NeatReceipts Scanalizer Professional 2.5 Mobile Scanner and Software

OK, I read all the reviews on this product and still purchased one. Here is my scoop: This product fills a great little niche for those of us with home businesses that need some help keeping track of our expenses and contacts. But dont expect the world from this product. First, it hasnt been out that long, so yes, there is definate room for improvement. The scans sometimes dont work, and yes, the software does hangup sometimes. But considering what this product does for me, I can live with that. Also, the real beauty of this is the software it comes with that has some great reporting functions. You will be able to hand your tax preparer all your expenses in a tidy report. The reports alone will save me a ton of time. And I love the business card scanning. Im one of those who just came back from a week long conference with a ton of cards I normally would have just pitched after awhile, even though it will definately be an asset to my business to be able to contact these people. I was able to scan them in and export them easily into Outlook in a short amount of time. SWEET! Now, to address some other peoples concerns I saw in other reviews: First, I have no idea what they meant about having to reboot the system 3 times. Mine didnt need to reboot at all, although it did inform me that a reboot may be needed in a couple of spots. And the software was a breeze to install. I have also seen no affect on the performance of my machine, and I run a TON of software and hardware. This may be because I have an up to date system with plenty of memory. Second, the software does hangup sometimes and lose all your data since your last save if you scan too many times in a row. Just save your data by doing a backup every few scans - it only takes a few seconds. Also, you will be prompted during the setup to be part of a test group that can provide feedback on the product - join it. This is a relatively new product that is a real timesaver - help the company fix the bugs in the product instead of just complaining about them. Third, make sure you perform all the upgrades it prompts you for, before you actually start scanning anything. This alone will save you a ton of headaches. And dont forget to do the calibration. While were on the subject, the program will start a little tutorial program after you install it - take a few minutes to go through it and you will save yourself a lot of headaches. Fourth, the accuracy of the scans is completely related to how good your original is. I scanned business cards with dark type on either a dark or light background and got 100% accuracy. The accuracy rate dropped to about 90% if the card or receipt had light print or any damage to it. Did I have to do some typing - yes, but not a lot. And hey, each field it fills in is one I dont have to type myself. Fifth, yes - you do have to give the receipt or card a little push most times to get it to start the scan. HELLO - this is a sheetfed scanner! If you can show me another sheetfed scanner where this doesnt happen, Id be very surprised. The software easily uses any scanner on your system (I have 3) so just use another scanner if a particular reciept or business card gives you trouble. I would not recommend buying this as the sole scanner for your system - sheetfed scanners do have limited abilities. In short folks, this is a great little product, but it isnt perfect yet. I am computer savvy and able to deal with the little hiccups it throws my way without any trouble. If you are one of those people challenged using scanners or computers in general, then this product is not for you. But if you have no trouble in these areas, then this baby can save you a ton of time and you can then throw away those shoeboxes of receipts and business cards you have.

I purchased Neat Receipts after reading mostly positive reviews here and elsewhere but have been disappointed. At least 75% of receipts scanned are not read completely or improperly, and I end up manually typing everything into the program. Many businesses now use the carbonless receipts and the customer copy is a light yellow with faint imprinting. Neat Receipts will not recognize these types of receipts - I realize they are difficult but are also a large percentage of what I have to work with. Right now it is gathering dust on the shelf as receipts go into a shoe box, just like before. Can you say EBay?

Although I cant give this product a perfect five-star rating, it still is worth the investment. I am impressed with the overall accuracy of the OCR capibility and the flexibility of the filing system. The major drawback for me is the lack of full integration with the newer versions of Quicken, which is my main financial management software. It requires several extra steps to transfer all the scanned info and not all the fields that I need in Quicken are available in the scan batch. However the ease of use and the fact that receipt, bsn card and other documents can be stored with a compact device on-the-run compensate for most of the awkwardness.

I purchased this scanner several years ago. I intended to use it instead of a flatbed scanner to scan my household paper documents. The major drawback of using this scanner is the included software. Using an application to organize documents is alright as long as the application always works. When you cant get the application to run, you have no way of accessing your documents. Such is the case with me when I upgraded to Windows 7. The Neat Receipts application will not open the database, so I have no access to my documents saved using Neat Receipts Professional software. Luckily, I only save documents for about a year several years ago. As time goes by, there is less and less chance that I will need the documents I cant access using Neat Receipts software. Early on, I started searching for a software alternative to use with this scanner. Basically, all I need is software that allows me to save documents in PDF format. I am quite capable of storing individual PDF documents in directories that allow me to locate anything I am looking for quickly. If I need a hard copy of a document, it is easy to print a PDF document. The software I found that works great for this purpose is JGS-Scan ([...] With the Neat Receipts Twain driver, the scanner works great using JGS-Scan. It allows scanning of multiple pages into 1 PDF document and I am not limited to using a program to look at my documents. As a portable scanner, I think this scanner deserves 4 stars. The only problem with the scanner itself is the difficulty in feeding documents into the scanner that are not free of creases. Documents with previous folds have to be watched closely to make sure they feed properly. The software deserves 1 star, in my opinion, which is why I gave this review 2 stars.

The scanner here is worth about $120; so youre paying about $35 for the NeatReceipts software. Thats probably the upper limit of what its worth right now. It claims to be version 2.5, but feels more like an early beta - slow to load, frequent crashes, poor search function. This is potentially a useful package for compulsive record keepers. Scanner works fine, but software needs more development.

The software and scanner were 2005 versions that do not work with Windows 64 bit software. I have had to spend much time with tech support. Very cumbersome to uninstall old version before installing the updated version. I had to actually delete files from my system registry AFTER uninstalling through windows. After this was successfully done the scanner still did not work. Contacted tech support again. Had to delete more files in the system registry. Scanner still does not comunicate with the software.

Great device for cutting down on paper clutter. Main uses for me are receipts (I create a PDF of all receipts from a single trip and zip it with the expense report), for business cards which I sync with Outlook and for general notes -- I never have to worry about having the right paper folder along on a trip. Outlook sync for business cards is great but could map more fields or allow user to adjust the maping. For example, would like to map attachments and back of card (particularly Chinese cards) into Outlook.

I got this scanner 5 days ago, and I scanned over 400 documents (receipts + bills) already. I got it before the expected date of delivery (Thank you Amazon) and the product was great. The software installation took some time and has a large footprint. I generate a 1 to 2-inch thick stack of receipts each month of varying sizes (2x3 to 11x8) and I scanned one months receipts/docs in a few hours. It is so easy, that my 5 year old scanned over 50 different sized receipts for me. Here are some good and need for improvement items: Goods: 1. Can scan anything -- scanned very glossy paper receipts to crumpled ones to those that have staples (yes - you can push papers with staples with little effort). Scans Biz Cards also. 2. For receipts, it recognized the information (date and totals) 95% of the time - a couple of times, it messed up the $ which is easy to fix. 3. It has a multi-page scanning option to scan multiple pages into one document (e.g.phone bills) - the documents can be of different sizes. 4. The scanning speed is not bad - better than what I expected for such a small equipment 5. Allows you to organize scanned content into different folders 6. Can export entire folder into many formats (tried only XLS and PDF so far) and it summarizes the XLS or creates one PDF with all the images - the PDF export is a neatly formatted report, with summary (categorization) in the first few pages, and images after that. 7. Allows Color scanning too, but I used the B&W default only. 8. Can scan very long receipts (tried 3-4 page long receipts successfully) 9. Document (8x11) scanning is also reasonably quick (if you make the mistake of scanning a document, e.g. bill into receipts, it takes a long time to analyze the image for distribution - scan the docs into Documentation category and you are set). Needs Improvement: 1. The software sometimes takes up a lot of CPU (>50%) of the machine 2. If the receipt has a fold, it could turn during scanning, causing the image to appear warped - I would like to see a glide/support. Use your finger to act as a glide they improve the product. 3. Vendor Name recognition needs some improvement - It recognizes some, but did not for most. Definitely does not recognize if Vendor name is in the logo (e.g. Sams Club receipts) - so after scanning, I added the Vendor name. 4. Scanning documents does not do any recognition - nothing is filled (date, name of doc, type etc). 5. It does crash once in a while, and you lose your work - I periodically close the program after scanning 20-30 documents, and start again. 6. Startup time of the software is rather too long. Overall, I would say I am very pleased to have bought this scanner. I need to wait and see what happens to their software when I scan a few more months of documents - will it become slow? only time will tell.

My disappointment with this product is two-fold: (1) The number of scanning and classification errors it had in my testing were too high. (2) It does not add anything to somebody using Money or Quicken. Ill address the second point first: My main interest in this product was to have my receipt automatically categorized and then have that information transferred into my Money file. However, I found that that the categories it supports are very limited. Secondly the import into Money was very cumbersome: you had to first select the records you wanted to import, save it to a file, then open that file in Money and import the records. Note that these have to be done one account at a time since Money expects that the records you are importing all belong to the same account. The biggest blow was that the importing process did not retain the category selected in NeatReceipts, so the whole exercise was just an elaborate way to get an entry into Money. If your institution supports downloading, that is a much more easier and accurate way to get the records into your Money or Quicken file. You can then categorize them manually (of course both Money and Quicken do a good job auto-categorizing expenses with regular payees). As to the first point (scanning errors), I found that it was unable to pick out the account number in some cases, the date in another case and even the amount in a couple of cases. One of my receipts was for a refund with the - symbol clearly present in front of the amount. It not only categorized that as an debit instead of a credit, it even got the amount totally wrong. On the positive side, it should be useful to somebody who does not use a product such as Money or Quicken - having a digitized, searchable copy of your receipts can be very useful. You will have to correct some errors in the scanning/optical recognition, but using this product will be better than not doing it at all.

Ive owned this scanner for several months now. With the original software, the system would produce an error and no-scan about 25% of the time. After an hour or so with a very pleasant customer service rep, we gave up to wait for the upgrade. That came last week and now it wont run at all. Much better systems available.