Scanning services near Allentown, PA
An auditor picks a year at random and asks for four files from it. Producing three of them counts the same as producing none. Boxes on a shelf make that a morning’s work, and an index makes it a search.
Pennsylvania projects average about 136,500 pages, which is a lot of paper to hunt through by hand and very little to index by machine.
What OCR is, and why the index matters more
Optical character recognition — the process that turns the shapes on a scanned page into text a computer can match. It answers a search for a phrase buried inside a document.
Indexing — the fields attached to the file itself: grant number, program, year of award. Indexing answers the question the auditor actually asked, which was for a file rather than a phrase.
Most bids price these together and some price them apart, which is the single biggest reason two quotes for the same boxes look nothing alike.
What the office gets back afterward
Searchable files, delivered as PDFs, with the originals either returned or sent to certified destruction. Record Nations matches Allentown offices with providers who quote the indexing as its own line, because the index is what a retrieval test actually measures.
Get scanning quoted before the next audit
Give a provider a page estimate and the fields you search by. Record Nations returns free quotes from Pennsylvania companies with capture and indexing broken out, so the cheaper bid isn’t quietly the one that skipped the part that counts.
