The cost of scanning an archive box is the equivalent to 10+ years storage, making it the main reason why storage is still far more popular than scanning.
Essential Archive Storage
Really?!
That’s a bold statement – lets look into it further, because many people are attracted to offsite document storage based on cost – but are they seeing the whole picture?
The cost of document imaging has gradually fallen over the years as technology has improved allowing faster scanning and much cheaper digital storage. On the other hand the cost of storage space, maintenance and utilities has risen sharply.
The effect is that cost comparisons from years ago simply no longer apply.
Decision makers are often blinded by the, seemingly unbeatable, short-term cost advantages but they ignore the overall cost of a service for the period it’s actually required.
For example, this typical UK storage company currently publishes a price of £35 to store up to 50 archive boxes per month.
Given that the generally accepted document retention period is 10 years we can easily deduce that to store 50 boxes for this period of time is going to cost:
£35 x 120 (months) = £4,200
Although that looks quite straightforward, if we add in an inflation rate of 3.5% this figure then becomes £4,927 over the 10 year period.
This is assuming that no documents/boxes are ever retrieved from storage! So let’s guess that there are 15 single box retrievals over the same period.
This company charges £12.50 per delivery/collection (plus a small charge per box, but we’ll ignore that for now) – so to retrieve a box and subsequently have it put back into storage is going to cost £25 – therefore:
£25 x 20 = £500
This brings the total up to £5427 to store 50 boxes offsite for 10 years.
At the end of that period they will also charge you either for secure document destruction or maybe return of your boxes to you for disposal.
Yet at our current box scanning price of £53/box the same 50 boxes would only cost
£2650
for indefinite storage, with no retrieval time delays/costs, better security and zero document degradation!
That’s a saving of £2,777
Makes you think!!
Click here for more information on our document archiving service, or for how our nationwide service can help your business Contact Us
