The process of scanning, storing and tracking physical cheques is way too long.
Canon Canada Inc. is trying to dramatically improve the process with the release of two new cheque scanners called the imageFORMULA CR-120 and CR-150. These two new machines will be part of the company’s existing line of cheque scanners.
Canon CR-150 and CR-120
The two new machines can handle 150 paper cheques at a time and roughly 12,000 cheque on a daily basis. The seven-pound unit has been designed to be more agile in the workplace, while being energy conscious. Both scanners use only 2.1 watts in sleep mode.
Andrea Bruce, the product marketing manager at Canon Canada in Brampton, Ont., said Canon Canada understands there are new kinds of workspaces in offices today. The imageFORMULA line has been built to accommodate everyone’s office workspace and they integrate well with existing accounting systems. “These areas are getting smaller. The beauty with these models is we got the speed and size in the right package for bank tellers and credit unions,” she said.
Canon Canada is celebrating the 20th anniversary of their imageFORMULA high-speed document scanner product line this year. Cheque scanners will be celebrating 10 years in 2017.
Bruce acknowledged that the role of paper cheques is diminishing, but according to the Bank of International Settlements, which looks over all the central banks of the world, a Canadian on average writes 18 cheques per year, while their American counterparts conduct 38 cheque transactions. The Bank of America reported that they processed about a billion cheques in 2016.
For those bank tellers and Credit Union staffers that could mean a long time at the traditional document scanner or office printer producing digital copies of each cheque. Then saving them on a computer.
“That’s way too many steps,” she said.
The imageFORMULA can do double sided scanning and through Canon’s Optical Character Recognition technology it takes mere minutes to process hundreds of cheques and get them stored on most accounting systems.
It also recognizes important data such as the cheque’s log number and account number. This removes the manual step of inputting this data because the imageFORMULA has auto-read capabilities, while also eliminating errors made because of manual data entry. It can also save and print to PDF and TIFF formats.
“It can scan in colour and it straightens the cheque out for you in the file,” Bruce added.
Another added feature is imageFORMULA’s fraud prevention technology. The machine can capture the image and read the bottom account numbers done on magnetic ink.
The imageFORMULA CR-120 has an MSRP of $1,750 and is available through major distributors such as Tech Data, Ingram Micro and Synnex.
According to Bruce, the two imageFORMULA scanners help with remote deposits, decreases the capture and input time and is ideal for small and large banks, retailers, and condo property managers. For channel partners the imageFORMULA provides another opportunity provide a full solution for interested in upgrading its scanning systems and accounting programs.