Review: NeatReceipts 3 Professional

Posted by: tjchan on Nov 24 2008

We are entering into a digital age. It doesn’t mean the end of paper but it certainly does mean the decline of the use of paper in our everyday lives. Bills and statements for credit cards, utilities, and more are all viewable online and we pay for goods and services via electronic means rather than the use of paper checks. Likewise, it’s about time that we moved to a more modern approach to filing what paper information we still get. The simplest and most effective means is by digitizing them with the use of a scanner. Enter NeatReceipts, a solution that will turn all your receipts, paper documents, and business cards into 1’s and 0’s making them all easy to store on a CDR or even a USB pendrive. Join us as we find out just how easy it is to get into a more paperless, clutter-free life!

When I first received the Neat Receipts package I thought to myself. Wow, this is pretty neat! I’ve never seen a scanner about the size of a laptop battery before. USB-powered, the scanner is small and light - perfect for using it anywhere including on the go. The scanner comes with Neat Receipts Professional 3.0 software, a desktop vertical stand, pouch, USB cord, welcome letter, starting guide, calibration sheets, and cleaner sheets providing a complete solution for many scans to come.

Installation and First Use

First off, let’s read the system requirements. There is nothing more frustrating than having the product work improperly due to a below the specs system.

Pentium 4 - 1.3 GHz or greater.
Windows XP or Vista 32-Bit
1GB RAM with 2GB being highly recommended.
1GB Hard drive space for install with about 40GB needed for 1.5 million receipts
USB Port
Broadband internet for updates.

For the test systems I tried it on:

1. Mobile AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 1.8Ghz
   256MB RAM (later tried it again with 768MB)
   Windows XP Home
2. AMD Sempron 3400+ 2.0Ghz
   768MB RAM
   Windows XP Home
3. Intel Pentiuim Dual-Core T2080 1.73GHz
   2GB RAM
   Vista Business
4. AMD Athlon 64×2 3200+ Dual-Core 1.9Ghz
   2GB RAM
   Vista Home Premium

The software was easy to install, just follow the standard software install wizard prompts and the software and drivers get installed. After installing the software, it will prompt you to connect your scanner and calibrate it using the provided calibration sheet. This is mandatory as it ensures proper operation of the Neat Receipts scanner. When you first open the NeatReceipts Professional 3 program it will provide you with a quick tutorial. This tutorial though helpful can also be confusing. Both mom and I are new users to NeatReceipts. I grasped the tutorial quite quickly and went straight away to scanning my stash of receipts and business cards. However, mom did not grasp the concept as quickly. During the tutorial, she got confused not to mention frustrated by clicking on the screenshots thinking that the screenshots of the Flash tutorial was the actual program. What contributed to mom’s situation, was also due to her using a much lower resolution and hence the tutorial window covered up the actual program itself while on my computer using a much higher screen resolution allowed me to clearly see two windows - that of the tutorial as well as the actual program window as well. It would be recommended perhaps to not have a separate window come up for tutorials but rather an interactive approach much like the many computer games out there such as Electronic Arts’ Sim City 4 where you actually are forced to click in the actual program and follow the prompts to actually get something done. One thought is to make the tutorial be like that of Alice where you have a filter over the entire program thereby blocking all clicks except for areas that are cut out (see photo below).

The video tutorials are excellent. Although with the release of Neat Works 4.0 to replace NeatReceipts Professional 3, the video tutorials for the older version appear to be no longer available.

After going through the tutorials it’s time to scan! Scanning was quick, the little NeatReceipts scanner when you insert the receipt into it will hit an internal switch which will make it “catch” the paper. After catching the paper, you may either press the “Scan” button on the scanner itself or the soft button when you are in the NeatReceipts program. You also have the option of scanning straight to PDF by clicking the appropriate button on the scanner itself or in the software program. I’ve learned it is best to be in “Smart Sorting” mode when scanning because you’ll be able to scan everything and have it sort in one stroke whether it be documents, receipts, or business cards. The other reason why I prefer sorting in the “Smart Sorting” mode is because after each scan it gives you a 5 second preview of the receipt thereby allowing you to rescan those receipts that got dragged in and moved sideways and the such. With “Smart Sorting”, after scanning you can drag those scanned materials that were misclassified back to the proper categories as well as merge receipts and business cards that either have multiple pages and /or sides. Upon filing your items, NeatReceipts will put your documents through OCR to extract and fill in all the information you need to have from a receipt or business card. (Note: I have wiped out the sensitive information intentionally.)

These are the fields extracted from receipts:

• Name of establishment
• Type of Establishment
• Date
• Payment type
• Tax
• Total amount

And these, from business cards:

• Name (First, Middle, and Last)
• Company
• Address
• Phone
• Fax
• Email

Everything is easy to use and NeatReceipts even makes it fun! The average scan time for a receipt is about 10 seconds with processing times of around 12 seconds for test setups #1 (after RAM upgrade) and #2. With test setup 1 before the RAM upgrade The result was 7 minutes for it to scan a single receipt. The dual core systems (test setups #3 and #4) performed even faster with scanning times remaining the same (for an average length of 5 inch length receipt) but processing times take a shave to about 7 seconds.

Scanning Tips

• If you are scanning very long receipts (like Micro Center ones), you should use your finger to guide the paper through the scanner or else it can pull the paper in crooked. This is not a force issue as you are using your finger to create a barrier so that the paper cannot go any direction but straight into the scanner when the unit pulls the paper in.

• When using “Smart Sorting” be aware that some odd shaped receipts may be sorted as a document rather than a receipt. This mode makes it the easiest to scan as you can scan everything and sort - just remember to toggle color or gray scale especially when you are scanning business cards as well. My recommendation is gray scale for receipts but full color for business cards.
• Make sure you take staples and any goo or stuff off of the receipts - you don’t want to damage the scanner!
• Date and make a notation on everything you scan so you don’t go making duplicate scans.

Exporting Contacts

NeatReceipts Professional can export to Plaxo as well as Microsoft Outlook thereby making everything that much easier. From business card to NeatReceipts to Outlook to mobile device with Mobile Outlook - Ahh…life is good.

Copying / Printing / Reporting / Tax Functions / Other “Nice Touch” Features

• With the copier option, you can scan something and have it print out immediately - it’s something nice when you don’t want to run down to the copy room.

• Printing receipts and business cards are easy as it will actually format the receipts to the page. A long Micro Center receipt actually gets cut into segments with 2 segments per page (perfect for rebates). This was very well thought out as the makers could have taken the lazy route and just printed one segment per page thus wasting paper. Kudos NeatCompany!

You can also print out contact information with business cards.

• The reporting options in NeatReceipts is extensive - but I admit I don’t use them at all. You can have reports generated based on payment type, vendor, project, and more. A perfect aid in keeping track of expenses.
• As for the tax functions I don’t use these features much, but for those who are in business these features are invaluable.When you are organizing your receipts you can actually select a checkbox to indicate something that is reimbursable as well as filing each receipt into a tax category which can then be used to print reports or even exported out to TurboTax! Not having used tax software, I am thinking that other major vendors of tax software support importing of TurboTax data. Receipts alone, however, can be exported to Quicken, QuickBooks and Money formats as well.

• Folders can be emailed to recipients, however individual receipts cannot. I wish they made it possible to email an individual receipt directly. As for now, I have to manually export a receipt and attach it to an email.
• Split receipts can be useful for when you need to split a ticket whether it be a lunch bill or paying a percentage of an item (mom said she’d contribute half of the cost of my new computer - just kidding, mom!).

Backup

The program uses MS SQL to store all your stuff. The Neat Company has included an easy way to backup your data. The program will even prompt you if you haven’t backed up in a while which is a big plus.

Support

The Neat Company’s technical support is second to none! I had a live person to chat with within 3 minutes when I had lost access to my databases when I had to reinstall windows. I had initially consulted the knowledge base and found part of my answer there but needed additional technical help. Mark, was patient and guided me step by step to get my NeatReceipts Professional 3 running again.

Conclusion

What can I say except that this product is Neat^3 degree (Neat to the third degree)! Getting organized is now as easy as can be! Truly in just 3 steps you are done - Scan documents, Get back reports, Send to other programs.

I nominate this product to be a JAMM essential. You not only want it, but you need it. This thing quickly turns scraps of unsightly paper chaos into well filed digital information that is easy to access, sort, and keep. With the mobile scanner that is USB powered, this thing is ready for any road warrior not to mention standard home and business use. What am I getting my mom for the next special occasion? A NeatReceipts scanner.

Vital Statistics and Summary

Name: NeatReceipts Scanner v3.0
Company: The Neat Company
Platform: Windows XP / Vista 32-Bit
Also Available for: Mac OS X 10.4.11 or higher
Price: $179.95 - $229.99 (Price depends on platform and retailer.)
Available at: The Neat Company, Micro Center

Things I Liked

• Small USB Powered Scanner
• Easy to use software interface
• Excellent OCR
• Ability to do backs and fronts of business cards.
• Ability to generate reports including for tax purposes.
• Excellent support.
• Ability to backup.

Things That Can Be Improved

• Unable to email just one receipt.
• Quick start tutorial could be done in a better and less confusing way.
• A slider of some sort to prevent receipts from occasionally going in vertically and ending up diagonally when scanning.

Technorati Tags: The Neat Company, NeatReceipts 3.0, OCR, Review, Tjchan, Just Another Mobile Monday, JAMM

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