Neat Receipt Scanner App

[Ogier Dudley]

Editingthe 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.

Giving this thread a little bump. Eric, I wondered if you had any success in acquiring a NEAT Receipts Scanner for some testing. Also wondered if anyone else has been using it, and if so, what kind of results are you having?

Thanks for any words of wisdom.

I just downloaded an update to my NeatReceipts software, and was surprised to find they had changed the app name name to NeatWorks. The release notes for v2 noted a lot of changes, including the ability to scan and analyze business cards and put them into your Address Book. It also creates searchable PDFs and exports to Quicken. They added support for Canon, HP, and ScanSnap scanners.

Giving this thread a little bump. Eric, I wondered if you had any success in acquiring a NEAT Receipts Scanner for some testing. Also wondered if anyone else has been using it, and if so, what kind of results are you having?

I am glad to see some discussion on the Neatworks software on this site. I pruchased the scansnap S510M, its a great scanner. It came with a boat load of software, and yet the Fujitzu sales rep also recommended I go directly to Neatworks and pick up the neatreceipts software, as my goal was/is to clear out all the receipts, and papers, etc, cluttering and reduce my filing, ie, shred, shred, shred.

Now, the only solution is for you and neatworks to operate together. I would like to have each document go through both of your software packages, so I can get the best of both worlds. In a perfect world, I would want it to be an automated process managed in the background, so that I would only have to scan one time.

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.

There are 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.

I concur (forgive the pun!) with Gary. Receipt Bank offer a superb service. But this is an ongoing service, probably best used with a cloud bookkeeping solution. You say that you want a one-off up-front cost instead of ongoing monthly fees, but have you compared like with like and valued your (or your staff's) time spent processing the scanned data compared to fees paid to Receipt Bank or Concur?

If you really want to process it yourself using a scanner and OCR technology (that reads the scanned image and extracts key financial data), there is no need to use a scanner sold by the same company that makes the OCR software. I'd never heard of NeatReceipts, but I've looked at its website today. It may be fantastic, but there are lots of providers of good OCR software that may do the processing of the data as well as (or better than) NeatReceipts and you can make your choice of scanner separately.

For scanning at meetings away from the office, I use the Doxy Go (www.getdoxie.com/info/compare.html), which is a similar size to the NeatReceipts scanner, but doesn't require connection to a computer until you get back to the office (as it stores the scanned images on its own internal memory). If you do most of your scanning in the office, you'd be much better off using a larger scanner (with or without automatic paper feed).

It takes very little time for the remote sales team to photo the receipt with their smartphone and upload using the Concur App. Works much more smoothly than our previous system and no complaints from the workforce.

The only problem with Receipt Bank is that they don't capture line items on invoices. So if an invoice contains items for different jobs or that cover more than one expense category, you have to separate them out manually, which can be quite time consuming.

We have had an issue with missing post, recorded delivery items just put through the letter box without asking for signatures - and mail being delivered to the wrong address - so my confidence in Royal Mail is shaky at the moment.

There are other upfront options such as iPhone apps however the issue with these services is that they are driven by software-only. Software-only solutions can't (yet!) reach the levels of accuracy that you would expect for bookkeeping. The ongoing services do have monthly charges but they offer a much greater variety of importing and exporting options and, crucially, higher accuracy!

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