Brian Tankersley, CPA, and Randy Johnston,. take a look at the Ricoh ScanSnap iX2500, the newest flagship model in the ScanSnap family. Tax and accounting firms have long trusted the ScanSnap line as a component of their paperless/digitization strategy. Watch the video, listen to the audio, or read the transcript.
The Accounting Tech Lab is an ongoing series that explores the intersection of public accounting and technology.
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The Accounting Tech Lab is an ongoing series that explores the intersection of public accounting and technology.
Transcript (Note: There may be typos due to automated transcription errors.)
SPEAKERS
Randy Johnston, Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA
Randy Johnston 00:10
Welcome to the Accounting Technology Lab. I’m Randy Johnston with co host Brian Tankersley, have an exciting new product to talk to you about today, the Ricoh ScanSnap IX, 2500 now the folks at PFU, the company, which has been around since 1960 with 16 billion in revenue, has introduced a new product in the ScanSnap line. And I got the pleasure of using this product before it was announced publicly. And my feedback, frankly, is going to be pretty stellar. I like a lot about the product itself. It’s got a simple, easy setup. It’s a high performance scanner. Brian will talk to me more about that. I like the new Wi Fi connectivity and the way it works with smartphones. I’ve scanned all sorts of formats of paper. In fact, even this week, I had a requirement to have a business card. And it’s like, I just dropped the business card in there and scanned it, and poof, I had it. Just like, right away, it was so doggone easy to do all that further. Much of the software integrations that you know with the ScanSnap continue to be available in this new model. So, Brian, you know, again, I’ve had the pleasure of using this, but I think you’ve got a little bit of background on term, in terms of the basic capabilities of the scans have 2500
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 01:34
Yeah. So, so this, you know, again, the reason we’ve always liked the scan snap scanner so much, even though they don’t have a Twain or ISIS driver, so, so what that means to you in English is that certain applications, like smart vault can talk directly to the ScanSnap, but they it doesn’t talk directly to every document management system and every front end tool. You have to use their front end tool for it, okay, which is the ScanSnap Home app available on PC or mobile. But the thing is, this is a, this is a business class scanner. Okay, so it does 45 pages. 45 pages a minute. It tray holds up to 100 pages. Scans front and back at the same time. It has the brake roller and ultrasonic multi feed detection. You know, 15 years ago, you had to buy a $1,500 scanner to get that. Now it’s included in the lower end. In the lower end stuff, five inch LCD touchscreen, again, that you can use to to to to scan, to to mobile or to USB.
Randy Johnston 02:30
And if I could interrupt you on that point again, I’ve been using this scanner for six weeks at this point, and traditionally, I haven’t used the skin scanner screens much at all. They weren’t very useful. You also know, historically, our listeners don’t know this, but you would know Brian that a lot of touch screens don’t recognize my skin in a touch. So I have trouble on almost all smartphones or tablets, for example. So I’ve always been a little funny when it comes touch screen, this bloody touch screens five inches. It’s very responsive. Everything that I did on it worked the first time. Now that’s you would say, Well, shouldn’t they all work like that? For some of us, they don’t, and that was a huge surprise to me, because when they told me it was going to have a five inch LCD touchscreen, I said, Oh, great. You know, I won’t use that. No, Randy’s wrong.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 03:25
Randy’s absolutely right, because, you know, we’ve known each other. We’ve worked together for 20 years now. And the thing about it is that I can’t tell you how many times he would have a phone or a any kind of touch screen that he couldn’t interact with because of some thing with him. I mean, maybe it’s a magnetic personality, maybe it’s an electric maybe it’s an electricity he’s got going on, I don’t know what, but it’s, it’s that that has been a consistent thing I’ve seen over the last 20 years, including going to CES for 15
Randy Johnston 03:56
Yeah. So Brian, just a social comment for our readers. You know a mum who has been gone now for about 18 months, had the same skin type. And we used to joke because we couldn’t provide her any type of watch or pendant that had a clock, because the electricity in her body always stopped those so we always used to razz her mom, you have a face that is stop a clock. And it turns out it wasn’t the face, it was the skin. I can do the same thing, and have done it with a lot of electronics. And we actually have a friend of the family who can only use a keyboard for about 30 days before the electricity in their skin burns out the keyboards. So they have a keyboard replacement budget, because every time they touch electronics, it burns down. So friends those types of weird side things. When you’ve got team members, employees that have those type of attributes, you know, they’re not making stuff up. It could be real. Well, the focus here is supposed to be on scan staff, not on
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 04:52
I’m just, I have to, I have one in the strike zone. I can’t let go through without swinging at it. You know, the thing about it is. That you must have been developed when you were working with apple in the in the 80s and 90s, when Steve Jobs was developing that reality distortion field that he had, you know, maybe that threw off some electricity, or something like that. I don’t know. That
Randy Johnston 05:14
is pretty, pretty wild, but probably a pretty good observation. Well, you know, the other thing that I used a fair bit on this new model was the scan, drag and drop quick menu as well. So I wanted our listeners to know that that feature is a new that new Quick Menu, and I have customized that to great advantage. So when you’re talking about the profiles and destinations for the users, I’ve always set up all scanners to have these profiles and destinations, so I could scan black and white, or I could do OCR for work papers and so forth. This new menu is way easier to use on that, in my opinion, so that part of it has been very, very useful and intuitive.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:00
So did you use the scan to mobile? Much Randy? You
Randy Johnston 06:04
know, I used it enough to know that it was useful to me. And historically, when this was first released, I got the vision of it, but there were some restrictions early on. And nowadays, I think it’s actually good. You can do multiple profiles on the mobile device today, and that’s only supported in the scan SAP line on the ix 2500 Z understand it, but you can retrieve, you know, information. For example, if you do a business card, you can get the phone number and address and use it for sending an email. So you can do all of that in the ScanSnap cloud, even without a PC. And that’s been pretty useful as well.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 06:50
IOS and Android both Yes,
Randy Johnston 06:53
sir, and that seems to be, you know, true in most of the lines here. So we’ve got support. So you know, the software itself comes with ScanSnap home, or the scanner itself, and it’s really a pretty simple document management system. So for our sole practitioners, are very small environments, this may wind up being your substitute document management system, but I did like that. It was JPEG, PDF and searchable. PDF output,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 07:27
very nice. What about the speed? Does it? Do, you know, did you feel like the speed was as fast as the production scanner used to using, you
Randy Johnston 07:37
know, as matter of fact, it’s spot on. The vendor claims 45 pages a minute. It’s got to be hitting all of that 45 pages a minute. And when I look at my legacy production scanners, because I was fortunate enough to use fast ones, as you were, 30 and 60 pages a minute, you know the first time to first page to scan, speed was good, and also just the throughput was good. So was 45 as fast as my 60. No, was it notably quicker than the 30? Yes, and what really got my attention on this release, Brian, was the price of the product.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 08:16
Yeah, so $459 and that’s 459 99 I haven’t gone out to look at Amazon to see what they’re selling it out there, but it’s, you know, the street price has got to be pretty amazing on that.
Randy Johnston 08:30
Yeah. So you know, it is not frequent that we will focus a whole episode of the accounting Technology Lab on a single product. But so many of you historically have purchased scan snaps in the past, or Fujitsu or Rico production scanners, and this may be time for an upgrade for some of you, because again, at this price point, at this feature set, it’s certainly worth buying one to experiment, even if you only used it in your homes. But I think what will happen is you’ll wind up using this in your office, and scanners won’t break. Most of the ones that you buy from Rico or historically Fujitsu, about all you do is put maintenance kits in them, because they just won’t die. But this new feature set on this one with the ultrasonic multi feed detection, which has not traditionally been a scan snap feature, that’s a great thing.
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 09:32
And I’m kind of thinking that, you know, I don’t know what your workflows look like lately, but my workflow incorporates much less scanning than it did in the past. So where one of those production scanners absolutely made sense 510, years ago. Maybe this is a place to kind of downshift a little bit if you you know, as you’re replacing those production scanners, certainly, if you’ve still got them, they’re great. But I don’t know about you, but I’m finding that I do less and less. Less imaging of paper documents anymore. I find that I’m doing more and more work with things electronically. And so this is a, you know, this would be perfect for when you have a paper document that you have to do an electronic signature on, or something like that, you know. But again, it’s, I think it’s, it’s perfect for the firm that’s kind of downshifting their the amount of imaging they have to do, and going to something that’s simpler, that’s more mobile friendly, that’s more like your what’s your kids want?
Randy Johnston 10:29
Yeah, on that point. Brian, yes, I do not scan near as much as I did. An excellent point. But I also know that there are times when I kind of get trapped where I’m out in the field. And, you know, using the mobile phone and the scanning products that we have taught people to use there, I don’t believe would be as good as the ScanSnap mobile. So, you know, you may get kind of an upgrade on your mobile scanning experience if you use this type of product. Well, Brian, any parting thoughts here for our listeners today,
Brian F. Tankersley, CPA.CITP, CGMA 11:03
one thing I did want to point out here is that it does have Wi Fi six on it, and so you it doesn’t have the six gig spectrum that you get with wi fi 60 or Wi Fi seven, but it does have the five gig spectrum, which which lets you have much more bandwidth than you do on the on the traditional 2.4 gig Wi Fi. What this means is that you can use it. Means it you’re going to be much it’s going to be much easier when you’re scanning over Wi Fi, or over, you know, or to a mobile device, honestly, than you’ve had in previous generations, simply because it will use that five gigahertz spectrum where there’s more bandwidth available through there. Just, okay, you know. Again, I didn’t mean to completely geek out and get into all those specs, but the point here is that it will, it should work significantly faster for mobile than some of the older generation ones that were 2.4 gig only.
Randy Johnston 11:52
Yeah, and I did notice the performance improvements on Wi Fi, so I’m glad I asked you that. Well, we appreciate you listening in today, and we’ll talk to you again soon in another accounting Technology Lab. Good day.
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