Why Faxing Remains a Modern-Day Necessity

Technology continues to present new options for getting documents from place to place. With options like document sharing services and even sending scanned images via email, you might wonder why faxing even exists anymore. Actually, this older technology continues to provide options that are not currently available elsewhere.

Faxing Continues to Have Advantages for Document Transmittal

Before you trash your fax machine or cancel your service. make sure that none of the following reasons for faxing apply to you:

• The government often accepts only faxed documents: Granted, the IRS prefers electronic tax filings, but many regulatory agencies still want paper. It always makes sense to give the government exactly what they want.
• Fax transmission receipts, provide a verifiable paper trail:  The receipts issued with each successful transmission provide evidence. If you need proof that you submitted documents prior to a deadline, the receipt verifies the date and time sent.
• Faxed documents are accepted for discovery in legal cases: Particularly true for anyone who deals with legal discovery requests, you may need a record of every document pertaining to a specific client or issue. If you use online fax services, you have a single place where all transmissions are retained, and possibly several options for efficiently locating all pertinent documents.
• Faxes are considered to be more secure than other transmission methods: On a very basic level, physical fax machines aren’t prone to hacking. While this doesn’t strictly apply to faxing in the cloud, reliable providers maintain robust security systems that are safer than most methods used in homes. Plus, it’s common knowledge that email provides very little security. In 2017, 71 percent of cyber hackers did their work through email spear phishing.
• Digital data is not always easily-sharable: Even though current medical regulations require digital data storage, those systems are often incompatible with each other. To share vital data with other medical professionals, offices still heavily rely on faxing. Some other industries share the same concern.

You Have Choices When Picking the Right Fax Option

Keep in mind that you don’t have to pay for a physical machine (along with supply and maintenance costs). It’s easy to find plenty of online services that provide a variety of options for your consideration. A reputable fax evaluation site, like FaxCompare, can help you narrow your choices to  those that best meet your needs. And, since they generally offer free trials, you can do some testing before making a final decision.

We Still Use Wheels, Too

Thanks to rapid technological advances, it’s tempting to eliminate the things in our lives that seem outdated. Still, if something continues to perform a needed task, it makes little sense to relinquish it, particularly when technology has provided numerous ways to meet increasingly advanced requirements.

Think about all the changes that cars have seen since Carl Benz invented the gas-powered automobile in the late 1800s. Some of today’s vehicles no longer need drivers, but they all still have wheels.