Brendan’s Blog

If you travel much you have likely seen advertisements and perhaps even kiosks in airports for NeatReceipts. The NeatReceipts product bundles a small USB scanner and custom software tailored to managing receipts and business cards. The product web site does an excellent job of describing how NeatReceipts works.

I like the product because I hate having small scraps of paper around my desk. Receipts and business cards are scanned and organized quite easily. The included software stores all information about your receipts and business cards (both images and OCR text) in a Microsoft SQL Desktop style database. Routine database backups are done automatically according to a schedule you set. I keep my database backup file in the My Documents folder.

Receipts are quickly scanned and automatically OCR’d for the vendor and total price.  This OCR process isn’t always successful, but it is easy to make adjustments if the metadata is important to you.  Receipts are organized using folders to group them together for the same trip and/or expense report.  Printouts can contain receipt copies and a summary of the data.  For my purposes I just print the receipts without the fancy report.  The software can even arrange smaller receipts to print on the same page.

My employer uses a custom expense reporting system (as many larger companies do.)  After scanning in my receipts, I generate the official report in my employer’s system and print the report to PDF.  I then use NeatReceipts to print the receipt image(s) to a PDF file too.  Since my employer accepts faxed reports, I can then transmit the two PDF files electronically without ever generating paper.

Receipts go in… reimbursement comes out via direct deposit.  Perfect.

In addition to receipts, the software does a good job of importing business cards.  Cards scan quickly into the same database that stores receipts.  After importing you can choose to synchronize your scanned cards to your Outlook Contacts.  This process worked easily for me, and even added missing information (like mailing addresses) to my existing Outlook contact records.

I have also used the included scanner to scan handwritten notes into Microsoft OneNote. While the scanning software controls are better suited to receipts and business cards, it does take in loose paper easily and the scanning device is small enough to stick in my laptop bag if I wanted to take it with me.

So is it worth the retail cost of $200? If you travel for work and/or accumulate lots of reimbursable business receipts it may be.  I purchased mine through Amazon.com and paid only $170 with shipping.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 2:25 am and is filed under Backups, Hardware, How To, Review, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.