Photos or scans: what to ask clients to send

Ask clients to send a flat, sharp photo or scan of each document, every page including the back, filling the frame, in even light, one document per image. That single sentence, saved as a template message, is most of a paperless intake. The rest is knowing why each part matters and what happens when a photo is bad.

Why intake quality decides the rest of the day

Everything your office produces starts from what the client sends. If the materials arrive complete and readable, the document work is short: read, fill, review, done. If they arrive as a dim photo of three documents fanned out on a kitchen table, someone spends the afternoon squinting, guessing, and emailing the client for a better copy of page two. The intake message is the cheapest place to fix this, because it costs you one saved text and it runs before the problem exists.

Photos or scans: which should you ask for?

Either works, if it is done with care. A scanner produces a flat page with even lighting by construction, which is why scan quality is boring and consistent. A phone photo can match it, but the phone introduces three risks the scanner does not have: glare from the flash or a window, perspective skew from shooting at an angle, and cropping that cuts off a margin where a number lives. Ask for whichever the client can produce today. A careful phone photo this morning beats a perfect scan promised for next week, and most clients have a phone in their hand while they are reading your message.

The one message to send every client

• One document per photo. Not three cards arranged on a table in a single shot.
• Every page, including the back. ID cards, bank cards and many certificates carry data on both sides.
• Lay the document flat and shoot from directly above, so the page is square in the frame.
• Fill the frame with the document. Small print survives when the page is large in the image.
• Even daylight or room light, no flash. Flash across a laminated card produces a white stripe exactly where the numbers are.
• Send the file itself, at full size. A screenshot of a photo, or a photo of a screen, throws away detail twice.

Save this as a canned message in your phone and your email client. The wording matters less than the habit of sending it before the client starts photographing, not after the first unusable batch arrives.

What makes materials readable

• Sharpness on the smallest print. The test is not the heading, it is the serial number in six-point type near the edge.
• Contrast between ink and paper. Grey stamps on grey paper and faded thermal receipts are the usual casualties.
• Nothing covering the text: no fingers holding the corner, no sticky note, no other document overlapping.
• The whole page, edge to edge. Margins carry dates, reference numbers and stamps more often than people expect.
• For multi-page documents, every page in order, even the pages that look like boilerplate. The one page a client skips is reliably the one with the signatures.

The safe failure of a blurry photo

A bad photo fails in the safe direction: toward missing, not toward wrong. That property is what makes photo intake trustworthy. When software reads a blurry or cropped image, the usual outcome is that a value cannot be read and stays absent. An absent value is visible. You see the gap, you ask the client to resend one photo, and the cost is a short delay.

Compare that with a person retyping from the same bad photo. A human squinting at a blurry number does not stop; a human makes a judgement call, and a plausible wrong digit enters the document looking exactly like a right one. The blurry photo did not cause that error. The pressure to produce a value from it did. Treat unreadable materials as a request to resend, never as a puzzle to solve by eye.

The short version

• Send clients one canned message: one document per image, every page including the back, flat, filling the frame, in even light, as full-size files.
• Photos and scans are equally usable when done with care; ask for whichever the client can produce today.
• Judge materials by the smallest print, not the heading.
• A blurry photo is the safe failure: it produces visible gaps, not plausible wrong values. Resend the photo, never guess.