The Tax Professional’s Guide to a Paperless Tax Workflow

Scanning 101: Basic Settings for Tax Document Scanning

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The first step in going paperless, and the heart of all paperless tax workflows, is scanning documents.  The documentation you receive from clients will continue to be paper-based—and all of that paper has to go somewhere before you can start working with it digitally.

But not all scanning is created equal.  The image quality of scanned documents starts at the scanner level.  If your scan settings are not optimal for scanning tax documents, the image quality of the resulting scanned document will be lacking.  Set your scan software to the following basic image specifications to ensure you always scan your documents right the first time.

• Scan to a PDF.  To create a PDF from your scanner, choose File > Create PDF > From Scanner in Adobe® Acrobat®, or any industry-standard PDF writer.  You can also choose whether you’d like to create a new document or add the scanned pages to an existing document.

• Scan at 600dpi.  Make sure your image settings are set to scan the document at a resolution of 600dpi (this is not the same as scanning at a lower resolution and then saving at 600dpi).  This setting is especially important if you’re planning to use a scan-and-organize or scan-and-populate tax document automation solution.  Software that “reads” and extracts data from scanned tax documents may not be able to identify the text on low resolution images.

• Scan in black and white.  Scanning in black and white will create smaller files, so they’ll take up less space on your hard drive or in your document management system (DMS).  And again, if you’re using tax document automation software, this scanner setting will provide clearer images for processing—and they’ll take less time to upload.

• Scan the original documents. Every time a document is copied, the image quality goes down. The further removed you get from the original document, the “noisier” the document becomes—and the harder it is to read.  For best results, scan the original source document, as received by the client.  Avoid using copies of client documentation—especially faxed copies, which are very low quality.

And finally, automatically organize your scanned client source documents.  Though this doesn’t exactly fall under the “Scanning” heading, it will change the way you scan documents.  If you know you’re going to be using a tax document automation solution, to automatically index and organize your client’s source documents, you won’t need to sort the documents before you scan them.

GruntWorx Organize allows you to scan a stack of disorganized client documents and will automatically identify, organize, bookmark, and label each document with the document issuer’s name on each bookmark.  Using GruntWorx Organize will also allow you to completely hand off the organization and scanning to support staff, so your preparers can focus on more value added activities.  Best of all, you can try 5 returns free to evaluate how the product works and how it can fit into your paperless tax workflow.

To learn more about the do's and don'ts of scanning tax documents, download our free tutorial, Best Practices for Scanning Tax Documents