LilyMay

Hello everyone,

Please someone here share the experience of scanning service provided by VFS office.

I'm in the stage of planning and gathering supporting documents for my future spouse visa application (probably applying in 7-8 months time from Burma). And I'd like to know how much they charge per page to scan the documents at application centre (like standard fees set by UKVI).

Thanks in advance for your time and help. Good luck and speedy process for all those waiting for their visas.

MonsterP

Fear not! My Wife just had her passport / vignette back yesterday after submitting documents in mid-June. Success!

First of all, there isn't any charge per page for this service. It is a User Pay Service, we paid RMB300 in China, but I noticed that it's not listed on the Burma website, perhaps not available to use yet.
UK Visa Information - Burma - User Pay Services

On the basis that it might be available when you apply, or if anyone else reading is curious, I'll give you our experience below.

Some of the VFS centres have been equipped with little, I think Fujitsu, scanners that arrived from the UK apparently, and when I checked the model online, the specification is very high, they cost around £500 each! So they're not cheap and nasty.

Scanning takes about 1 second or so per page.

The option to scan the documents is, perhaps, one of the best advances UKVI has done to help applications be more straightforward, even though we may all be able to produce a long list of other things that don't, haha.

For us, we have several documents which are pretty critical for us not to lose or get damaged. We even keep them in a safe! Translated marriage papers, notorised, etc., birth certificates, and the list goes on. The thought of sending those originals, by courier, and then sitting in an office in a pile of thousands of others is almost as worrying as wondering what result you'll get for the visa!

I recommend the following:-

- You need to print off the standard section papers from your VFS website. Note that these won't really match what you might have already prepared, and you might need to still juggle some documents when you submit in the VFS office. The officer / clerk will tell you what sections they want.

- Create an index for your documents. Produce a spreadsheet, it helps you keep track anyway, and give your documents a category letter, then a number. e.g. A1 (1/3) etc. At least, when they get juggled during submission, then the ECO could see your document from the index and identify exactly which one it is by the "A1 (1/3)" in the top corner (write with pencil).

- Where your original papers, are single pages, such as bank statements, then use those to hand to the clerk to scan. Where they are stuck together, like our marriage translations are, then you'll need to provide a photocopy / scanned & printed copy, in order that it can go through the scanner. Take your originals too, incase VFS want to check them, but frankly, it seems they don't bother.

- Make sure your copies are in COLOUR too! Get them done at a decent printing shop with colour printers/copiers

- So you'll have an index and a number of total pages that you can then count as they go through the scanner to be confident that everything has been scanned. Try not to go dizzy!

So that's it! The clerk will check on their computer how many pages they have, and you can cross-check that number.

That's my little book for tonight, sorry if it's a bit detailed, but I would choose the scanning process any day! I also think that, where many of the applications have been farmed back to their origins to be processed to clear the back-log, it's a lot easier for UKVI to do that when it's in digital form! Ours ended up being sent back to origin for processing, and was done in a day....eventually. :-)

Hope that helps.

Regards, MP

LilyMay

Thank you very much for your reply, MonsterP! It's indeed helpful. I'm sure no one would mind to read such a long but informative message.

I totally agree with you about choosing scanned service rather than using courier for my precious original documents. (One of the parcels sent by my mother in law from UK was lost in April this year).

I saw this information on VFS Burma website:
"On 05 May 2017 a new process will be introduced to digitally scan all documents submitted in support of settlement visa applications made at the UK Visa Application Centre in Myanmar." But as you pointed out, there is no settlement scanning service like in China. I'm living a bit far away from Yangon and is difficult for me to inquiry at the centre in person. They don't have phone numbers or email inquiry service at VFS Yangon office. Hopefully they were already provided with scanning machine by the time I apply and charge more or less the same as China around $45.

Congratulations to you and your family! Now you all can be together after such a long wait.

MonsterP

You're welcome!

It could be that they haven't properly updated the website yet, but anyway, you have a few months to go before your planned application. Although, start preparing your paperwork gradually now, as it is massively time consuming.

All the best.