Neat Scan

[Kandy Swartzel]

Thereare quite a few complaints from users on Windows as well as Macs about the Neat scanners. Seems most of their products were either portable scanners or desktop scan->file devices. They seem to have abandoned the product line.

With Cloud technology and smartphones, there are now many ways to scan receipts and documents using an App that can generate a PDF and dump the output to a cloud storage drive. OneDrive does this very well and Microsoft Lens App as well along with many others. My company uses the Concur system for travel and expenses and their mobile App can scan receipts from your smart phone, perform optical character recognition (OCR) and when the bank charges arrive, automatically match the receipts to the credit card charge and generate a automatic expense report line item. All of this effectively makes portable scanners as obsolete as fax machines.

If you need a upright sheet feeder desktop scanner to digitize a lot of documents, Fujitsu, Canon, and Epson have some nice products that work with Mac. Shop around, look for Mac specific ratings and reviews. VueScan is an excellent software package that can revive many popular old scanners whose manufacturers have dropped support. But it doesn't support everything. It doesn't work with the Neat scanners as an example.

When they are Synch'd to the evernote servers, the server software performs the OCR and creates the search capability, and that searchable index/data is then sent back to your PC so that you can search within Evernote for strings within the scans. There is a time lag between your scans (or in fact any others images) being Synch'd and the OCR occuring, so you have to wait a while and then re-synch to get the data back to your PC so that the search is possible.

But...when it works, it works well. The scanner & it's software are very good at scanning, OCR'ing & "correcting" receipts. The OCR software is also nice b/c it defaults the vendor, date, payment method & amount & most of the time is fairly accurate.

Since I'm not fully comfortable with Neatworks, I have taken prior years, exported them & then imported the scans into Evernote. That way, if I ever get to the point where I'm fed up enough with Neatreceipts, I can easily jump ship.

I have been amazed at the "Not Ready For Prime-Time" software that comes with Neat Receipts. The installation process was painful. I had to go through several upgrades that were very, very clunky.

"NeatWorks cannot launch because a connection to the databse could not be established, possibly, because the database is still starting up. Please wait 30 seconds and then try re-launching NeatWorks. If the problem persists, please contact NeatWorks technical support for assistance."

Me, too. Especially given the fact that this is not inexpensive software. The first version I had (3.x on the CD that came with the scanner) wouldn't allow the software to be loaded onto any drive other than C. (???) This was Jan of 2008, so having a drive other than C was not a novelty at that time. I contacted them & they sent me a link to download a version that could be installed on another drive. (However, the database is still, always installed on the C drive.) THAT took me 3.5 hours to get installed on my computer during a chat session with Arlene from NR.

I get those too. The second one is a PITA, but I can live with it. I got the first message occasionally on the 3.x software. But with the Neatworks 4.x, I get it EVERY TIME, if I don't turn off McAfee's real time scanning. I contacted their tech support & got the following reply, along with a link to a knowledge base document indicating Kaspersky Anti-Virus Causes Error at Startup.

"It appears you may have an indexing conflict between the NeatWorks software and another third party application running elsewhere on your system. NeatWorks will periodically re-index itself automatically to catalogue data. Third party indexing/backup software such as Carbonite or Google Desktop can potentially interfere with this process. This does not necessarily mean you will need to shut down those applications while using NeatWorks everytime, however in most cases if you disable those applications temporarily, NeatWorks will successfully re-index upon launch and the crashing will cease."

You're welcome! My big dog computer is still down, so I can't get into Neat. But I looked in EN & I have a jpg for each receipt. IIRC, I would select all receipts & then I think you can export as jpgs, one file per receipt. Also, FWIW, I'm using the latest version which is Neatworks 4.x. (I bought the upgrade in Feb 2010 & there was an upgrade issued in May...that's the one I'm using.) I don't have them nicely titled in EN, since I'm still relying upon Neatco. I do have them in a single notebook (receipts.) Each batch is tagged according to year & person. I do my Mother's books, so receipts from 2007 for her are tagged 2007 - Mother. Hope this helps...I just hate the thought of being in a position where I can't get Neat running & yet want to find a receipt. So EN is my "backup" for this.

Since it took so long to figure this out I tossed out the machine about 4 months ago. I repurchased the handheld version and now I'm having the same problem. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way of opening this model to do this. Thus, is there any way to open this model and complete this process?

Mine was doing the same thing and I cleaned and cleaned and clean with no result. Finally I decided to gently lift up the 1/2" piece of plastic that covers the front of page scanning glass and ran my finger of all things (I had just washed and dried my hands so no oil build up) down the length of the plastic and noticed some dust had built up on my finger by doing so. This was a bit tricky because that plastic cover fits tight against the glass. THAT is what finally fixed my line issue.

Thanks for the advice but I cannot figure out which piece of plastic your are referring to. Can you take a photo or describe more specifically. I cannot seem to lift up the plastic covers on the horizontal glass bar. Is it the cover over the bar on the base of the machine or on the cover of the machine. Thanks

I did figure out what piece of plastic that you were referring to and cleaned it. It did have dust buildup on it bu did not fix my problem. My front page has a 3 inch blank column down center of page.

I am experiencing the same issue. I have cleaned my scanner to the point it looks brand new. That flimsy piece of plastic Chris is referring to is above the large roller. It is actually attached to a removable piece that unhinges when you squeeze the two tabs next to the divots at the base of the large roller. I thoroughly cleaned everything. The grey markings that are on this particular scan seem to be of a different quality than markings from dirt scans i have had in the past. It makes me wonder if it is a software issue?

Getting really frustrated here trying to set up a neat scanner to be recognized as a TWAIN device for QuickBooks (Win 10), The neat device is correctly configured for WiFi as I can ping the scanner and I have already installed the drivers but is nowhere to be found to be added.

Funny the Neat Website says it supports direct scanning to Quickbooks. Rather than bust your head against the wall, I would contact them. If your system does not see it, you might have a firewall issue that is blocking communication.

Editing the fields and adding in information to what was missing or picked out incorrectly was extremely simple. It is also faster than having to type in everything at once and each receipt one by one. One issue that I had with the scanner though is that you have to place everything face down and it only gets the information right about 60 to 70% of the time, which is still better than having to do everything by hand.

Thanks for the down and dirty. I have decided to look for a deal on one of these after A: A ton of online research and , finally B: After reading this review. Thank you for taking the time and for sharing.

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Here's a neat trick I am learning... Take a CT scan and make it in to a 3D model and print it on our 3D printer. Easy right? Not really... Lots of fancy, confusing software and 3D modeling to clean up the mesh. However this is the wave of the future. Taking a stack of 2D images and making them in to a 3D mesh. Event beyond that are guys working on 'voxels' taking each 2D pixel and turning it in to a 3D mesh (vectors). vector + pixels = voxel? Hmmmm sounds good. Who's going to do it best or who's going to do it the most? Here's a link to an article that explains it much better...

currently I am using nmap wich scans the range of IPs that my DHCP server assigns to hosts. However this is a) slow and b) sometimes nmaps doesn't discover all hosts. Laptops that are connected wirelessly sometimes aren't counted.

You could always just use the Image Capture software that comes with your Mac. But it is more meant for images, not scanning documents.

Preview also has a File, Import From Scanner command.

But I don't know if either of these options will work with your scanner. They don't with my Fujitsu ScanSnap.Even if they did, I would probably not use it because you really need to have document scanning software that can handle multiple pages and filing.

What does Neat recommend? Ask their support as they may know of the best option if you want to not use their software.

I would also take a good look at their software and see if there is a way to still store things locally. They may have that option if you know where to look.

If you want to get away from them altogether, I switched to that ScanSnap years ago and it has been a great experience.

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