business cards and promotional brochures you can bring back to the office without collecting a single piece of paper.
Optical character recognition technology allows portable scanners to scan, digitize and capture information from business cards and promotional materials for downloading onto a laptop or personal computer. Networking will be much easier when you can electronically share your contacts information with your coworkers with the help of your portable scanner. Using only a USB cable, data transfers from portable scanner to laptop without the need for an external power source. Your team members can access and use the information for their own networking and marketing purposes after it has been exported into your contacts management software.
Portable scanners do more than extract information from promotional materials. You can use your portable scanner to digitally manage your business expenses. If you run your receipts through the scanner, it will read, parse and store data like vendor name, purchase date, payment amount and method. As it did with your business cards, the scanner will organize and export the information into your companys reporting program (such as Excel), which your accounting department can access at any time. Your portable scanner will also retain a digital copy of the receipt for future reference. This alone is a big work saver for both you and your accounting department.
Portable document scanners capture and file all your crucial documents into digital libraries for retrieval at a later date. Whats more, the scanning system permits you to add descriptive text so that you can search for your documents using specified keywords. Take your portable scanner along on your next business meeting. You can scan important papers for review and comment back at the office rather than using up valuable meeting time flipping through papers. What a time saver.
Small offices use portable scanners to scan and capture client information as needed from passports, drivers licenses, medical insurance cards and other forms of personal identification. This function alone saves on office copy paper costs and reduces time spent at the copy machine. And a good way to go paperless.
Arslan writes about portable scanners.For more information on portable scanners see http://www.neatco.com.
