The real cost of fax machines goes beyond paper and phone lines. It’s the time staff spend handling documents, the risks of unsecured PHI, and the revenue delayed along the way.
If you’re building the business case for fax machine replacement, then your ROI estimate needs to consider the full workflow and scope of risks. We’ll discuss which costs to count, how to value the upside, and when a phased fax migration might pay off.
Few organizations can show direct fax costs in a single number. It’s typically spread across telecom, office supplies, and IT budgets, not to mention hard-to-quantify revenue and compliance risks.
Start with equipment currently in use. Purchases may be a sunk cost, but any replacements, leases, maintenance, licenses, or support contracts are all pertinent. If you use multifunction printers (MFPs) extensively, you try to include only the costs attributable to faxing, since migrating their fax capabilities may not eliminate the printer lease.
Recurring costs are primarily phone lines and supplies. This is usually straightforward enough, although you’ll need to segment which lines serve only fax traffic.
Work around the machines is the most difficult but potentially most important calculation. Collecting pages, scanning received documents, and resolving failed transmissions may add up to multiple FTEs.
Manual handling also increases the risk of misplacing documents or delivering them to unintended recipients. These privacy and security concerns are inherently difficult to measure. Unless your organization spends specifically on compliance or physical security for paper faxes, simply flag the potential downside without speculating on exact amounts.
Each fax device is a bundle of long-term cash flows which add up quickly across a whole fleet. For example, 30 fax-only lines at an assumed $50 per month cost $18,000 a year before inevitable supplies, staff time, and repair/replacement.
Cash flow improves when you replace those fax expenditures with a more scalable and cost-effective paperless alternative. Of course, migration isn’t free. Beyond the cost of the new fax platform itself, there may be professional services, number porting charges, support, and temporary overlap between old and new services.
The cost of a faxed document keeps growing after delivery. With paper-based faxing, staff often have to:
If possible, run a simple time study to ground your baseline in actual documents, rather than universal minutes-per-fax estimates. Make sure to separate paper handling from document review and data entry, so the same saved minute is not counted twice.
To work through a trivial example, let’s say a department handles 3,000 faxes per month, and expects that automated, digital workflows would save just 2 minutes per fax. That recovers 100 staff hours. Assuming a fully loaded labor cost of $30 per hour, the additional capacity is worth $3,000 per month, which is realized if it reduces overtime or avoids an additional hire.
Our article on healthcare fax automation ROI examines these calculations in more detail.
Digital faxing enables referral automation, so patients are scheduled sooner and appointment capacity is well utilized. Delayed referrals may simply go elsewhere, though not every delay causes a lost visit.
Our guide to healthcare referral automation describes where delays can occur. To model the financial benefit, track how many additional visits are completed because processing improves. Use expected collections minus the incremental cost of providing care, rather than billed charges. Count only visits the organization has capacity to deliver.
To recap, we’ve covered four cost inputs that should drive the business case for fax machine replacement:
Once there’s consensus around the business case, we recommend a phased migration from paper to digital faxing. Above all, it builds momentum by prioritizing a department or workflow with higher document costs or throughput constraints. In addition, it maintains a fall-back in case requirements evolve during go-live.
We discuss migration planning in our guide to consolidation and centralization, and in our broader strategy for phasing a cloud fax migration by department or number range rather than all at once.
In three decades of digital fax implementation, we’ve battle-tested every imaginable cost model and assumption around document workflows. In many cases, the simplest migration path is a managed fax platform (like our Private Fax Cloud®) which solves fax infrastructure and workflow in one fell swoop.
If you’d like a sounding board for your own fax ROI model, or you want to talk through your concerns with a veteran solutions architect, then reach out today. We’re happy to chat with no obligations whatsoever.
It includes equipment, phone service, supplies, support, and staff time spent handling documents. Costs vary by workload and deployment.
It can reduce paper handling and remove dedicated line costs. Compare those savings with the replacement service’s fees.
Choose a time period, subtract total project costs from benefits, then divide by project costs. Separate cash savings from the value of staff time freed.
No. You can migrate by department or number range after confirming that the replacement workflow works.