The money hit your budget on July 1. It’s the middle of August, and the fiscal year still feels wide open.
It isn’t.
The gap between how much time you think you have and how much you actually have is where most digitization projects go sideways — and here’s what the real calendar looks like.
The Year Feels Long in August. It Isn’t.
The most common mistake we see has nothing to do with money. It’s waiting. The funds are assigned, the project is on the list, and there’s an entire year in front of you, so there’s no rush.
Then Q1 of the fiscal is gone (July – September). Thanksgiving shows up, December hits, and most public organizations slow to a crawl through the holidays. January comes back sluggish, and before anyone has really touched it, it’s February. Now you start looking at the project seriously, you find out it takes longer than you assumed, and you’re sprinting toward June 30.
Or the worse version: nobody moved on it, and those funds got redirected to something with a louder advocate in the room. Nothing dramatic happened. You just waited, and the year went the way a Saturday goes — an hour at a time, and then it’s dark out.
The Timeline Nobody Quotes You
When someone asks how long a project takes, the number they get back is production time. That’s the honest answer to the question they asked, but it’s not the answer to the question they meant.
Take 500 boxes of paper — standard files in manila folders, nothing exotic, no rush turnaround, batched pickups, normal capacity while we’re running other work. That’s roughly four to five months of production. Call us at the end of August and you’d reasonably assume you’re done in January.
Here’s what has to happen before that clock even starts:
- Scoping: a few days to a few weeks. What do you have, can we see samples, do we need a site visit, what’s the pricing conversation look like. Call it a month with the back-and-forth.
- Contracting: two to six weeks, sometimes more.
- Milestone One: two to three weeks. This is our proof-of-concept — we build the process flow, run samples, and review the output with you before we go into full production. Add a week if your team needs time to review.
That’s about eleven weeks sitting in front of the four to five months. A project that sounded like it ended in January now ends in April or May — and that’s assuming everything goes smoothly and nobody’s out the week we scheduled the pickup.
Microfilm runs faster on the production side but obeys the same math. Ten thousand rolls is roughly two to three months of scanning, and every one of those front-end phases still applies. And if the project includes detailed indexing or heavy post-processing, some of that work can only start after the material is scanned, so it extends past the scanning window rather than fitting inside it.
Contracting Is Where Everybody Gets Stuck
If there’s one phase people consistently forget to plan for, it’s the paperwork. The project team is focused on records, boxes, and outcomes — nobody in that conversation is the person who’s going to review the contract.
Then it’s contract time and everything stops. Whose paper are we using? If you’re a county, we’re probably reviewing your agreement, suggesting edits, and setting up a call or two. If we’re using ours, your legal team wants a read, a few changes, and another pass. That’s two weeks on a clean, straightforward deal. It can be six weeks on a normal one, and a couple of months on a complex project with real nuance in the scope.
It’s the same feeling as buying a house. You found it, you agreed on the price, everybody shook hands — and then you sit in escrow for another month and a half while people you’ve never met move paper around. The deal was “done” a long time before it was done.
The fix isn’t to rush legal. It’s to loop them in early, tell them what’s coming, and stop treating contracting like a formality at the end.
You Don’t Have to Eat the Whole Elephant
Say you’ve got real money to work with — $50,000, maybe $300,000 — and a pile of records you want dealt with. The instinct is to solve all of it at once, but that might not be the right first move.
Starting with a smaller, well-defined piece gets you a quick win. It clears approval faster because it doesn’t have to survive as many committees and checkpoints. And once you’ve proven the process works and your people are actually using the digital files, adding the next phase is a much easier conversation than the first one was.
Simplicity is the other half of it. Even on a big project, you can phase the complexity: basic scanning as phase one, detailed indexing as phase two once you’ve confirmed you actually need it. A lot of projects die in analysis paralysis: everybody trying to get every specification perfect before anything moves. Getting something real done beats getting everything planned.
The Homework That Saves You Three Weeks
Nobody likes homework, but this is the part that decides whether scoping takes four days or four weeks.
The slowest possible start is calling a few companies and saying “I’ve got some stuff, what should we do?” That’s a fine place to be — you’re not supposed to be the expert, that’s why we exist — but it means every conversation begins from zero and the whole thing crawls.
Come in knowing the basics: what kinds of materials you have, roughly how much, how they’re organized, what you’re trying to accomplish, and how you want the digital output to look and behave. Microfilm and microfiche especially — knowing the general types and counts moves things fast. Then know your own side of the process: who approves this, what the steps are, and who’s involved when it goes to contracting.
You don’t need to have every detail nailed down because we’re going to ask you questions that get us to a real scope. What you do need is to be prepared and responsive — available for a Zoom, willing to send a sample, open to a site visit. That’s the difference between a scope that lands in a week and one that limps along for a month.
June 30 Comes for Everybody at Once
How the deadline actually works depends on your organization. Some agencies tell us the project has to be fully complete and invoiced by June 30. Others just need the pickup done and the invoice cut, with delivery landing in the next fiscal year. It’s worth knowing which one you are before you build your plan around a guess.
Either way, here’s what you don’t want to be: the call we get in the first week of June asking if we can pick up, scan, and invoice an entire project inside the month. Sometimes we can pull it off. But you’re competing for capacity against everybody else in the exact same position, and the whole thing turns into a scramble over something that didn’t have to be one.
The point isn’t that you have to start production this month. It’s that having the scope defined, the pricing agreed, the timeline mapped, and a real buffer built in costs you almost nothing right now — and it’s the entire difference between a smooth project and a crunch. If your money is already sitting there for this fiscal year, the cheapest thing you can do in August is get it planned.
Next Steps
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Further Reading
What Happens to Your Records During a Scanning Project?
Scanning rarely fails on hardware—it fails on planning. Here are four common mistakes and a simple, low-risk way to avoid them.
Beyond Scanning: Why Accessible PDFs Are the Next Step in Digital Transformation
Scanning gets records online. Accessible PDFs make them usable by everyone. This article explains why true digital transformation doesn’t stop at digitization—and how accessible PDFs improve compliance, usability, and long-term value across your organization.
How to Scope a Digitization Project Accurately (and Avoid Change Orders)
Most surprise invoices on scanning projects trace back to scoping mistakes made before the first page was scanned. Here’s how to count, question, and structure pricing so change orders stay rare.