Customer Reviews

NeatReceipts Mobile Scanner and Digital Filing System for Mac

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(29)

 

 

Neat Receipts is a great idea and concept. But the moment you start to really use it disappointment will set in.

The portable scanner works fine. You have to feed the receipt in with a loving delicate touch. I can live with this. Here is the problem. Initially when you do not have much in the library, you can scan and process receipts as fast as you can feed them. Great. BUT, once your library starts to build up, it can take up to two minutes for the program to open and I average about one receipt scan per 1.5 minutes. No kidding.

When you read the Neat Receipts' response to the army of pissed off Mac users they simply acknowledge it doesn't work well when you get more than 900 items scanned and it is our responsibility to not have more than 900 items in our library. Come on Neat Receipts. Any average consumer or average business person makes more than 900 purchases in a year. They expect you to split off your library and create a multitude of sessions. This is a lame diversion from their software engineers fixing the problem.

So, what is their solution, just like the PC vs. Mac ads where PC spends more money on promoting/advertising the product instead of fixing it in R&D.

Mac users, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. Stay away from this sinkhole of a money pit.

I am now looking at Mariner's Paperless software. Their features and compatible scanners are listed below. Most scanners are already compatible with this software.

[...]

I received an advance-release of this product at WWDC08 in June 2008, and I've been playing with it ever since. It is top notch in every regard. The hardware is small and only uses the USB port [no need to find an A/C plug!]. The software is even better, as it grabs data right from the scanned receipt; no need for retyping in most cases!

This is a high quality product, and feels like something Apple has made, as even the packaging is tidy and well organized.

I highly recommend this over the currently offered shareware solutions. The software is really top notch, and the scanner is portable enough to fit in a laptop bag easily.

Update 3/09 Much improved with software updates since I wrote this review. Still a little uneven but gets OCR right more often, better field customization, etc. I tried to change the rating to 3.5 stars.
Earlier I said:
Two main problems:
1. uneven character recognition--for example, will sometimes record purchase price as $51.00 instead of the actual $51.53. Will often recognize total purchase price but not sales tax. Only recognizes name of store if it's in a "normal" type style, something few stores do.
2. no field for sales tax in the summary section. When I contacted their support staff about this, they suggested I use the "comments" section (which I had been using for other things). The date of the purchase is an important piece of information which should be included in the summary section.

This is my first product experience with receipt scanners. I found it very easy to use and intuitive. Works seamlessly with Mac. Although the OCR doesn't pick up everything all the time, it picks up most of it and changing/editing items is a no-brainer. I am very happy with this portable, little scanner. Takes up little to no space; is very compact and also creates PDFs for my text documents.
The whole point of getting it for me was to lessen the number of receipt boxes and folders I have running amok in my house. So far, it's worked brilliantly. I scan in my receipts about once a week to keep up with what I have for this year. I love that it doesn't need a power cord and uses a mini usb cord instead. The software allows you to create your own libraries of receipts in order to group them according to your needs.
I have my own business at home and this seems to be doing the trick. Rather pleased. Gave it 4 stars because it doesn't recognize all the info off the receipts sometimes. Would buy again, knowing what I know now.

I purchased neat receipts for the sole purpose of scanning business cards. I used to use card scan with a PC years ago and it saved me a lot of time manually entering data. I thought neat receipts would do the same thing. I considered card scan for mac but could not justify paying almost $100 more. Well, neat receipts just is not the ticket. It makes so many mistakes in the OCR process that I spend an equal amount of time correcting them as I would if I just entered the data manually.

I have been using this for about a month. It scans in receipts very well and the OCR works about as good as you would expect, maybe a bit better. The NEAT software is very friendly and easy to set up folders for your receipts. I plugs into your computer (Mac) and powers through the USB. No power cord to mess with.

I bought this to also make PDF's of documents from time to time and this works well. The problem with the system is that when you scan a document to a PDF the next time you try to do a receipt, it scans all the black area around the receipt and makes it proportionally small. To get around this, you have to re-calibrate your scanner before you scan a receipt after creating a PDF doc. This is not a long process, but kind of pain. If they fixed this it would be a great device.

This is the third different make of scanner I have purchased and for the purpose of records keeping it is the best. It is fairly accurate in reading and placement of my required data. Since I have had it 2-weeks, there have been several updates and improvements in the operations that you can choose to do. I would recommend this to any Mac person who wishes to be able to quickly log and retrieve information from their documents or receipts.

I purchased my Neat Receipts for Mac on July 2009. A few weeks ago it stopped working completely, but it is still under warranty. The support service of The Neat Company only contacts customers via a message board on their Website, which is slow moving. When I finally got my replacement scanner it looked used. I called the sales division after writing several messages that went unanswered. The sales rep said that they only replace scanners under warranty with refurbished ones, and that it is stated in their warranty disclaimer. I read it and there was nothing of the sort. So I requested they send me a new one...still waiting after a week for that...

I DO NOT recommend that you buy this product, the software is also VERY slow. The other scanner recommended in these reviews is better.

The Neat Company NeatReceipts Mobile Scanner and Digital Filing System for Mac (White)
This little item works very well and very quickly but it isn't perfect yet. The scanner is good, it rectifies crooked scans, but the OCR can miss things. It can be amazingly accurate, and on the next scan it can get the vendor wrong, the price wrong or the details wrong. Nevertheless it's good because it is very easy to correct the mistakes and then the file of images and the reports it generates are great for record keeping and consistent with IRS standards. Particularly good if you have a FLEX (Flexible Medical Spending Account) and you need to keep records of all those copays, OTC meds, etc. Overall a really good product. Fix the OCR software and it will be perfect.

I really like how this product saves time by auto-filling in the information from the receipt. I've also been able to easily scan documents in an effort to be more organized and go paperless. My favorite feature is that I can "print" documents from the web, email, or my computer directly to the NeatReceipts software and save the paper all together.

I am looking forward to the new software in early 2009, which hopefully will allow me to scan in business cards as well!