RingCentral: A Great Fax & Toll-Free Phone Option For Small Business Owners
We used to use free programs like eFax for receiving faxes and FaxZero for sending faxes.
For a couple of years now, we've been using RingCentral instead. It's not free like eFax and FaxZero are. But, in our opinion, RingCentral is the best option for small business owners like us.
We use it all the time. Here's why...
Why We Like RingCentral:
It's easy.
I save the RingCentral URL in my bookmarks and go to it every time I need to send a fax.
And, when we receive a new fax, we get a notification in our toolbar (the lower right corner of the web browser).
It's fast.
To send a fax, you just type in the fax number, attach a file (you have to have a scanner to scan documents and save them as images), type what you want to say on the cover letter, then hit send.
To receive a fax, you just click on the new fax that appears in your RingCentral control panel (the URL for RingCentral you have bookmarked).
You get a permanent fax number.
Ours is a tollfree fax number, so anyone can fax us from anywhere -- with no long-distance charges applied to them.
You can also get a permanent toll-free phone number, if you like.
That way, other people can call you from anywhere, without paying any long-distance charges.
You get a generous number of tollfree minutes that can be used each month. If you go over, then a small per-minute fee is applied to your monthly bill -- just like with a cell phone plan.
It's relatively inexpensive.
You can choose from a number of different per-minute plans. The more minutes you buy, the lower the per-minute rate. It's similar to a cellphone plan. We pay $119.90 for 12 months at a per-minute rate of 6.7 cents. (Their plans start at $9.99 a month.)
The minutes are based on the time it takes for RingCentral to send all of your outgoing faxes, receive all of your incoming faxes, and record all of your incoming voicemails received at the tollfree number. On average, our voicemails are typically 2-3 minutes apiece. Our faxes, depending on the number of pages being sent or received, can range from just under a minute to just over 3 minutes.
The control panel (or dashboard) is simple to navigate.
You can view your inbox, outbox, sent items, and deleted items -- just like a regular email box. Only these are all of your faxes and any voicemails that came in to your tollfree phone number.
From there, you can also click on any of the faxes you've sent or received, as well as any of the voicemails that have come into your tollfree phone number. That's how you can "view" a fax or "listen to" a voicemail. You can even forward a fax to someone else via email, or forward the digital audio file that contains the voicemail via email.
There is also a fairly sophisticated address book for storing the phone numbers and/or fax numbers of all your contacts. This makes it easier to fax one of them again in the future, or call them via Skype, if you also have that. (We do, but we hardly ever use it.)
RELATED:
RingCentral is an excellent choice for frequent fax users. For someone who only need to send fax once in a while, http://www.GotFreeFax.com allows user send two free faxes a day to the US and Canada.