If your business receives a large amount of mail each day, you know how quickly it can pile up. Whether it’s invoices, checks, or other important business mail, staying on top of it can feel like a full-time job, and in many cases, it is.
Going fully digital with your communications might sound like an easy fix, but most businesses still need to handle at least some physical mail. The problem is, managing it in-house means training staff, setting aside space, and investing in additional equipment, and not every business has the resources to spare, especially for something as routine as mail handling.
Fortunately, there’s a better option. Our digital mailroom service is the easiest and most affordable way to outsource the management of your incoming business mail. Whether mail is central to your operations or simply something you can’t fully eliminate, we make it easier to stay on top of it.
In this article, we’ll explain what a digital mailroom service is, how it works, and why more businesses are choosing to hand off this time-consuming task to a third-party provider.
What is a Digital Mailroom Service?
A digital mailroom service packs everything you’d expect from a traditional onsite mailroom, including the staff, equipment, and know-how into a convenient, fully managed solution. Your incoming mail is redirected to a secure processing facility where it’s sorted, opened, and scanned into a searchable archive of digital files that can be accessed and distributed virtually.
From there, your digitized mail is delivered throughout your organization based on routing rules determined by you. It’s fast, it’s efficient, and it completely eliminates the need for manual handling on your end. No more paper piles, no more bottlenecks, no guesswork.
It’s an affordable way to bring structure and control to a part of your business that’s often overlooked and underappreciated.
How Does a Digital Mailroom Service Work?
A digital mailroom works by combining traditional mailroom processes like sorting and distribution with professional document scanning and indexing. Here’s is how the process works:
Step 1: Mail Redirection
The first step is rerouting your mail to our secure processing facility using a unique mailbox number assigned to your business. All it takes is updating your business address with the postal service. We also recommend letting your vendors and clients know directly, so you don’t have to rely on USPS mail forwarding to receive important documents.
Step 2: Mail Sorting
When mail arrives at our facility, it’s sorted and categorized based on the criteria you define, things like sender, recipient, or department. Whatever works best for your business, we follow your lead. The goal is to give you full control over how your mail is managed and distributed.
Step 3: Scanning
After sorting, each piece of mail is opened, scanned, and converted to PDF format. PDFs can be opened on nearly any device, making your mail easy to view, share, and store. Great care is taken during this step, as these digital files serve as the foundation for future processes like text extraction and searchability.
Step 4: Optical Character Recognition (Optional)
If required, OCR can be used to extract the text from your scanned mail. This makes the content both searchable and editable, so you can copy text directly from a document or look up files using names, keywords, or other details.
Step 5: Electronic Delivery
Once your mail is scanned, it’s delivered digitally to the appropriate departments or team members based on the categorization rules set during the sorting process. Whether delivery happens through email, a document management system, or a secure SFTP is entirely up to you. We offer flexible delivery options to ensure that the process as seamless as possible for your team.
Step 6: Storage
After scanning, your mail is held securely for 30 days in our secure vault. This grace period gives your team time to review the digital versions and request any physical items you’d like forwarded. If needed, we can send the originals to an address of your choice.
Step 7: Secure Disposal
Once the storage period ends, the remaining mail is securely destroyed via NAID® AAA Certified shredding and recycling processes, permanently destroying any and all sensitive information. A certificate of destruction can be provided for your records to support compliance with privacy regulations and retention policies.
As you can see, every step of our digital mailroom service is designed to give your business maximum flexibility with minimal effort on your part. To ensure that sensitive information, which is extremely common in business mail, is protected, all of our services are HIPAA certified and undergo unannounced security audits to maintain that standard.
For a more detailed look at how a digital mailroom works, check out our complete mailroom automation process diagram below:
What Are the Advantages of a Digital Mailroom Service?
Outsourcing your mailroom to a digital mailroom service like ours offers a wide range of benefits, especially for businesses that still rely on physical mail. but want to handle it with less effort, less cost, and far fewer headaches. Here are some of the biggest advantages:
Fast Turnaround
Our digital mailroom service gives your business access to the latest scanning technology, software, and sorting equipment, without having to purchase any of it yourself. You also get a team of trained professionals to run the entire operation, so there’s no need to hire or train staff internally.
This combination of expertise and top-tier equipment creates a mail processing pipeline that’s faster, more efficient, and far less of a hassle than managing it in-house.
Reduce the Cost of Processing Mail.
A digital mailroom is a far more cost-effective way to handle mail when compared to traditional in-house methods. Many of the most time-consuming tasks are streamlined and automated, making the process faster, more efficient, and less labor-intensive.
That added efficiency translates directly into lower costs, reducing the time, effort, and expense required to process each piece of mail.
Free Up Your Team’s Time
Sorting, opening, and routing mail takes time, time your team could be spending on more important tasks. With our digital mailroom service handling everything behind the scenes, your staff is freed from the busywork of mail management for good.
Even better, the mail that matters to your team shows up right where they’re already working, whether that’s email, a shared drive, or your document management system. There’s no need to open envelopes or track down missing mail, just quick, convenient access to what they need, when they need it.
Respond Faster to Customers and Vendors
When a customer or vendor sends something important, delays in processing mail can slow everything down. Our digital mailroom service gets incoming correspondence where it needs to go quickly, so your team can respond without unnecessary holdups.
Reclaim Valuable Office Space
Running an in-house mailroom takes up more space than most people realize, space that could be used for something more productive. Between sorting tables, filing cabinets, and storage for incoming mail, it quietly eats into your floor plan.
With a digital mailroom, all of that happens off-site. Your mail is processed securely and delivered to your team digitally, giving you back the space and cutting down on the overhead that comes with managing mail in-house.
Eliminate Satellite Mailrooms
Managing mail across multiple locations can get messy. Processes become harder to control, delays creep in, and important mail items slip through the cracks.
A digital mailroom helps you centralize your mail processing, no matter how many physical locations your business has. All incoming mail is routed to one location, where it’s distributed digitally to your team, no matter where they are. It’s a simpler, more reliable way to keep mail moving efficiently across your entire business.
Improve the Security of Your Mail.
Mail can contain sensitive information, and the more hands it passes through, the higher the risk. With our digital mailroom service, your mail is handled by a trained, HIPAA-compliant team in a secure facility, minimizing the chances of unauthorized access. Once digitized, your mail can be secured with password protection, access controls, encryption, or any other security features your business deems fit.
Create an Electronic Audit Trail
Digitizing your incoming mail creates a built-in audit trail, giving you visibility into every step of the process. From the moment a piece of mail is received, its journey is tracked and recorded automatically.
This makes it easier to meet compliance requirements, maintain a clear chain of custody, and keep sensitive information accounted for at all times.
Use Data to Improve How You Handle Mail
One of the lesser-known benefits of a digital mailroom is the visibility it gives you. With every piece of mail converted into digital data, you can start to spot trends, like where delays are happening, how long it takes for mail to reach certain departments, or what types of mail you receive most often.
This kind of insight makes it easier to fine-tune your processes, track performance, and make smarter decisions about how your mail is managed day to day.
Bonus: No More Junk Mail.
Tired of sorting through junk? With a digital mailroom, you can set rules to automatically filter out unwanted solicitations before they ever reach your team. You stay in control of what gets delivered and what gets tossed, so your employees can spend less time digging through clutter, and more time on what matters.
What comes next?
If you’re ready to take the stress out of managing your mail, SecureScan can help. With over 22 years of experience, we provide a fully staffed, fully automated mailroom solution built to handle whatever comes your way.
Every member of our team is trained in HIPAA-compliant document handling, and our secure process ensures your mail is treated with care every step of the way. Contact us today for more information about how to get started with our digital mailroom service, or get a free quote from one of our technicians to get started.
