NeatReceipts: A Tiny Scanner for Your Desk or Briefcase
The first thing I noticed when I took the $200 NeatReceipts scanner out of the box was how tiny it is. Here's a photo of it compared to the similarly-priced ScanSnap S1300:
The NeatReceipts weighs under a pound, and it uses a single USB cable to power it and to transmit data to you computer (the ScanSnap S1300, also a portable, requires two of your computers USB ports: one for power, and another one for data). The scanner is attractive in a minimalist way, and like the ScanSnap, it features a prominent button to initiate a scan. (It also features a second button to scan and convert a document to a PDF file, which I'll cover in more detail below). Here's a photos of the contents of the box:
Installing the included NeatWorks software was simple and straightforward. After, I connected the scanner to my computer, loaded an 8.5 x 11 inch document into the feeder slot and pressed "Scan." It took 31 seconds to complete the scan. By comparison, the similarly-priced (but larger and much heavier) Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 took 29 seconds to scan the same document. Keep in mind, however, that the ScanSnap can scan both sides of a document in one pass and that it has a feeder that holds ten sheets of paper. NeatReceipts requires you to insert one sheet at a time, and only scans one side of a sheet of paper.
I was impressed with the NeatWorks software, which is excellent for organizing receipts and documents. It analyzes the documents and extracts key information such as dates, names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, and dollar amounts and adds them to the database-like record that's displayed alongside the scanned receipt. The data for multiple records can be arranged in various spreadsheet-style combinations, or exported to Quicken or as a PDF. The data extraction wasn't perfect, however, and I found I sometimes had to click the "Reanalyze" button to extract the text from the receipt. And the optical character recognition wasn't good enough for me to trust it -- it made frequent errors that I would have to correct.
NeatWorks comes with the scanner, but you can buy it as a standalone application and use it with a third-party scanner supported by NeatWorks. If I wasn't already an Evernote junkie, I'd consider switching over to NeatWorks. It excels at creating business expense reports.
I had a few issues with the system. When I tried scanning a small receipt as a PDF file, the software didn't crop the image, so there was a big black area to the left of the receipt. Since it was a PDF, I couldn't crop it with an image editing program. The scanner also had difficulty grabbing onto thin paper receipts when I stuck them into the feeder slot. Sometimes it would take several attempts before a receipt would go through.
For my purposes, the clear winner so far in my quest to find the best scanner is the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M. Sure, it's more than twice the price of the NeatReceipts and is much larger, but it burns through a stack of documents much more quickly. (I just ran 19 double-sided sheets -- 38 pages -- through it in 60.5 seconds.)
However, It's not really fair to compare NeatReceipts with the ScanSnap S1500M. NeatReceipts is a portable scanner, and it even comes with a nice cloth carrying bag (see photo above). If you're a business traveler and you need to take a scanner with you wherever you go, NeatReceipts just might be what you are looking for.
Next week, I'll take a look at NeatCo's other, beefier scanner, called the NeatDesk, which offers many addition features that NeatReceipts sacrifices in order to be so tiny.
Mark Frauenfelder – Editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and the founder of the popular Boing Boing weblog, Mark was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and is the founding editor of Wired Online.
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