How to Scan Documents with a Cell Phone

The Problem

Some people have experienced difficulty executing our online cremation authorization form when multiple people have to sign and multiple people are required to witness the signatures. Before the advent of online forms, and the legislation that makes them possible, people simply printed out a form, signed it, had an acquaintance witness it, and either delivered it to our office, or occasionally faxed it.  It was far simpler than trying to navigate an online form requiring multiple online signers.

It’s still possibly to do it by “hand” and send it electronically without a fax machine or scanner.

An Alternative Solution

There are a number of apps available for both Android and Apple cell phones that can copy a signed paper form and email it directly from your phone to our office.  Here is an example of such a form; the left is the original and the right hand form is the emailed copy, which we subsequently printed.

Here they are for a side-by-side comparison.

How to Do It

iPhone Users

iPhone comes with an easy utility (app) called Notes.  It can be downloaded from the app store if it is not already installed on your phone.

Open the app. To scan, tap the square icon at the bottom right of the screen to open a new document. Then tap the paperclip icon. Choose Scan Documents. Position your signed document on a well lit flat surface. The Note App says, “Position the document in view.”

The app will outline the document and automatically scan it.  There is no need to tap a button.

Then tap the small icon of the scanned document in the lower left of the screen to open it into full view. If it looks good, long touch the middle of the screen to bring up a menu.  Choose share.  At the top of your screen you should see the icons for Airdrop, Mail, Text, Notes, Reminders, Journals, and  possibly a lot of other applications.  Choose Mail and email the scanned form to us at info@bartonfuneral.com

If the copy looks too light when you touch the small image icon to preview the page, you can edit it to make better contrast. Touch the overlapping circles

to open the editing menu. Usually all that is needed is to convert the document to “black and white.”

Other apps for the iPhone and Android.

There are numerous other scanner apps for both the iPhone  and Android Phones that offer more options than Notes. Each has free versions and more advanced paid versions.  The ones we have tried that work well are Genius Scan from Grizzly Labs and Adobe Scan from Adobe.

There is a small learning curve to use these apps. Genius Scan is relatively intuitive and provides good copies if the settings are correct.