How Much Does Document Scanning Cost? Pricing Explained

Ask three scanning companies what a project costs and you will get three answers you cannot compare, all of them ending in “it depends.”

The reason is that most of the industry prices per page. Per-page pricing sounds precise, and it is — for the vendor. For you it means the number that matters is unknowable until the work is finished, because nobody knows how many sheets of paper are in your boxes. Not you, not us, not anyone. A “standard” banker’s box might hold 2,000 pages or 3,500 depending on how tightly it was packed and whether someone used file folders.

So a per-page quote is not really a quote. It is a rate, attached to an unknown quantity, presented as if it were a price.

We Price Per Box

Paperless Revolution charges per box — specifically, per standard banker’s box.

A standard banker’s box is the one nearly everyone already uses: roughly 15 inches long, 12 wide, 10 tall, with the lift-off lid and the hand holes cut into the ends. It is the box your files are almost certainly sitting in right now, because it is what office supply stores sell and what records storage companies use. That is exactly why we price against it — it is a unit you can see, count, and verify without taking our word for anything.

The practical consequence is simple: you can count your own boxes. You already know how many you have, or you can walk into the storage room and count them in ten minutes. Multiply, and you know what the project costs before you commit to it.

If your records are in something else — legal-size boxes, copier-paper cartons, filing cabinet drawers, or loose on shelving — we convert to banker’s-box equivalents when we quote, and we show you the conversion rather than doing it quietly. A four-drawer lateral file, for instance, works out to several boxes’ worth of paper.

Notice what this does with the uncertainty described above. The page count inside a box really does vary — that part was not a criticism of per-page vendors, it is just true. The difference is who carries that variance. Under per-page pricing, you do: a densely packed box costs you more and you find out at the end. Under per-box pricing, we do. Some boxes run heavy, some run light, and it averages out on our side of the table instead of yours.

That is the whole argument. Not that per-box is cheaper in some abstract sense, but that it turns an open-ended expense into a number you can take to whoever approves spending.

Why We Come In Lower Than the National Companies

We carry less overhead than the large national scanning firms, and we pass that on.

The bigger operators are running regional sales teams, national marketing budgets, multiple facilities, and layers of management — and every one of those costs is inside the price you are quoted. We run a single facility on Shoemaker Ave. in Santa Fe Springs with our own staff. When you call, you get us. There is no account executive whose commission is built into your rate.

That is also why we take small jobs. A four-box project is not worth a national vendor’s time to quote. It is worth ours.

What Is Quoted Separately

Being clear about the base price only helps if we are equally clear about what is not in it. These are add-ons, priced when you ask for them:

• OCR (optical character recognition). This is what makes the text inside your documents searchable, so you can find a scanned contract by typing a phrase from it rather than remembering how it was filed. It is an option, not something bundled into every job. Many customers index well and never need it; others consider it the entire point of the project. Tell us up front and it goes in the quote.
• Additional index fields. Every job includes indexing so your files are findable. What varies is how many fields you want captured. Two to six fields covers most needs — for patient charts, typically last name, first name, date of birth, and chart number. If you want twelve fields captured off every document, that is more data-entry labor and it is priced accordingly.
• Bates numbering. Standard for law firms, unnecessary for almost everyone else. Quoted for litigation work.
• Return of your original documents. Certified destruction is our default and is included. If you want the paper back, there is a return fee — the boxes have to be re-handled and transported, and we would rather charge for that plainly than hide it in the base rate.
• Rush turnaround. If you have a deadline, say so early. It is usually workable.

What Is Included

So there is no ambiguity in the other direction, the per-box price covers:

• Pickup from your office, or drop-off at our facility if that is easier
• Document preparation — removing staples, clips, and bindings, flattening folds, repairing tears. This is the step that determines whether the finished scans are legible, and it is the step some low-quote vendors quietly skip.
• Scanning at 300 DPI or higher
• Indexing to the fields you specify
• Consistent file naming, so the output imports cleanly instead of arriving as scan0001.pdf
• Certified destruction of the originals after you have confirmed the files are correct, with a certificate of destruction

What We Do Not Do

Worth stating plainly so nobody wastes a phone call: we do not handle microfiche, microfilm, aperture cards, or one-of-a-kind engineering drawings. Those require different equipment and a different kind of specialist. If that is what you have, we are not your vendor and we will tell you so on the first call rather than after we have your boxes.

What we do is paper into indexed, searchable digital files — office records, patient charts, case files, personnel files, invoices, job files, permits.

Comparing Quotes Without Getting Fooled

If you are collecting bids, the honest difficulty is that the cheapest number on paper is frequently the most expensive project. A few things to check before you compare:

• Is prep included, or extra? This is the single most common place a low quote hides money. Removing staples and clips and flattening folds is slow manual labor. A vendor who excludes it either bills it later or skips it — and skipping it produces scans with the corner of every page folded over the text.
• Is indexing included, and how many fields? “Scanning” quoted without indexing gets you a folder of PDFs named sequentially. That is a digitized archive, not a usable one. If you cannot search for a customer by name, you have converted a filing problem into a different filing problem.
• What is the DPI? Scanning at 200 DPI is faster and cheaper and looks fine on old typed documents. It falls apart on handwriting, signatures, carbon copies, and anything faded. We capture at 300 DPI or higher for that reason.
• Who is doing the work, and where? Some quotes are low because indexing is performed offshore. That may be acceptable for your records. It is a serious question for patient charts or personnel files, and you should know before you sign rather than after.
• What is the destruction and return policy? Ask whether you sign off before anything is shredded, and what it costs to get your originals back if you want them.
• Is there a minimum? Some vendors have project minimums that make a small job cost the same as a medium one.

The useful question to ask any vendor is not “what is your rate.” It is “what is the total number for these boxes, and what would make it go up?” A vendor who can answer that has thought about your project. One who cannot is quoting a rate and hoping.

What Actually Moves the Number

Box count is the main driver. A few other things matter:

• Volume. Larger projects get better per-box rates. The setup cost is the same whether we are scanning ten boxes or four hundred.
• Index field count. As above — this is data-entry labor and it scales with how much you want captured.
• Add-ons. OCR, Bates numbering, returned originals.
• Deadline. Rush work costs more, as it does anywhere.

What does not move it much: how messy your files are. We expect staples, paper clips, mixed sizes, and folders that have not been opened since the Clinton administration. Prep is part of the job.

How to Get a Real Number

Count your boxes and call us. If you would rather not guess, we will come to your office, count them ourselves, look at what is actually in them, and give you a written price. That visit is free and carries no obligation.

What we will not do is quote you a rate over the phone that changes once we see the work. The point of pricing this way is that the number holds.

Get a written quote, or read more about what we do.