External Document Scanning Provider in Switzerland: Reception of Incoming Business Mail in a Digital Inbox

"Spend more time working with content, not prepping it".

Get your letter post always right on time - no matter where you are.

Have your inbound company mail sent to our scanning centre in Zurich. You will receive it shortly by e-mail in a digital inbox as PDF.

Are you tired of manual ScanOps? We automate your mailroom logistics.

We professionally digitize your business correspondence and enrich it with useful metadata for archiving at scale.

No more missed invoices! Discover our centralized mailroom.

Improve internal workflows (across branches) by centralizing inbound documents at a single point of truth.

Are you lost in content chaos? Our systems shed light on dark data.

We embed content in business logic so unused data becomes searchable and discoverable to illuminate hidden connections.

Your legacy archive provider is down? We give 99.99% uptime.

We take documents from your file cabinet or legacy provider to a Swiss audit-proof archive (here) - always at your fingertips.

All done for the day! Enjoy your empty letterbox.



What is a digital inbox?

For Swiss companies, an electronic inbox is the first and easiest way to digitize the entire enterprise.  A digital inbox in Switzerland lets your company receive its entire physical business correspondence on a corporate e-mail address on the same day in high-quality PDF/A format with an audit trail.

Outsourcing the scanning of daily postal letters to an external service provider is in most cases the quickest and most cost-efficient step on a company's digital transformation journey. It builds a solid basis for the acceleration of future e-Workflows  at relatively low project implementation costs.

We believe that an e-Inbox in Switzerland makes sense starting from 40 letters per month.

Redirection of inbound business mail to our scanning centre in Zurich

To activate our document scanning services, you must redirect your incoming letters to our processing and scanning centre in Zurich at Sihlpost. In Switzerland, corporate mail can be redirected permanently to a scanning centre through the online forwarding service of Swiss Post (here).

Ideally, it takes 3 working days  to activate the redirection order. There are two ways to do that:

1. Swiss businesses that are registered with Swiss Post and use its online services can place the forwarding order by logging in via their SwissID (here)
2. Swiss companies without an account with Swiss Post can place the redirection instruction conveniently at their local Post office branch

Handling non-scannable mail items

The following types of correspondence is not forwarded by Swiss Post:

• Debt collection documents (redirection is only possible within the debt collection district)
• Daily and weekly newspapers, journals, periodicals and magazines (delivery is carried out by the publisher itself)
• Consignments and parcels handled by private logistics and (bicycle) courier companies in Switzerland such as DHL, DPD, Fedex, UPS or Quickmail

Non-paper objects dispatched in letters  (such as credit cards) are scanned as far as possible and delivered to your home address.

Important original documents (such as court files, registered letters, contracts for countersignature or application forms to be signed) can be requested from us within 2 weeks, stating the reference number indicated on the scanned document. After this period, the originals will be professionally shredded at no additional cost.

Going paperless - but what does a paper-free office actually mean?

Most small and medium-sized companies in Switzerland want to go paperless and rush toward digitalization. But ironically, as long as Swiss SMEs still receive their daily business correspondence in a letterbox (or a corporate P.O. box), the paperless office exists on paper only.

Teleworking and home offices make it difficult to operate the daily on-premises mailroom efficiently. The in-house mail distribution centers of large Swiss companies still rely heavily on paper-based processes and manual work steps, which are labor-intensive and error-prone.

Dissatisfied logistics and dispatch employees, who have to make do with low wages, offer numerous threat vectors for security breaches. Manually opening physical mail exposes sensitive information to too many people - there is always a risk of confidential information being lost or mishandled.

What are the advantages of a digital inbox in Switzerland?

We believe Swiss start-up companies, established businesses, and especially bank branches and the public sector can benefit greatly from a paperless inbox  in conjunction with our digital archiving solution (here). Specifically, they can:

• Eliminate envelopes and sheets at the reception desk, work tables, filing system, shredders and trash containers, making more economical use of commercial real estate
• Minimize lost letters, misfiled contracts and exceeded legal deadlines
• Stop distributing letters manually inhouse: gain time, efficiency and ultimately productivity
• Improve the information flow in the organization with a single central and authoritative inbox allowing document classification and triage in a centralized process by a dedicated document handler
• Easily upload incoming mail to the archiving system or feed scanned documents directly into peripheral systems via API calls (CRM, DMS, ERP, intranet, Abacus, Microsoft Navision, Windream, ELO, Kendox, Triboni, d.velop, DocuWare, Dropbox, MS SharePoint, SAP, IBM, Google Drive, Azure Storage, AWS S3 Buckets) - immediately available to the final recipient
• Access documents remotely and avoid important files getting stuck on an absent colleague's computer
• Filter out irrelevant mails into a spam folder and eliminate unsolicited marketing letters or requests for payment from registry fraudsters (here) at source
• Extract valuable metadata for present or future AI-driven workflows

What is the probative value of scanned documents?

Public and private-law documents play an important role as evidence during legal disputes ("legal hold") or tax controls ("legal retention"). This immediately raises the question of the probative value of scanned records.

Many Swiss companies continue to believe that scans do not have full evidentiary value and that they must store original documents such as invoices and contracts in hard copy should the authorities one day demand them.  Especially small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Switzerland feel uncertain about the legal admissibility of mailroom digitization.  There is a misconception that scanned documents do not have the same conclusiveness as originals with a wet signature.

In reality, the probative value of digitized documents is undisputed in current Swiss court practice. Legal doctrine in Switzerland (here) has been stating for a long time that "electronic deeds or copies of scanned originals are in principle just as credible as hard copy documents in paper form. They are equivalent to the originals if they meet certain standards, in particular the requirements of Swiss commercial law as laid out in the Swiss Business Records Ordinance" (here).

What is a digital mailroom?

A good definition for a digital mailroom of the 21st century is the automation of the receipt, processing and routing of printed company mail (customer, supplier and official letters) through optical character recognition (OCR) and preparation for long-term archiving by converting into the PDF/A format, as well as downstream data enrichment using natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Our systems generate business intelligence during scanning

360core converts raw image data into information - and information into business insights. During the scanning process, our system architecture conducts multiple high-impact data enrichment operations (here).

Error sources when manually scanning hundreds of letters per day

With as few as 10 letters per day, the logistics of daily mailroom operations  can quickly become time-consuming. Each envelope needs to be cut open with a letter opener and a fairly demanding sorting process  begins. If no care is taken here, invoices accidentally end up in the wastepaper basket or mixed-up consignments have to be separated again.

The scanning machine is rarely located directly at the desktop. If you are sitting comfortably at the computer with the scanning software, you cannot feed in the individual letter batches and have to go back and forth. If, on the contrary, you are positioned in front of the scanner, you must be familiar with the touchscreen in order to determine the correct target folder.

In both cases, the scanner and its software must be launched and the first stack of letters must be loaded into the input tray. Don't forget to choose between single-sided and double-sided scanning.

Back at the computer desk, once the scanning process is complete, the generated PDFs must be properly named  (in accordance with internal data governance policies) and prevented from being mislabelled. Practically, this means that each letter must be opened again in its digital form for a final quality check.

Scanning of letters at scale

360core's high-performance scanners capture incoming letter mail directly from the envelope and produce searchable documents in real time:

• In-house processing and scanning centre located near Sihlpost in downtown Zurich
• Throughput capacity of over 8,000 letters per day (120 ppm or pages per minute) for a variety of document types, including scanning of tomographs, X-rays and 3D objects
• High-quality image capture (up to 600 dpi) with automatic skew correction (skew designates misaligned pages)
• Digitization of most formats and paper types from thick to onion skin paper - even if they are damaged
• Automatic recognition of sender and addressee during OCR so the document is dropped in the correct hot folder
• Quality control by our operators, who check the scanned PDF before clearing it into your digital mailbox
• Daily availability of the scanned company letters in the digital inbox contractually guaranteed
  

Scan quality: what is the best dpi resolution for your organization?

Our customers can choose the image quality  (measured in dpi or "dots per inch") in which they would like to receive their scanned incoming mail (from as low as 100 dpi to as crisp as 600 dpi), in addition to selecting between black and white and colour scans.

When it comes to process optimization, system design choices often entail trade-offs. For example, better scan image quality leads to higher storage costs.  The expected memory space for a typical Swiss business letter scanned at different dpi values is as follows:

• A4 letter scanned at 100 dpi: approx. 50 KB
• A4 letter scanned at 300 dpi: approx. 300 KB
• A4 letter scanned at 600 dpi: approx. 1.1 MB

At a font size of 10 pt (= points), all of the above PDFs are clearly legible. However, words below this threshold are no longer detected correctly by the system. At the same time, the above comparison illustrates significant differences in file size, which means higher cloud storage costs in the data center.

We believe that the best scan quality for scanning business and official documents in Switzerland is between 200 and 300 dpi, taking into account readability and file size, but frugal system architects (here) can get away with 150 dpi. For the faithful capture of text samples under 8 pt, we recommend 300 dpi upwards. For the rendering of high-quality images, we recommend 600 dpi, but this is not normally required for enterprise correspondence subject to Swiss archiving regulations.

The same considerations apply to file usability, such as upload or download speed  and ease of document sharing: many corporate mailboxes have size limits (typically 20MB), and e-mails with large attachments often bounce back.

Suggested workflow for scanning and archiving

The recommended process sequence for our Swiss scanning and digital inbox solution is as follows:

• You set up a mail redirection order with Swiss Post to our ISO 27001 certified scanning centre in Zurich
• We sort, open, scan, save, dispatch and shred your incoming mail using inhouse state-of-the art mail openers, scanners, and shredders
• We print an ink or digital audit trail on the captured document
• We recognize the document language  and extract other business-critical data points (here), which we store as metadata
• We send you the scanned document (i) as a PDF attachment or alternatively (ii) as a file link (with password protection on request) to (iii) an inbox provided by us or (iv) a dedicated inbox of your choice (e.g. scanning@company.ch), which is managed by your staff ("Document Recipient")
• The document recipient forwards the document to the correct business unit or responsible person in your organization ("Document Owner")
• The document owner verifies (i) the automatically determined document type (contract, order, invoice, request, complaint, HR, support, etc.) and (ii) the automatically determined folder location (customer, case, asset, project, support or business case, etc.) and decides whether the document is eligible for archiving

How much does a Swiss digital inbox cost?

Our hardware and software solution ("360 Scanning"), which combines physical scanning with computer-aided data indexing, is a new product that is being introduced at a significant discount for Swiss SMEs (less than 250 employees):

• Project setup fee: CHF 280
• Price per scanned document: CHF 0.55 (this is almost half the price compared to other Swiss providers of external scanning solutions)

As part of a configuration workshop, we define the following product features with you:

• Requested scanning quality: DPI resolution, PDF in black and white or colour
• Type of audit trail: ink or digital imprint
• Data elements to be included on the audit-trail: format of the document number, place and time of the scanning process, personal details of the device operator
• Processing rules for certain document types
• Text elements to be recognized as metadata: sender, recipient, customer number, case ID etc.
• Personal details of the Document Recipient on the customer side and designation of a dedicated inbox
• Requested delivery method: as a PDF attachment or download link (optionally with password protection)
• Validity period of the download link
• Time of the day when the scanned letters must be available in the digital inbox
• Dispatch instructions for non-scannable items

Our standard Order Confirmation for setting up 360core's scanning and digital inbox services is available for download under this link (here). You can download our standard Data Processing Agreement under this link (here).

How much does Swiss Post letter redirection cost?

For the permanent redirection of letters to a scanning center, Swiss Post charges CHF 0.02 per letter, but at least CHF 27 per month. With 4,000 letters per month (= 200 letters per day), the redirection costs thus amount to CHF 80 per month.

Scanning security and confidentiality

360core AG's scanning services are not sub-delegated to third parties as is often the case in the Swiss BPM industry. We carefully select our scanning personnel and provide fair compensation to avoid frequent staff turnover.

Our information security measures for safe, secure and confidential scanning and shredding include:

• Electronic access permissions to the scanning area
• Electronic access permissions to the scanning workstations
• Audit trail that logs each scanning operator’s interaction with a document
• Background checks when hiring new employees
• Industry-standard high-capacity shredders: DIN certified 66399 Super Micro Cut Level P-7 quality (here)
• ISO 27001 certified Swiss data centers without foreign transfer (replication across 2 availability zones within Switzerland)
  

Set up mail redirect order with Swiss Post

Incoming letters are opened and scanned

Capture of metadata and print of audit trail

Consume letter in PDF format via mail

Further Reading

Lukas Fässler (2014) Durchklick: Elektronische Aktenführung - Beweisführung mit eingescannten Dokumenten, Anwaltsrevue | Revue de l'avocat 9/2014 (here)

David Hand (2022) Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters (here)

Swiss Post (2024) Redirect business mail. Receive consignments at another address (here)