Welcome to one of BeYourOwnIT.com’s free tech support videos. The theme this week is small business solutions. I’ve been working on a website design guide and a couple other small business tips and tricks that help you make your business more efficient. The topic of this video is faxes. I can’t remember the last time I’ve ever needed to send a fax besides what’s on this blog post, but people still use them. Governments still use them, local, city, and businesses still use fax. It’s still a good, acceptable way to send an original document. People don’t always accept emails. So there definitely is a need for them out there.

Due to some recent parking violations I realized just how scarce the fax machine really is. I couldn’t find a single person that owned one, so I ended up looking for an online solution to send and receive faxes from my computer and I came across eFax. I know they’ve been around for a long time and they’re very well respected. I just wanted to inform the community a little bit about how nice this software is, how quick and easy it works.

I made a blog post on my website and I also have their banner here. Basically, you sign up for it. You get your own fax number. It’s local, so people can fax to it. It goes straight to your email inbox. This is great for a bunch of reasons, for filing, for sending files straight from your computer.

Before programs like eFax you’d have to use one of those bulky, all‑in‑one HP machines to fax directly from your computer, but now you can take a word document and fax it using their software.

You can receive faxes straight to your inbox and then edit them and forward them on. You can do a whole host of great things with it. You have access from anywhere. The faxes come through and the fax is an attachment so it’s a lot easier. You can delete it. You can check it at your convenience. You don’t have faxes inundating you all day.

It’s really a good thing for businesses to use. I know a lot of local businesses in the area have switched to digital faxing for the record keeping. It eliminates paper and greens things up a little bit.

What I did was I wrote a little bit about it on my blog and I offered a few links up where you can get a 30 day free trial. A couple people that I heard back from already are using it and really enjoy it. I turned my parents on to it, they use it because they do some faxing with their home business.

You really can’t go wrong with eFax. They’re definitely an industry leader. So read about it because you’d be surprised how much you can do. You can do all sorts of different formats. You can send PDFs. You can send TIFFs, image files. It’s far more robust than I ever thought it might be. So, check out eFax and that should solve anything you need for sending and receiving faxes via email.