If your business receives a large amount of mail each day, you know how quickly it piles up. Whether it’s invoices, checks, or other important business mail, staying on top of it all can feel like a full-time job, and in many cases, it is.
Leaning into email and switching everything over to paperless billing might feel like an easy workaround, but most businesses still need to handle at least some physical mail. The problem is, managing it in-house means training staff, setting aside a dedicated space for it, and investing in 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 businesses mail. Whether mail plays a big role in your business or it’s just something that can’t be avoided, our service makes it easier to sort, process, and route it where it needs to go.
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?
Our digital mailroom service brings everything you’d expect from a traditional onsite mailroom, staff, equipment, and expertise into one convenient, fully managed solution. Incoming mail is redirected to our secure processing facility where it’s sorted, opened, and scanned into a searchable archive of digital files that your team can access on the day that it arrives.
From there, your digitized mail is routed based on the rules you set, ensuring it reaches the right department or employee. It’s fast, efficient, and eliminates the need for manual handling. No paper piles, no bottlenecks, no guesswork
It’s an affordable way to bring order and efficiency to a part of your business that’s often overlooked but makes a real impact when managed well.
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
It all starts with rerouting your mail to our secure mail processing facility, where we give your business its own unique mailbox number. From there, you just update your address with the postal service and let your vendors and clients know about the change, so you don’t have to rely on USPS mail forwarding to continue to receive your mail.
Step 2: Mail Sorting
When your mail arrives at our facility, it’s sorted and categorized according to the rules you set, by sender, recipient, department, or whatever works best for your business. You stay in control of how everything is managed and distributed, just as you would if it were being handled in-house.
Step 3: Scanning
After sorting, each piece of mail is opened, scanned, and converted to PDF. Because PDFs can be viewed on almost any device, your mail is easy to access, share, and store. This step also lays the groundwork for optional enhancements like OCR, which makes documents fully searchable.
Step 4: Optical Character Recognition (Optional)
If needed, OCR can be used to extract text from your scanned mail. This makes the content both searchable and editable, so you can copy text directly from a mail item or quickly find files by name or keyword.
Step 5: Electronic Delivery
Once your mail is scanned, it’s delivered digitally to the appropriate departments or team members according to your preferences. Whether final 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 stored 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 any address you choose.
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 requirements and retention policies.
Every part of our digital mailroom service is built to give your business flexibility without adding more work for your team. Since business mail often includes sensitive information, we provide a dedicated HIPAA-compliant mailing address for your incoming mail. All of our services meet strict HIPAA standards and undergo unannounced security audits to ensure continued compliance and protection for your data.
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 plenty of benefits, especially for businesses that still rely on physical mail but want to manage it with less effort, lower costs, and fewer headaches. Here are some of the biggest advantages:
Fast Turnaround
With a digital mailroom, your business gets access to advanced scanning technology, sorting equipment, and specialized software, without having to purchase or maintain any of it. You also gain a team of trained professionals who handle the entire process, eliminating the need to hire or train staff in-house.
This combination of expertise and technology creates a mail processing workflow that’s faster, more reliable, and far less stressful than trying to manage it yourself.
Reduce the Cost of Processing Mail.
A digital mailroom offers a more cost-effective way to manage incoming mail compared to traditional in-house methods. Many of the most time-consuming tasks are automated, making the process faster, more efficient, and less labor-intensive.
That improved workflow translates directly into savings by cutting down the time, effort, and expense involved in handling 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 most shows up right where your team is already working, whether that’s via email, a shared drive, or your existing document management system. No envelopes to open, no missing items to track down, just quick and convenient access to the information they need.
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.
