Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 88
 Amazing Organization Tool November 4, 2008
R. Toro (Tampa, FL United States)
167 out of 176 found this review helpful
I went to the store looking for the Neat Receipts scanner, and I came across this new product. I could not be more happy for buying it! I had 4 years worth of credit card and bank statements piled up in boxes, and with this scanner system I was able to scan them and organize them on my computer in less than a day (I'm talking hundreds of pages).
I have absolutely no complaints on this (other than the price, which is high, but it is a new product and it will come down).
The scanner can read 2 sided documents and scan both sides, in color! And it does it fast.
It also reads receipts and business cards and extracts the information from them (such as what store the receipt is from, how much total was, how much tax was, date of transaction, etc...) The best part about this feature is that it lets you edit the information (sometimes necessary if the receipt was very worn or wrinkled.
The software is extremely easy to use and very powerful. A great feature about the scanner/software is that you can load a bunch of pages and start scanning them. While they scan you can work on filing other documents. Once the pages are scanned they go into a sort of "inbox" where they wait for you to look at them and decide where to file them.
The two sided, color scanning is great and very fast. Another convenient feature the program has is the ability to combine several pages into one document. All you do is click on the different pages while holding down control and click combine ... and you have one file for a multi page document!
All the files you scan into the program are searchable, so you can enter a search term and it will bring up all the documents (or receipts or business cards, depending on which section you are searching in). Very handy to search back on when you bought something...
Another great feature for those that do not receive paper statements is the pdf import feature! If you get your statements from online, you can still import the file into the program (as if you had scanned it in yourself) and have the searchable capabilites of the other files.
Keep in mind, this is probably not a good scanner to scan pictures with, but for a document scanner, it is fast, and very good. I just hope it lasts the wear and tear I'm subjecting it to right now. I am very thankful that this product has helped me get rid of all of my paper clutter!!!
Very Nicely Done!!! April 4, 2009
Mary Jo DiBella (Rochester, New York USA)
44 out of 45 found this review helpful
This scanner is marketed to small businesses, and while I do not happen to run one of those, it does appear to be a really nice item for organizing business expenses. Since I am very fond of 'tech' of all sorts, I offered to test and review this item.
The description says it does not support 64 bit windows, and in fact the included installer CD refused to run on my 64 bit system. Not to worry though, if you go to their web site (www.neatco.com) you can download a 64 bit version. It installs a database as well as the scanner software. There is a special piece of paper in the package which is used to calibrate the scanner, and the documentation recommends occasional recalibration, which means you need to NOT lose the paper. I am not sure what you'd do if you lost it...I guess ask them to send you another one.
The NeatWorks software is really nifty. It interprets the scanned documents, and if they are receipts, it picks out dollar amounts for later use in expense reports. I did not have any business cards to try, but the application will scan them and produce an update to several types of 'contact list' that you might use. There is also an option to choose to file an item as a 'document' which means it is largely uninterpreted (though you can do text searches on them. One suggestion made by the developer is that you file recipes as documents so they can be searched for ingredient lists).
I wanted to give this scanner a good test, so I fed in a bunch of stuff just to see how it would be handled. My results:
1) I fed in a grocery receipt that had been folded a few times but wasn't badly crumpled. This was handled just fine, and the software was easily able to pick out the correct dollar totals. It even figured out that the receipt was for groceries and tagged it as such.
2) An Amazon purchase receipt that was in the box from a network hard drive I recently purchased. This scanned correctly as 'hardware' but the software read the dollar sign on the total as a '1' and thus added a thousand dollars to the purchase amount! Yow! Luckily, this is simple to fix in the application and you are in fact prompted to verify the numbers before they are filed in the database.
3) A receipt from a recent American Airlines flight to Texas. The application did read it as an 'airline' expense, but the dollar totals were completely misread. Again, I fixed them easily.
4) A receipt from a recent trip to Best Buy. If you've seen BB receipts lately, these are receipts with an attitude! They've got a lot of 'stuff' printed on them, advertisements, phone numbers, etc. The scanner processed this perfectly and the software read everything correctly.
5) For chuckles, I fed in a MegaMillion lottery ticket (a loser, sadly). This ticket had really light print on a colored background, and of course it had numbers everywhere. Not surprisingly, the software was completly flummoxed by this one. I filed it under 'documents'.
6) How about a 20 dollar bill? It scanned perfectly, and the software indicated it was 'cash' (hee hee) but did not indicate the denomination.
7) Since I was testing it, I decided to do something of a stress test. I took a longish grocery receipt and I crumpled that sucker up BADLY. Then I flattened it out as best I could and fed it in. For good measure, as the paper disappeared into the scanner, my cat leapt onto the desk and whacked it. Now THAT is a test... This receipt did not fare well at all. It was completely chewed up and caught in the scanner mechanism. I was afraid I'd done some damage but I picked out the pieces and then got the last of it out of the works by scanning a blank piece of paper. This jam-clearing exercise was simple to do, since the scanner top pops open at the push of a button to allow access to the internals. The scanner was undamaged and I fed in another document, which processed just fine.
Now I tried out some of the software options...
Once the receipts were in the scanner database, there were numerous export options. I exported to a MS Word document and got a very nice 'expense report'. An export to Excel gave me an xls file that produced a nice spreadsheet.
My final scans really tested the NeatWorks interpretive software, and that application exhibited a level of functionality that might be an indication of why this scanner is so expensive. I tore a page out of a paperback book (the 'about the author' page at the end, because it contained two different font sizes and some bolding) and scanned it in as a document. Then I exported it to a PDF and opened that PDF in Adobe reader. I exported it to a text file and it was a perfect text representation of the words on the page! I could wish it had the option to export to MS Word format because I can't begin to afford Adobe Acrobat...
I then printed out an adobe document I already had on my system, a knitting pattern with smallish text and color pictures. I scanned the printed document back in and then used the NeatWorks software to export it to PDF. I ended up with a PDF that looks really close to the original, allowing for some quality loss from printing the color images.
All in all, I liked this scanner and as I said, if I were running a small business, I'd find it really useful. It's also really nice for folks who scan in regular documents because it saves them in a handy database for later searching or printing.
The newly added 64 bit support means this will be my 'main' scanner in the future.
Amazing Scanner! September 30, 2008
C. Carroll (Seattle, WA United States)
38 out of 41 found this review helpful
I am someone who travels a lot and need to submit expense reports. I love this printer. It allows me to scan business cards, receipts and full size pages all at once. Then, it inputs the data into reports and databases with accuracy and clarity. It is awesome that it can scan all types of sizes at once and quickly. The older scanner was nice because it was portable, but it was slow and receipts would not stay aligned as well.
I keep this at my desk, load it up, and hit "scan." Its that easy! You can easily scan to a PDF as well, when wanting to send attachments in emails. The IRS accepts these scanned PDFs for tax purposes.
I like the look of the product too. Plus, it is quick and small, and fits nicely on my desk. I cannot recommend this product enough, and I used to use CardSCan for my cards and Neat Receipts for receipts. This does it all.
Don't know how I got along without it! October 31, 2008
Bruce Langworthy (Issaquah, WA USA)
22 out of 23 found this review helpful
The Neat Company NeatDesk Desktop Scanner and Digital Filing System (White)
This makes filing so much easier, and I like how it "learns" information about items I've scanned such as a bank statement. If it isn't able to recognize the name the first time, it does after that.
Also like the fact that at the end of a year or whenever, I can export groups of documents to searchable PDF (all text in the image is searchable), so I can archive documents at the end of the year.
This thing is great, and by far the fastest scanner I've ever had (in double-sided mode in black and white anyway).
They're not lying... It's definitely neat! April 11, 2009
esanta (San Jose, CA USA)
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
Consumer grade scanners have been around for over twenty years. In all this time, the prices have plummeted, the performance (resolution, quality, speed) soared... and the software has made little to no progress.
NeatCo's system is the first attempt I've seen at addressing specific scanning needs in a systematic, well thought out manner, and the results are terrific.
They started with excellent hardware. The sheet-fed scanner takes much less space on a desktop than a flatbed, and it can scan both sides of a sheet at the same time. Speed and quality are excellent, but obviously if you need high-end photographic quality you will have to look elsewhere (but that's fine since that's explicitly not the target for this product). The feeder has guides for letter/legal documents, receipts and business cards. The power (a wall-wart type brick) and USB connectors are on the back, as well as an on-off switch. On the slanted front you will find two buttons for scan and PDF, which are replicated in software.
The software is a delight to use. Essentially, the idea is that you feed the scanner your documents, and a built-in intelligence figures out what they are and sorts them accordingly. It's a good thing that it's very easy to reorganize the documents, because I had mixed results with my attempts; for instance my W2 ended up recognized as a purchase receipt.
No biggie, NeatWorks makes extensive use of drag and drop and is extremely intuitive. Once your documents are organized, NeatWorks makes it very easy to export, print or email them, and make them "searchable" (NeatWork's term for OCR)
It's hard to find fault in this well designed, polished system. I mainly feel frustrated by the fact that NeatCo feels compelled to charge separately for software upgrades; if you're a Mac user, prepare to shell out an extra $100 (currently $80). I understand that they need to make a living and all this beautiful software doesn't write itself, but charging extra for Mac software is shortsighted. I hope NeatCo will reverse their position on this.
Despite this minor gripe, I can't imagine giving less than 5 stars to this spectacular product. If the price is a little high for you, take a look at the NeatDesk's little brother, the NeatReceipts scanner. Same software but a slick bar-shaped scanner, at half the price (and more convenient if you do your receipts on the go)
Showing reviews 1-5 of 88
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