NeatReceipts Scanalizer Professional 2.5 Mobile Scanner and Software

Covienent size. Scans ok. Software ok. Had problem scanning an orange receipt. Poor support. Answer was will not scan orange and could not manually enter data.

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.

When I first got it I loaded the software, and then tried the scanner. It did not work and I had got the receipt face down. I reloaded the software and downloaded the latest update and the scanner worked. I found that it does not support foreign currencies and usually got the date and the amount wrong (the former was partly because my computer comes from Switzerland. And I was in the USA at the time so my receipts were all American. What I did like was that I can scan all my receipts and export them as a pdf file which I can use to back up my expenses. It also does not import pdf files so that if I save my internet receipt in pdf format, I cannot import it and I have to print it out and rescan it, which seems to defeat the purpose of the paperless office. However, it also offers a business card scanner and it works as a general purpose scanner which is useful when I have to send an electronic scan back to the office. For those based solely in the USA this should do the trick but for those travelling overseas you will still have to do the currency conversion at the next level.

I did all kinds of research online for a compact portable scanner to help me with document reduction. I finally decided to go with the Neatreciepts scanner after considerable research across all kinds of sites including watching the downloadable Martha Stewart review from their web site. My overall impression is that its a great concept but the way the product delivers is less than perfect. The Scanner: The one thing I will say about this product is that its compact. Its very small, much smaller than other desktop models Ive seen and it draws all of its power from the USB cable making it truely convienient. However, my big problem was with getting it to grab and scan the document. When you feed a sheet into the scanner, it prefeeds the document a slight amount to prepare for the scan. However, once you push the scan button (either on the scanner or in the software) it rarely pulled the sheet through without me needing to give it a push. I tested this with an 8.5 X 11 document and it only grabbed the sheet correctly 20% of the time. The Software: This is where I was most dissapointed. On their website the software was billed as a being able to categorize and database reciepts, documents, tax forms, business cards, etc. In reality this tool was built to categorize reciepts effectively and do other documents as an afterthought. This is most evident in the softwares single-minded focus on trying to categorize everything you scan as a reciept. I scanned in my paycheck and it categorized ny employer as a vendor and my salary as an expense. I had the same problem with scanning in documents. The categorization had to conform to the types of categories used for reciepts. Not good. You can turn off the OCR and manually categorize your information, but you still need to classify all documents as some kind of reciept. I saw this problem on the Martha Stewart clip where her recipe cards were classified as reciepts where the vendor was the name of the recipe - I should have realized then how big the problem is. Okay aside from the categorization issue the biggest problem was that many of the documents I scanned were returning errors when they were scanned into the system. This supposedly was with their most recent version of the software. The verdict: If youre looking for a scanner to scan only reciepts then this may be the product for you. Otherwise Id suggest you keep looking.

The only fly in the ointment is the fact that this device only really works with Windows XP, and not Mac or Linux, and not very great (as of last month) with Windows Vista. Scans and helps you organize store receipts and business cards, very important items for anyone who likes to really keep track of their or their business finances.

The NeatReceipts product is useful, labor saving and fun to use. I bought it to clear a large backlog of unfiled trip expenses - it was neat to join forces with my 6 year old kid who found it amusing to scan receipts into the scanalizer, while I quickly validated, corrected and/or refiled missing numbers. The job felt like it took shorter than it would have, otherwise. But be warned of software glitches: 1. Always check the Vendor, date and amount. Dont trust the software implicitly; it has a hit-or-miss rate of about 50%. 2. There was some kind of software memory leak bug that just wiped out 150 receipts that Id entered!! A good 4+ hours of work just disappeared. That Im still using the product (exiting and restarting after every 10 receipts) is a testament to the value of the product. So use it -- but dont trust it.

I bought the NeatReceipts Scanalizer for a small business because I was becoming overwhelmed with all the paper. I have been using it for about a month now and think it has been worth it. Set up was easy. Initial use is like a tutorial until you are ready. Receipts are categoried and is easy to customize and search. Scanalizer reads most of this information and enters it for you but not always acurate, but better than nothing. It recognizes some vendors and categories and mostly always gets the receipt price right. It even has tax forms you can print. Recommend you get extra memory and external backup just incase IRS needs receipts, you have them all. Each receipt is about 1 MB but when backed up compresses files to about a third. At the end of the year, I wont be stressing during tax season. Priceless.

Bought this item the other day. Received it last night. Tried it on a few things and seemed to work ok. Today I used it on several Home Depot and Lowes receipts. I am a contractor and bring home dozens of these receipts each week. Tooooo bad it will not read half of them. They are completely flat and I notice the scanner pulls them in and they slowly begin to rotate a bit. It comes back with errors galore. Waste of time, money, and my patience on this Professional Scanner. I will be sending this item back. Rather keep my $170 and deal with it come tax time.

I have used NeatReceipts for several years and this little scanner really does a great job. Doesnt take up much room and after you are thru using it, just unplug it and put it in a drawer for next time. I save my receipts for a couple of weeks and then scan them all at one time. This really helps when tax time comes as many people find out that the receipts you get from the stores are thermal printed and the information on the receipts disappear/fade after awhile and if you cant read them, thats a problem. This scanner along with the NeatReceipts software can save a lot of headaches when compiling your receipts for the year.

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.