Customer Reviews

NeatReceipts Scanner and Software for Expense Management and Reporting

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I am a consultant and am self employed and I track exepnses and bill them to my clients - or I lose money. I bought one of these about 3 weeks ago and it's awesome. It is really smart (or the software is) and when it scans a receipt it moves the amounts right into the excel spreadsheet I use. Wow, once in awhile technology really works!

I've been using the scanner to organize my business receipts. Its been a big help in keeping track of my expenses. No complaints so far.

For a home receipt solution this would be a great product, but as far as a business solution it requires twice as much data entry then just using quickbooks. It worked fantastic with outlook contacts and the sync was flawless, but of our over 200 vendors not a single invoice could be recognized.

A colleage showed me her NeatReceipts scanner and software while on a business trip one afternoon. What a great thought, automate, organize and e-file my receipts. Plus it was small and portable so I could do it WHILE on business trips to eliminate the risk of losing my receipts when I got home!

I give it three stars because the device works well, and has some amazing unique features, but definitely some disappointments.

First, be aware, you are buying THE SOFTWARE here, not the scanner. What I mean is, the company couldn't care less about the scanner. You can use any TWAIN compliance scanner, and the software would still recognize and file the receipts. This was explained to me by a company rep when I was receiving support on my software install.

This also meant I wasn't going to receive software updates without paying for them, which was also pointed out to me.

Second, this software is BLOATED. Honey, I'm talking like - "You're not gonna fit into your prom dress because you're preggers, girlfriend" bloated.

It uses a local install of SQL database server, and the service has to be running in order for the software to kick off. This just adds A LOT of overhead to your computer, in case you're geeky enough to care. You may also notice some performance issues during use.

All-in-all, would I recommend this? Yes. The tool/software is incredibly useful and really help you manage not just receipts, but any piece of paper you want to have an electronic copy of.

The product does what it says... it scans, organizes, and categorizes receipts from just about any retail store or restaurant chain. If you run your own small business and need to track expenses JUST via receipts, this is a great tool. Everything else about this product is broken.

First, the program itself is huge. It installs MSSQL, and an a large set of programs and data files. It also adds a background service (which autostarts at boot) that eats 500M+ of memory even when the main program isn't running. When it IS running, it's combined system usage is over a gig of memory.

Second is speed. The scanner itself scans receipts in quickly, taking only a second or two for a standard receipt, 5 or so for a letter sized page. The software then takes 30 to 90 seconds (2Ghz laptop w/ 2G of ram here) to "scanalyze" the receipt, depending on size and image quality. There is no way to batch scan receipts and put off the rest for later, so you're stuck waiting for it if you have multiple receipts. If you're lucky, it gleans and auto-enters data for 4 or 5 fields and/or auto crops and rotates your receipt. If not, you have to do that manually.

It also claims to organize other documents. But other documents it means recipes and newspaper clippings, which are about all it knows how to do outside of receipts. It can scan and store letter sized documents and pictures, but it then spends lots of time trying to "scanalyze" it, even though it's not a receipt, before finally giving up and letting you enter data manually. The interface is clunky at best, more so when you're trying to scan multiple pages from a document in. And if the scanner get unplugged from the USB port (which is very easy to do), you lose, as the software can not see the scanner again until you close it and re-open it, which takes at least a minute.

Finally we get to export. The QIF data is great, but most recent Quicken products no long accept the QIF format. And if you happen to have an older version, you're limited in what you can do with that data in any case. I've also yet to get it to export a single PDF properly, so I can't say much about that except that it's totally busted. And while I'm sure the tax reports it makes are really nice, who's going to use scanner software to print tax forms for filing?

Overall, the hardware is great, but the software is very lacking. It's nice that they offer a twain driver in the bundle so you can use other software with the scanning wand. But even that interface is clunky, and only supports one image at a time scanning. So doing anything multipage is painful, and the buttons on the device are useless outside of the supplied software package. Again, it does what it says, but only that, and not that quickly.

Also... It doesn't work on Vista. Period. They've released a few patches to try to update it, but they didn't work. And it now looks like they've given up on the older version and are trying to get people to update to the newest line of software (for a modest fee of course).

simply put it isn't compatable with all recent versions of windows, there is a petition to try and get the company to respond to this. Until they do you should NOT BUY IT, and let the company know why.