Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Price Per Box

Lately, SoftFile has been asked to offer document conversion quotes "per box." Presumably, this is because other vendors are pricing document scanning services in this fashion. The following illustrates why a price "per box" is a bad idea for the customer.

All box content are not equal, consider the following two example;


Box #1 Example


At first glance, Box #1 has about 40 folders and each folder has about 30 sheets of paper (or 1,200 sheets of paper total).

Further, in order to find what you are looking for, each folder must be electronically indexed by say a 7 digit number which might be located on the folder's tab (or 280 characters total).

Finally, in order to get these folders scanner ready (document preparation) assume it will take a SoftFile employee 30 minutes.


Assume the following rate schedule;

Box #1 Example Rate Schedule


Service Description QTY Rate Unit EXT
Document Preparation 0.5 $16.00 Hour $8.00
Document Scanning 1,200 0.05 Image 60.00
Data Entry 280 0.01 Character 2.80
Total       $70.80


Box #2 Example



At first glance, Box #2 has about 2,200 sheets of paper.
If you look really close, there seems to be a staple (a new file or different document) every 20 pages (so there are about 110 individual files).

Further, in order to find what you are looking for, each folder must be electronically indexed by say a 7 digit number which might be located on the folder's tab (or 770 characters total).

Finally, in order to get these folders scanner ready (document preparation) assume it will take a SoftFile employee 1 hour.


Assume the following rate schedule;

Box #2 Example Rate Schedule


Service Description QTY Rate Unit EXT
Document Preparation 1 $16.00 Hour $16.00
Document Scanning 2,200 0.05 Image 110.00
Data Entry 770 0.01 Character 7.70
Total       $133.70


In conclusion, a blanket quote of say $150.00 "per box" is really a poor way to quote a large volume document conversion project. This pricing method, although easy for the vendor to quote and for the customer to compute, generally benefits the vendor more than the customer. Further, most boxed document look more like our Box #1 example.

Finally, the more pages per one file (one PDF), generally the less expensive the total project will be.

For more information contact SoftFile at (916) 927-4211 or email us at info@softfile.com.




Matt Monaghan
SoftFile
(916) 927-4211
mattm@softfile.com