Emailing and signing digital documents is the new wave of doing business. You’ll find insurance companies, banks, and a host of other corporations now using digital documents and signatures for new and existing customers.
And who’s complaining? It’s ultra-convenient, allowing you to print out your car insurance cards immediately, establish electricity at a new location, and open up a bank account virtually.
You can offer the same level of convenience to your clients and business partners by using digital documents.
One way to do this is to scan documents to a platform like Xodo Sign to be emailed and signed digitally.
Today, you can do this while on the go using mobile apps. These are available for both Android and iOS tablets and smartphones.
Let’s take a look at some of the top mobile scanner apps out there today.
What to Look for in a Mobile Scanner App
Before we begin listing mobile scanner apps, it’s important to go over some of the things you want to look for when shopping around.
For starters, you want an application that’s going to provide a quality image of the document you’re scanning. So you need an app with an auto scanning function that detects document edges and puts text into focus.
There’s nothing worse than having a blurry scan that’s illegible. Many apps don’t have this feature and require you to push a button for it to scan.
This is important because you need to hold your hand steady during the scan. Pushing a button makes this difficult.
You also want an app that’ll turn your document image into a digitized version—a PDF. There are some apps that require a secondary app to complete this process.
Then once the PDF is created, you want to be able to share, print, and export the files. While features are great to have, you don’t want to overlook quality.
It’s better to have a quality scan and reliable functionality than the most advanced features. So keep this in mind when making your final choice.
1. Dropbox Business
Dropbox is an app that’s known for its document management services. It comes with a free version with limited space.
The app is available on both Android and iOS devices. You can use it to scan text and create multi-page documents, which is great for contracts and other long paperwork.
This is one of the apps that doesn’t support PDFs, so you’ll have to use another app to transfer file types.
All of the documents you upload are stored in the cloud for safe-keeping as well. Plus, you can upgrade your account for 120 days of file recovery.
2. Microsoft OfficeLens
This is another app you can use in collaboration with other tools. It’s a good idea to have OneDrive and Word to turn your smartphone or tablet into an office away from the office.
It’s a free app that allows you to scan documents on the go. It comes with OCR (optical character recognition) technology, which enables it to convert printed characters into digital text.
You can also search and edit the document using a word processing software (hence why we recommend the Word app).
You’ll also have to save the scan as a .docx file to OneDrive and then open it up in Word. Here, you’ll have the editable text and then once you’re done, you can save the final version as a PDF.
It’s not as convenient as others, but worth considering since it’s free.
Do note that you’ll need a Microsoft account to use it, which you can easily sign up for free of charge. It works for both iOS and Android devices.
3. Scanbot Pro
You’ll find that it’s difficult to scan documents that are ripped, wrinkled, or otherwise imperfect using certain mobile scanners. But you don’t have this issue with Scanbot Pro.
It’s capable of capturing pages with odd shapes and sizes, as well as those with a mix of typed and handwritten text. The OCR processing is automatic and the digitized version shows up next to the original scanned image.
You can easily jump from one tab to the other to compare the two. Depending on how obscure the text on the document is, there may be some editing to do manually.
But you’ll find this is still faster than typing out print documents page by page. It’s also worth noting that this app supports 60 languages.
You can use this on both iOS and Android devices.
4. Scanner for Me + OCR
When you’re on the go and need to scan and email a document quickly, this app is the one you want on your mobile device. Scanner for Me + OCR comes with all the capabilities you need to get the job done efficiently.
It scans documents and transitions them into digital formats at lightning speed. Plus, it detects 13 languages, including English, French, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, and Japanese.
Once your scan is complete, you can save it as an image or text and send it via email, iCloud, Apple Message, and a variety of other methods. It comes at a nominal fee and is only available on iOS devices.
5. CamScanner
This app is available to Android and iOS devices. It’s free to use and is quite popular with over 100 million downloads. You can use this to scan everything from receipts and notes to images and business cards.
It’s an ideal tool when you’re a businessperson who’s constantly on the go and networking along the way. You can add tags to the documents you scan and store them in folders for better organization.
Plus, you can share them on social media at the press of a button. Then if you need to fax or perform cloud printing, you can do so right from the app.
It comes with OCR technology to make transferring images into digital formats seamless.
And let’s not forget about security – you can add a password to your files to prevent unauthorized access.
6. Tiny Scanner
Here’s a great document scanning tool you can use if you’re looking for something simple. Sometimes, you don’t need all of the complex features boasted by many of the other mobile scanning apps.
Instead, you want something that gets the job done – nothing more and nothing less. With Tiny Scanner, you get a simple interface.
You can use it to scan documents either in grayscale, color, or black and white. Then after you take the scan, you can choose various contrast levels to make it easier to see.
The app detects document edges, but if needed, you can adjust it before saving the scan. One feature it comes with is the ability to add a password to your files. It comes with a one-time fee of $5, which grants you access to unlimited document scans, batch scanning, AirPrint, and cloud services.
It’s available on both iOS and Android devices.
7. Genius Scan
This app boasts having digitized a whopping half a billion documents and counting. It’s the go-to app to use when you need to turn documents into PDFs and JPGs.
It comes with smart page detection, image enhancement, and perspective correction features. Then if you have documents with multiple pages, you can do batch scans to get them all in seconds.
Best of all, you get scans that are legible – after all, what good is a contract no one can read? Then you can tag and title all of your files for better organization.
Then sharing the files is simple – you can upload them to platforms like Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive or One Drive.
This app works on both Android and iOS devices.
Bonus: Combine These Scanner Apps With Xodo Sign
Since this is a web-based platform, you can use this on any device, including iOS, Android, and desktop devices. It’s designed for people and businesses (large and small).
It’s free to use and comes with low monthly fees if you decide to upgrade to unlock all of its features. This platform is unique in that it not only uploads documents but also allows you to sign them.
You can use Xodo Sign in conjunction with a mobile scanning application. Just upload the document to OneDrive, GoogleDrive, Dropbox, or even Gmail to upload to the platform.
Then send it to your counterparts to sign digitally. You can use your smartphone or tablet to hand write your signature, upload an image of your signature, or you can auto-generate one through the platform.
Turning Your Mobile Device into a Scanner
When you own or manage a business, you need tools to make your job easier, wherever you may be. This includes being able to scan, upload, and email documents within minutes.
You never know when you need to deliver a new contract, NDA, or other agreement to a potential client. This could be the difference between you gaining or losing a new customer.
With this solid list of mobile scanning apps, you can be sure you’re ill-prepared to handle these matters when they come your way.
So give them a try and let us know in the comments which you decide to go with!