Flat Rate Toll Free Numbers

How would you like to have a toll free number for your business without the worry that you’ll never know how big your bill will be each month? What you are looking for is flat rate toll free service. Your bill is the same every month and you’ll get dozens of features included at no extra cost. Best of all, there’s no risk to try it because you can get a 14 day free trial of flat rate toll free service.

The flat rate service from iTeleCenter is just $49 a month for unlimited calls. You pay no per minute charges, no extra fees for features, no activation fees, no surcharges or hidden fees, no confusing plans and no contracts.

What are some of those special calling features? You get professional grade business phone service such as an auto attendant with main greeting voicemail to email or text transmission, multiple extension mailboxes, online faxing, follow-me call forwarding and 30 additional features.

How about the numbers available? You have two choices in how you pick your toll free number. The first way is to simply select from a list of 10 assorted numbers that are available. These have the prefixes 800, 866, 877 and 888. If you see one you like, just click on the radio button and proceed to order it. If not, then click the “generate more numbers” button and you’ll get a new list.

The other method is to search for a custom vanity number. What is a vanity number? That’s a phone number that spells out a word or phrase using the letters that appear on the numbers of the telephone dial. You can specify any available toll free prefix, or limit your search to 855 or 866 or 877 or 888. You can also use * for wildcard digits. Those are digits where you really don’t care what number comes up. Let’s try a couple of examples and see what we get.

Say you’re in the water conditioning business and want a memorable toll free number to advertise. We’ll say any prefix is OK and that we want the term “water” to be in the toll free number. Enter “water” into the search box and press the search button. Voila! Here’s what we get. There are 10 different toll free numbers available and they all spell out water within the number. You can choose from (877) 95WATER, (855) 60WATER, (877) WATGER88 and another seven options. Don’t much care for these? Click on the Generate More Numbers button and you’ll get another 10 options. These include (855) WATER08, (855) WATER30 and seven more that are similar.

Got the idea? You may want to play around with this search engine a bit to get something that relates to your business and is easy to remember. Note that 855 is a newly added toll free prefix. You’ll likely have more options with the 855 prefix than the others because it has only been available for about a year.

What makes this system better than old-school toll free number ordering is both the interactive vanity search feature plus instant availability of your chosen toll free number. That’s right. You select the number you want and then place your order online right away before anybody else gets the same idea. That starts your 14 day free trial period. Play around with the features, decide how much of an asset this is for your business, and keep using that number as long as you keep your toll free service.

The Green Way To Get Documents Signed

We’re drowning in a sea of business paper. All that talk about computers creating the paperless office was 180 degrees out of phase with what really happened. As soon as there were high speed printers, business users started printing at high speed. This went on for decades, culminating in the rise of the professional business document shredder. They come by your office with a van full of high power slicing and dicing equipment and shovel the paper in like tree branches going into a chipper shredder. Is there any way to break this costly cycle of buying more paper so you can print more documents and then shred them to make more paper? There is, and you can thank your lucky cloud for it.


It’s cloud services that are finally starting to break the paper cycle. Clouds are nebulous things, so to speak. There is no hardware for you to deal with. You just access those clouds from your iPad, smartphone, desktop or notebook computer and accomplish what you had in mind. While on the go, you probably aren’t anywhere near a printer anyway. That means the business processes you use to get your job done have to be designed to work without paper.

This puts us in the interesting dilemma of half the people being fully interconnected online with the rest in a limbo state of half-online and half-offline. Many businesses and organizations still need those offline products like signed paper documents to copy, mail and file. Are you really going to trust email messages for your non-disclosure agreements, W9 tax forms, purchase orders or employment agreements? If it needs to pass a legal sniff test, a tweet, text message or an email just won’t do.

Fortunately, all is not lost. You may not be able to use casual online communication methods to support legally binding documents, but there is an electronic technology that does just that. Just in time, too, because business, government, health care and other serious endeavors are about to go paperless in a big way. The process is called electronic signature.

Electronic signature isn’t brand new. It’s just coming into the limelight with a recent stampede toward mobile computing and productivity oriented cost reductions. It supersedes makeshift solutions such as faxing (still paper intensive) and scanning paper documents so you can email them and have them printed off again at the far end. Electronic signature is a purely electronic system that doesn’t assume there is any actual paperwork to begin with.

RightSignature is a company in the forefront of this technology. What they’ve created is a way for e-signatures to replicate pen-and-paper signing when using a mouse and browser. The electronic documents then include handwritten biometric signatures that are legally binding. They are compliant with the E-Sign Act, UETA Act and European Directive that all establish the validity and legality of electronic signatures worldwide.

Getting a document signed is as simple as uploading a PDF or Word File to the RightSignature system, entering the required signers’ names and emails, and clicking send. RightSignature then contacts the signers by email to tell them how to access the online documents and sign them. When complete, all parties are notified and get electronic copies of the signed documents, plus a copy is archived.

It’s very similar to what you accomplish now, but without the flurry of copying, the cost of overnight mail, nor the interminable wait for physical documents to be delivered, signed and sent back. It’s estimated that the cost of processing a signed document can drop by more than an order of magnitude using the electronic signature process.

Would you like to give it a try? If you are a business or organization that needs to send out documents for signature, you can have a 5 document free trial right now. No credit card is required. Only buy the service if you like the way it works. Get your RightSignature Electronic Signature Free Trial started and see if you really want to go back to drowning in all that paper.

Try Internet Fax For Free

In these days of hyperactive texting, fax machines may seem a bit quaint to the uninitiated. But fax messages are a staple of business and used to exchange contracts and other important business documents. So, does that mean you need to buy an armada of dedicated fax machines and run to the office when you need to send or receive a fax message? No way. You can do it all online from wherever you happen to be. That is, if you have the right fax plan.

What’s better than a fax machine in this business environment is a fax service plan. A fax machine is a one task dedicated piece of equipment that sits in a designated space, tethered to its own phone line. A fax service plan lets you receive and send faxes by email and online account. It works on your desktop PC. It works on your laptop computer.

Oh, I know. You remember those early fax software programs that ran on your computer. You needed a special fax modem and they tied up both your computer and your phone line. This service is nothing like that. You don’t need a fax modem or even a phone line. This is an Internet-based fax service that you access over your broadband Internet connection like other online applications.

Here’s what you get when you sign up for a RingCentral Internet Fax Service Plan or take the free trial offer. You get your own toll free or local phone number. What’s that for? It is so people can send fax messages to you. Remember that fax machines send and receive messages over telephone lines. RingCentral gives you a virtual fax machine, but it still needs a number for those other fax machines to call. Those incoming messages will be stored in your online account and sent to you via email. You can even get text messages on your cell phone or PDA alerting you to new faxes so you never miss an important message.

How about sending faxes? You can send a fax right from email. Your email message becomes the cover sheet. The attached documents become the fax pages. That’s the simple way to fax. You also get a free software application that adds a fax button to your Microsoft Windows applications, such as Outlook and Word. Click the button and you can send your document out as a fax message. You can electronically sign faxes using a bitmap of your signature. No need to print documents, sign them with a pen, and then scan them back in as you would with a standard fax machine.

The RingCentral Internet Fax is as powerful as a large dedicated fax machine. You can create groups of contacts and easily send faxes to the whole group from your computer. You don’t tie up any phone lines. You’ll be notified by the system when your faxes have been sent. Both the software app and online account let you create custom cover sheets. Over a dozen different page styles are included with the service. If you are having a problem with junk faxes, you can block those so they won’t come in.

By the way, your computer doesn’t even have to be on for you to get a fax message. The sender never gets a busy signal when someone is on the phone, either. Remember, this is a virtual fax machine that is hosted online.

How much does it cost for all this faxing goodness? Plans start as low as $7.99 a month for 300 pages with a small charge per page over that. If you regularly deal with high fax volumes, other plans will push that up to include 2,500 pages per month. That includes your toll free or local fax number. You can pay that much just for a toll free number from other suppliers.