Most cloud fax value calculations are worthless, and they are worthless in a predictable way: they compare a plan price against a made-up figure for what fax “really costs”, and the made-up figure is doing all the work.
This page does the opposite. It sets out which numbers you can actually collect, which you cannot, and how to put them together, and it deliberately gives you no benchmark saving, because any figure we published for your organization would be invented.
What you can actually measure
Four things, all of which exist on documents somebody already receives.
Line rental
The dedicated analog lines your fax machines sit on. This is normally the largest single item and the easiest to verify. It is on a telephony bill, and the fax lines are usually identifiable once you have the number inventory.
Where to get it: the carrier bill, per line, per month.
Hardware and consumables
Machines and their replacement cycle, toner or ribbon, paper, and any maintenance or service contract.
Where to get it: purchase records and the maintenance contract. Spread capital cost over the replacement cycle you actually use, not the one in the manual.
Transmission charges
Per-minute or long-distance charges on outbound faxing, where they still apply. Often small, occasionally not, particularly for international.
Where to get it: the same carrier bill.
The new cost
The plan that matches your measured page volume, plus toll-free numbers, extra sending users and any storage above the plan, all published on the pricing page. Plus, separately and honestly, any integration scoped as its own piece of work.
That gives you an arithmetic you can defend:
(line rental + hardware + consumables + maintenance + transmission charges) minus (plan + options), per month, using your own bills.
It is a smaller and duller number than most vendor calculators produce. It is also one that survives being checked.
What you cannot honestly put a number on
These are real effects. Quantifying them requires assumptions you would be inventing, so state them as findings rather than as currency.
Time spent walking to the machine, waiting, re-sending. Real, and the standard way to price it: headcount × a loaded hourly rate × a guessed number of minutes: is a guess dressed as a calculation. If you want this number, measure it for a week rather than model it.
Faxes that failed and nobody noticed. Genuinely costly and, before the migration, genuinely unmeasurable, which is precisely the problem. You will only be able to size it after you have transmission reports.
Documents delayed on a machine in an empty corridor. Matters most where the document is time-sensitive, and there is no clean way to price it in advance.
Risk reduction. Removing an unattended tray of other people's information reduces exposure. Converting that to an expected-loss figure requires an incident probability nobody credibly has.
A business case that lists these as unquantified benefits is stronger than one that assigns them confident numbers, because a reviewer can check every number in the first kind.
What to measure after the move
The useful measurements start once you have transmission records, and they are worth capturing because they are the ones you could not get before.
Transmission success rate, and where failures cluster. By destination, by document size. This is the metric that tells you whether the move solved the reliability problem you had, and it usually reveals that failures concentrate on a handful of counterparties.
Time to delivery for inbound documents. From arrival to reaching the person or system that acts on it. If the migration only moved the bottleneck from a corridor to an inbox, this shows it.
Actual page volume against plan. Monthly, against your busy month rather than your average. This is what tells you whether you sized the plan correctly and whether seasonality is biting.
Storage growth against retention policy. If storage is growing and nothing is ever disposed of, the retention policy exists on paper only.
Lines actually canceled. The plainest measure of whether the program finished. Savings are not realized when the service goes live; they are realized when the analog line is canceled, and the gap between those two dates is where the business case quietly leaks.
Set the baseline before you migrate
Two months of page volumes and one clean month of fax-attributable telephony cost, captured before anything changes. Neither is reconstructable afterwards, and without them every later comparison is an argument rather than a measurement.
Record the number of lines and machines at the same time. It is the simplest before-and-after there is, and it is the one a finance reviewer will ask for first.
How to present it
Three parts, in this order.
The arithmetic: measured costs out, published costs in, with the source of every figure named. Any figure whose source you cannot name should come out.
The constraints: what made this necessary regardless of cost. If a phone system move broke fax reliability, or a counterparty requires a channel you cannot currently operate safely, that is often the real justification and the arithmetic is secondary.
The unquantified benefits, listed and labeled as unquantified.
If the arithmetic alone does not justify it, say so. A modernization that is justified by constraint rather than by saving is an entirely respectable case, and it is a far better one than a saving that was manufactured to reach a threshold.
Where to go next
How Much Does Electronic Fax Cost? covers the cost side in detail. Building a Roadmap for Electronic Fax is where this sits in a program, and Migrating from Fax Machines to Cloud Fax is the execution.
If you send us your page volumes and your fax line rental, we will do this arithmetic with you and tell you what it comes to, including if the answer is that it is not worth doing. Ask us.
Sources
- LABUSA eFaaS pricing: the authoritative source for every plan and option figure.
- ITU-T Recommendation T.38: real-time Group 3 facsimile over IP networks.
- 47 CFR Part 52, Subpart C: number portability, Electronic Code of Federal Regulations.