Customer Reviews

NeatReceipts NR-Refurb Scanalizer Professional 2.5 Mobile Scanner and Software Combination (Refurbished)

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4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I order this product to make my income tax data entry easier. It came without proper software for MS Vista. I download software from manufactures website and installed. It immediately erased 10GB that is Ten (10) Gigabyes of my computer data and them proceeded to crash my computer. I lost many many important software application but only a few files, (I THINK) I had to reformat my harddrive and start over again. It has taken me 5 weeks to recover the full use of my machine.

BE careful with the SOFTWARE Installation. It works fine now BUT....

This product is awesome if you have a small to mid-sized home based business and cannot afford your own accountant or secretary. I think gets loads of use.

First a word of warning - this is an older version of Neat Receipts software. The newer version has many additional feature. However, due to its increased memory requirement, I am still sticking with the older version that comes with the scanner. You can upgrade to the most recent 2.x release, or fork out more for the newer release.

The scanner itself is very small and USB powered. It can easily be brought on the road for scanning. It also allows for scanning really long receipts. On the downside, it sometimes needs prodding to keep skinny receipts straight. The OCR capabilites are passable. Some receipts it does great with. Others it really botches. I've even had it successfully scan in a few handwritten numbers (as long as they were written legibly.)

However, the main thing I've used it for is archiving receipts and preparing expense reports. Thus, correcting a few numbers is not a big issue. It does allow for easily selecting a bunch of receipts and getting then printed out.

The document organizer is also a handy way to archive documents. (It did take me a year to realize that there was a separate tab and "library" for storing documents. The main difference being that it does not try to OCR, and thus runs faster.) This is a very easy way to get documents scanned in to a library (and to output them to PDF.) However, you will still need to feed the sheets one sheet at a time, thus making it painful for large documents.

The Neat Receipts software can also work with other scanners you may have connected. (I've used my home flatbed scanner on occasion.)

The scanning software is a memory hog. (It even seems to hold on to memory after it is closed, and often needs the process to be manually killed.) The database used to store the receipts is proprietary. To get your data out you pretty much have to export PDFs. (Though exporting a large number can be problematic.) The user interface of the software is also kludgy - searching and 'finding folders are both somewhat counter-intuitive. (At one time I thought I had lost all my receipts, only to realize I needed to do "fast find all folders" in order to view the folders.)

When this product was added to the Amazon catalog, the software may have been up to date, but the current version is 3.0 and is a MAJOR improvement. I've told both NeatReceipts and Amazon that their product listing is inaccurate, but they have not changed it.

The NeatReceipts people took pity on me and comp'd me a 3.0 license, but beware, you are NOT getting updated software.

a. If you ever get audited, at least they can read the computer scan items.
b. If you ever have fire, at least you have scan copies of important documents.
c. Organize the business cards

God Blessed tool

who has the time to scan edit and paste all the different items from each receipt into each category and rename the ones it doesn't recognize and re do all the receipts it can't read. A lot easier to do it all the old fashioned way by hand and with pen, paper and calculator.

I was really excited about the potential of this product becuase I keep every recipt for tax write-offs. This product made my expense entry times much longer and I had to re-enter the information once scanned since it would not pick up the majority of the basic information inputted. Needless to say, I have returned the product. Manual entry and an accordian folder is a better use of my time!