Virtual Fax – A Must Have Tool for Small Businesses

Good communication tools are essential to own a successful small business.  They help us stay in touch with customers and providers, allowing things to run smoothly and without delays or complications.  If you rely on faxing to communicate on a regular basis, you can improve the delivery of documents with virtual fax.

There are multiple companies that can enable us to fax from email in just a few steps and without the problems that traditional fax machines have, such as busy phone lines, paper jams, running out of ink, etc.

This new way of faxing is called “virtual fax”, because instead of printing all incoming documents and having to scan the ones you send, you can simply manage all files digitally.  That’s right, all incoming faxes arrive to your inbox as PDF files, and in the same way you can send faxes straight from email, using digital documents. For businesses, this means that you’ll spend less money and time faxing on a daily basis.

What Are the Advantages of Virtual Fax for Small Businesses?

A free fax number. Another big benefit of using virtual fax companies is that they provide you a fax number, totally free of charge.  When you create an account with a fax service you can choose between a local or a toll-free number, which people will use to send you faxes.  Contrary to what happens with common dedicated phone numbers, this line will never be busy.

Speed of delivery.  Faxing from your computer is many times faster than faxing through a machine.  Once you press Send, your digital files are automatically converted to a fax image and sent to its destination without running into issues such as paper jams and interrupted transmissions. You can send email to fax, or you can use your service’s website to send faxes.

Fax from anywhere. With the use of a mobile fax app, businesses can send, receive and even sign faxes in just a few taps.  There are apps that charge you per fax and others that work alongside online fax service subscriptions.  We recommend the latter option, because they actually give you a number to receive faxes. If your business requires to be always on the go, this is an invaluable feature.

Automatic delivery. Every fax coming your way is automatically saved to your account and sent to your email as a PDF, you don’t have to do anything because the process is 100% automatic.  Just make sure you enable notification on your phone and be able to read them electronically.  Since your line is never busy you won’t have to worry about missing a fax ever again.

Other advanced features. Basic faxing tasks are just the tip of the iceberg of what you can enjoy with online fax.  There are other features that can make faxing easier than ever before, such as the ability to schedule your fax at an exact date and time, fax broadcasting (send a single fax to a list of recipients at the same time, and integration with cloud storage platforms including Dropbox and Google Drive.

Choosing the Right Fax Company

To make the most out of online fax, you need to choose the right company.  You’ll find that some services promise you everything, but many times customers have to deal with unreachable numbers or fax servers going down without customer support at hand.  

Luckily, there are also companies that have proved time and time again that they are reliable and can really help your business take the next step in faxing.  I’m talking about companies such as RingCentral, eFax and Nextiva, which we have tried and continue to use to this very day.

If you are having trouble deciding on which fax service to use, you can take advantage of free fax trials.  Most fax companies give you the chance of creating a test-drive account, which you can cancel at any time. So, for a full month you can fully test the features of a service and check if it is really helpful in reaching your goals. A great thing about integrating an email to fax Google alternative in your business is that it is very quick to get started.  It only takes a few minutes to create a new account and pick the fax number you wish to use.  If you are in the US you’ll find that there are numbers for the vast majority of cities in the country, but if you are outside the US you’ll need more specialized services with international presence.