For best results in FOURA the files that you attach should have the correct "context" and either be "Born Digital" or scanned using appropriate settings to produce readable files that are reasonably sized. This will make it easier to find the files later, minimize the overall size of the document archive and make the files faster to download and view..
The information below will help you to get the most out of attaching files in FOURA!
The context of an attachment refers to what document in FOURA the file is attached to, and what type of content is contained in the file. Every file submitted to FOURA must be attached to something, for example, a Purchase Order, a Sales Order, a Customer, etc. In addition, each file must be categorized with a "Content Type" that indicates what kind of data the file contains.
When considering where to attach a file, ask yourself what it applies to and where it will be most effective. For example, if you have a Tax Exemption file for a specific customer, this should probably be attached to that Customer. If you have a Product Specification sheet that describes the technical details for a specific item then that should be attached to the Item Master record for that item. And so on.
The Content Type refers to what type of data is in the file, or what it actually is, versus the file type (PDF, Docx, etc). Selecting the right content type will make it easy to find all similar files across every document in FOURA.
Born digital files are ones that were created directly from a source application and have never been scanned. These kinds of files are typically small in size and are extremely high quality. Whenever possible you should attach born digital documents.
For example, if you get an email with a born digital Customer Order PDF, then you should submit that PDF directly to FOURA versus printing it and then scanning it! This will make a massive different in quality and size.
In some cases you may have to scan a document. Generally this will be cases where the document is only available on paper or where notes and other annotations that you need to preserve have been manually written on the document. In these cases, you should configure your scanner to produce acceptable quality files that are not overly large in size.
Please set your scan settings to use the following defaults for FOURA:
A grayscale image is typically 8 times the size of the same black and white image, and a color image is typically 24-32 times the size of the black and white! On top of that compression algorithms for color and grayscale are not as efficient as for black and white.
On average a primarily text document that is letter sized and scanned at 300DPI in grayscale using PDF output w/JPEG compression should be about 50KB per page. The same document in color will be 200KB or more per page (over 1MB per page at 1200 DPI 32-bit full color). A result of 50KB-100KB per page is a good target to aim for when scanning business documents. Some will be bigger and some smaller but it should average out. For documents that do not have any fine details or text under 6 points you can usually get by at 200DPI, which is HALF the size of a 300DPI scan.
