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NeatReceipts Scanalizer - Scan business receipts

NeatReceipts Scanalizer
REVIEW DATE: 04.19.07

Total posts: 1

$166.00 - $247.00

By M. David Stone

The first time I saw NeatReceipts Scanalizer ($200 street) was in the Philadelphia airport, where NeatReceipts, a local company, was showing it off. The demo was aimed at business travelers, the scanner's target audience. The combination of scanner and software (then simply called NeatReceipts) was showing in a kiosk, surrounded by stores selling overpriced snacks. The product would scan customers' receipts for those snacks (not to mention other expenses) and let them throw out all the scraps of paper that were stuffed into their wallets—or soon would be.

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A few months later, I got the chance to review NeatReceipts, which was shipping at the time with the program NeatReceipts Professional 2.0.2. I still had that airport demonstration in mind, so I wasn't surprised that the program worked reasonably well. But it's now more than a year later, and the current version of the software is 2.7.5. I thought it was time to take another look.

• Visioneer RoadWarrior
• Scanners Product Guide

The hardware side of NeatReceipts Scanalizer is a sheet-fed scanner capable of scanning paper up to 8.5 by 30 inches. Despite the NeatReceipts logo, the scanner is actually the highly portable Plustek OpticSlim M12 that I've reviewed separately. But NeatReceipts Scanalizer is mostly about the software, which adds two additional modules—"Tax Reports" and "Documents"—to the earlier version's "Expense Reports Manager" (now called "Receipts") and the "Business Card Manager" (now called simply "Business Cards").

Aside from the names, Receipts and Business Cards are largely unchanged, at least in their general description. The main screen of the Receipts module is divided into four panes. The pane on the left shows either search options or an image of the currently selected receipt. The three on the right show a table of folders, a table of receipts in the currently selected folder, and additional information for the currently selected receipt or folder.

The earlier version of NeatReceipts impressed me with how well it enhanced receipts printed with ribbons that should have been changed long ago. The current version does just as well on that score, making nearly invisible ink easy to read on-screen, and it does at least as good a job at optical character recognition (OCR)—recognizing the text and putting it in the right database fields. For information it misses—including, for example, handwritten tips and totals—it's easy to read the originals on-screen and fill in the right amounts.

The same recognition and parsing technology works like gangbusters for business cards. In fact, the business-card module is in the same league as dedicated business-card programs. Thus, NeatReceipts is worth considering strictly for its business card features. Here again, the screen is divided into four panes. Two show a table of contacts and the details for the currently selected contact. Another lets you see any of four scanned images for the currently selected contact—the front and back of the business card, a photo, or one or more pages of anything you care to scan.

The fourth pane lets you list action items and notes for the currently selected contact, which lets the business-card module double as a simple contact manager. You can also right-click on a name in the table of contacts and choose Send Email To, and you can synchronize contact data with Microsoft Outlook or with the online Plaxo service.

The new Tax Form module can generate a long list of tax forms or generate a TurboTax file. Expense-report formats are limited, but if your accounting department insists on a particular format, you can export your data to a standard CSV (comma separated variable) file, which almost any database or word processing program can use to generate a report in any format—assuming, of course, that you're comfortable with the database program's report generator or the word processor's mail-merge feature.

The critical question is whether your accounting department will still make you keep the original physical receipts and hand them in. If you still have to keep track of the originals, you lose a lot of the benefit of the program. And for tax-deductible expenses, I'd still check with my accountant before I threw out the paper receipts.

Not so incidentally, if you'd rather manage the data in an accounting program, or need to enter it for things such as reconciling your credit card statements, you can also export the data to other formats, including Quicken, QuickBooks, and Microsoft Money, and then import it into your accounting program. The process doesn't work as smoothly as I'd ideally like. Depending on your accounting program, though, it may be a significant improvement over having to type everything in.

The newly added Documents feature is modeled on the Receipts module. It lets you create multiple folders and put individual documents into each folder. Unfortunately, it's disappointing at best. The hierarchical structure is not as useful for managing documents as it is for receipts. More troublesome, NeatReceipts doesn't OCR the documents, so you can't find a document by searching for the text in it, and you can't export the document in text format to edit it.

In many ways, NeatReceipts is unique, but it's worth mentioning that Visioneer recently introduced its RoadWarrior scanner, which is also aimed at the business traveler, putting it in head-to-head competition with NeatReceipts. (Neither one, by the way, offers full-fledged Vista support as of this writing, although NeatReceipts has a beta version for Vista on its Web site and Visioneer says it has a beta driver for Vista that will be on its Web site shortly, along with Vista-compatible updates for its bundled software.)

Visioneer doesn't include the ability to OCR-scan receipts and put the data in a database. Instead, it provides Nuance's ScanSoft PaperPort (which is a much better document manager than NeatReceipts). The idea is to manage the images of the receipts in PaperPort but still create expense reports and enter expenses in your accounting program the same way you do now.

You may prefer one program's approach over the other's, but make sure you take a look at both and consider which is the better match for your taste.