Getting your business off the ground and maintaining key functions is no easy task. Dealing with incoming mail is critical to keeping any business running properly, but it can be surprisingly time-consuming, especially as your business grows in size and complexity. Mail forwarding services can help simplify, streamline, and standardize your mail handling processes. It’s also great for any business that deals with freelancers or digital nomads who need secure access to their incoming business mail from anywhere around the world.

What is Mail Forwarding?

Mail forwarding is, essentially, exactly what it sounds like - a service that receives incoming mail at one central location and forwards it to the intended recipient at a different specified address. It’s particularly useful for companies with large, distributed workforces, as well as small businesses that may change locations often. Demand for mail forwarding has been growing as businesses embrace the work from anywhere movement and grant greater flexibility to their workers.

In today’s digital-first world, most mail forwarding is done by digitization. This process involves receiving physical paper mail items at a central facility, where the items are sorted, opened, and scanned using high-definition scanners, converted into searchable digital documents, and routed electronically to the intended recipient. The physical mail can then be forwarded, stored, or destroyed, based on user preferences.

These services often also offer virtual addresses, which allows businesses to centralize mail flow and establish a physical presence in certain regions or cities.

The best mail forwarding services give you complete control of all incoming mail. Whether you choose to have certain items forwarded to you, scanned digitally and sent to you via email – or whether you need to attach e-signatures to your mail, archive mail items, or even shred junk mail – you have the freedom to choose what to receive and what to eliminate.

Avoid Losing Mail When Relocating

As businesses grow and expand, upgrading to larger or more conveniently located centers of operation is often necessary. Alternatively, businesses adopting more flexible work from anywhere policies may find it advantageous to downsize their office space and opt for smaller, less expensive real estate. Whatever the reason for relocating, an office move often risks mail getting delivered to the wrong address. Missing crucial business related mail or notices can lead to big headaches, and potentially missed deadlines and lost revenues.

Additionally, businesses with branches, teams, or operations located in other countries can benefit from mail forwarding for expats as well.

Eliminate Unwanted Mail

Paper might not seem like it takes up much space, but anyone who’s had to deal with a lot of junk mail knows how quickly it can pile up, especially when deliveries accumulate over time. Sifting through every individual piece of mail delivered to an office location and physically sorting and organizing them based on importance is time-consuming and tedious work.

Many mail forwarding companies work with national post offices to offer an online postal mail service to their clients. With this type of service, customers get their postal mail electronically. The best part about this service is the removal of ever receiving mail that is considered irrelevant to the company.

Go Paperless by Digitizing Mail

Digital transformation has been reshaping businesses and internal processes for years now, delivering greater efficiency and improved outcomes for companies and customers alike. No matter where your business is in its digitization journey, digitizing mail services is an excellent next step. With powerful optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR) software, paper mail is converted into full digital copies as they are scanned. These digital files make for easy integration with downstream systems that rely on digital inputs for even faster processing.

Effectively Outsource Mail Management

Mail management is outside of the core operations for the vast majority of businesses. That means it’s inefficient for them to devote staff and work hours to handling incoming mail - especially as businesses grow and the volume of incoming mail and critical business tasks expand. Business mail forwarding is a convenient way to manage mail related tasks, allowing employees to focus on other areas of their operations.

Whether it’s dedicating more time to work on human resource management, operating procedures and product development – the ultimate result leads to improved performance and by extension increased profits for businesses.

Improve Communication

Another benefit of using mail forwarding is having better managed communication with business partners, employees, and clients. These types of services facilitate speedier, more dependable mail delivery and also offer added features like electronic signatures and easily accessible addresses that facilitate exchange or requests.

Save Money

Businesses that use mail forwarding services benefit from reduced operational costs in the form of fewer courier fees, eliminated in-office filing and storage costs, and no need for PO boxes or similar postal storage options. Additionally, the traditional mail forwarding lacks the flexibility to receive your mail at any given time. Digitizing incoming mail services also typically leads to a reduced need for onsite headcount.

Learn more about how Exela’s Digital Mailroom solution can help your business operate more efficiently, enable remote workers, and take advantage of digital innovations.

There’s no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a monumental impact on the way that business gets done. Across industries and around the world, businesses had to quickly adapt to social distancing, remote working arrangements, and a surging demand for contactless, digital solutions like paper digitization.

This kicked broad digital transformation into overdrive. According to McKinsey, adoption of e-commerce options among consumers shot up in the early months of 2020 to levels it would have taken 10 years to reach otherwise.

These changes weren’t limited to outward customer-facing interactions. Many internal processes were shifted to accommodate social distancing. It’s likely that, in the post-pandemic future, remote work will carry on, largely in the form of hybrid work models, that allow employees to split their week between working from home and coming into the office.

The pandemic has rapidly transformed the way that businesses operate, bringing digital solutions to the forefront and raising the bar for competition between organizations, both in terms of customer service and employee satisfaction. One of the most important steps in fostering a digital transformation within your organization is digital data delivery including paper digitization. That means not only capturing data that originates in digital forms, but also digitizing physical data.

The Cost of Paper

Paper may be a staple of daily life, but there are plenty of reasons for businesses to switch to digital options. For starters, the cost of paper can add up pretty quickly - especially with a global paper shortage and supply chain bottlenecks driving up prices. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of paper has gone up by 14.2% in the past year, largely thanks to the 50.2% increase in the cost of wood pulp. Considering an average office worker in the US will use more than 10,000 sheets of paper each year, that price increase can really start to impact your bottom line.

While one individual piece of paper may not take up much space, that square footage can add up very quickly when you’re dealing with many years-worth of documents. A single filing cabinet can take up about 16 square feet when you include space to fully open the drawers. With the average annual cost per square foot of office space in the United States coming in at almost $39 (with a high of $85.82 in Manhattan), a single file cabinet costs on average about $624 per year, just to store paper.

Paper is also time-consuming and limiting. Information stored on paper documents can only be accessed after manually searching through files and then physically entering the relevant information into whatever process it was originally needed for. By digitizing paper documents with advanced optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent document processing (IDP) technologies, you can unlock the full potential of all your stored information and data - even from physical paper sources. 

Paper Digitization

Solutions like Exela’s Digital Mailroom (DMR) are an excellent place to kickstart your digital transformation. Even amidst a boom in digital solutions, many important business processes rely on physical mail. Incoming mail is one of the clearest continuous sources of physical paper documents. Exela’s DMR receives paper mail on your behalf and transforms it into fully digital assets - searchable, trackable, and easier to integrate with downstream digital workflows.

But Exela doesn’t stop with digitizing mail. For example, while records digitization may sound like a daunting and time-consuming task, our high-capacity, high-definition scanning solutions can be leveraged to streamline and automate much of the work involved. Paper digitization saves a great deal of space and hassle, and makes it easier to access and utilize the information stored in your old documents, turning them into assets rather than just space-fillers.

Our digitization technology can also be applied to Accounts Receivable and payment processing. In fact, the predecessor of our IntelliScan platform was first implemented to process checks and remittance documentation - and it’s only gotten better since then. By digitizing payments and payment processing, you can prevent bottlenecks and help maintain a steady revenue stream to support the rest of your business.

The Future of Paper Digitization is Here

Typical scanning of a document may technically digitize it, but it requires the involvement of optical character recognition (OCR) technology to transform the document into a digitized document in which the text is actually searchable text. Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) takes things one step further. IDP leverages natural language processing and cognitive computing to derive meaning and context from scanned text.

This effectively provides an easier and much faster way to deliver data to robotic processing automation (RPA) tools, thus unlocking the full potential of a given document. IDP can handle document types as diverse as invoices, health records, insurance claims, and legal case files, making it broadly useful across a wide range of industries. The ability to transform essentially any physical or digital document type into a manipulable data asset can lead to immense gains in efficiency and productivity.

Get started digitizing with Exela’s Digital Mailroom solution.