Customer Reviews

NeatWorks Digital Filing System Software for Mac [Old Version]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

I've had many problems with the Neat Company. I had purchased their prior version of scanning software and it was abysmal. Crashed on start up. Completely unusable. I contacted the company asking for a refund and I was ignored. Another email from me (polite, simply asking for a refund) was also ingnored. They appear to be continuing releasing broken software from the online reviews here and elsewhere. I RECOMMEND THAT YOU AVOID THIS COMPANY AND ITS PRODUCTS.

An alternative that is now working for me:
-Fujitsu Scansnap S300M scanner (made to work with Macs).
-Mariner Software's Paperless application for the Mac: [...] This software is specifically designed to support the above Fujitsu scanner.

I feel bad writing this because I met the NeatCo folks at MacWorld and they were genuinely nice and engaged in the product they're building.

Now that that's out of the way, I paid $350 for their scanner bundled with this software and think it's completely unusable junk. I only use it for OCR now and put everything in Evernote instead.

As I write this, I can't even switch to NeatWorks because it's completely locked up doing OCR on a PDF. My fan is running at maximum speed on the current top-of-the-line MacBook Pro.

It crashes frequently and doesn't save.

It does an awful job of processing yellow receipts, especially those with blue text.

The organizational structure is confining and frustrating, forcing you to choose a "folder" for each scan type, and preventing you from tagging things across multiple smart folders. For example, in useful software like Evernote or Yep, I can tag something *taxes* *2009* *w2* *house*. Nope, not in NeatWorks. Pick one, and that's where it has to stay.

Then try searching for something. Wait 3 minutes. Great, let's look for all documents with the text "2009" in it. There's your search results. Now drag one to a folder and...hey! NeatWorks clears the search and you have to do it all over again.

Try scanning a document. Oh no, it's about 2 degrees tilted and the OCR isn't working right. Want to fix it? Sure. Crack open the file in the Neat library bundle, search for the PDF (or drag it out of the NeatWorks main window on to your desktop). Open it in Preview. Use image adjustment to fix the angle by 2 degrees. Save it. Drag it back in to NeatWorks. Reprocess. Only took 4 minutes! Or neat could just build all the os x coreimage utilities into this app, since they are readily available, and let us do this within the program.

So by now you're frustrated and you want to report a problem. Contact their support. Wait a week. No response. Do it again. Still no response. Maybe the third time you'll get a form letter back that may or may not actually address the issue (like the software's habit of forgetting where the scanner is in the middle of a large document scan and causing you to cancel). Post in the forums? Don't bother, you'll only get other customers sharing their grief.

Anyway, I hope to do two things with this review:
1) dissuade potential customers from making the same mistake
2) Give visibility to this and pressure NeatCo to get their ass in gear and releases stable, quality software

For what it's worth, upon buying my NeatDesk for Mac I recommended it to two people, both of whom have already returned theirs, bought SnapScans, and are using them with Yep/Evernote instead. I'd rather not give up yet and hope to give the next version of this 5 stars. Come on neatco...

### Update 11/19/2011 ###

Gave up and bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner for the Macintosh, paired with Evernote. This thing is amazing. It may be uglier than the NeatDesk, but it's better.

The software is slow and buggy, sometimes taking several minutes to start up. The proprietary format is useless, and the PDF support is primitive and not very helpful. I wish I had purchased a different product.

I have had this software for 24 hours and loaded in gobs of receipts. Bottom line, I'm exceptionally pleased with the software, it is worth the cost I paid for it.

I purchased the bundled scanner and software together at the Apple Store in Carlsbad California on 03OCT09. I needed to get expense reports out and can only file in digital format. Normally I would have scanned them in advance of the trip using my Fujitsu 510M (which I love, and am very happy with), but I was buried prior to the trip and didn't have time. With the Fujitsu, I just scan everything in and have an anal retentive directory structure and naming convention for managing my receipts, so they all fall together in the right directories, then I file my expense reports using my company excel spreadsheet. Anyhow...

The scanner AND THE SOFTWARE are very very very well done and I suspected that I would just use this as a way to get by on extended trips. However, since the NeatWorks software found my Fujitsu as well, I will likely be using it rather than my old system. I was just floored by the way it processed the receipts and found so many of the values and put them in the right spaces in the database. Its also very nice that you can drag and drop values, crop, and easily enter in new fields in the db if you want. As I travel internationally, I needed a way to reflect receipts in different currencies. So I added it as a "currency" type and now it even gets summed up with all the other numerical values.

The basic motif of the UI is like iTunes. I don't really like iTunes that much, but it works very well in this case. In particular is the way you group sets of receipts like smart play lists based on whatever field in the DB you want. I like this.

If I was to add anything, it would be editing. I like to add notes right onto the receipt for when they get printed out. Currently I use PDFPen for this. Another piece of software that is so good, I use it in place of the preview app that comes with OSX. It would be wonderful since PDFPen is so reasonably priced if Neat would consider perhaps licensing their editing capabilities? Just a thought.

Anyhow, I will demo this to people willingly as an app that will save time and improve quality of life because it allows you to become significantly more efficient at a task that I really hate doing. Those who see it will freak out, then run and buy it.

I tried Neatworks with my Scansnap 1500 and found it extremely lacking in about every area to the competition.

For documents it did an okay job, but I found that Evernote was far more useful, since it has clients for mac, pc, iphone, and most other platforms which meant I could access my documents everywhere. Also Evernote does handwriting recognition which neatworks doesn't. That meant that I was able to get my handwritten notes indexed as well.

For business cards it was pretty bad. I do most of my business internationally and neatworks was all but useless on the business cards I had. I used cardiris instead, and it works amazingly well against almost any business card I threw at it. It also imported directly to outlook, entourage, or other address books such as the apple address book. Far better.

For receipts it came close to the competition (since there isn't much out there), but the receipt it shows you to transcribe from is too small to read. The OCR is useless for most of my international receipts (as is that of the competition), but the interface isn't very good for recognizing and inputting things manually, because you have to double click every reciept to get a large view and then try to copy that information over to a form in a different window that has way too many fields that you can't get rid of. It has a few custom fields but these don't always work correctly in the various exports and reports. I ended up using Mariner Paperless, which does a better job of making this process streamlined. It's reporting and exporting capabilities aren't as good as neatworks, but at least I could get the receipts in quickly and accurately without a bunch of jumping around.

One thing I did like about neatworks was it's interface for moving OCR data into a form by drag and drop. If the OCR data had been better that could have been a killer feature, but alas since the OCR data was useless, so was this feature.

If you really want to only have one piece of software to do these functions, you can get neatworks, but I would recommend you to get a scansnap 1500 and get dedicated applications such as evernote (free), cardiris (bundled with scansnap), and mariner paperless. The scansnap makes it easy to switch between these programs and each of them are quite competent at their jobs.

I bought this software for use with the Fujitsu Scansnap. In my quest for a paperless office I was using the "direct to pdf" feature which is a real timesaver. One day it suddenly quit working. After three weeks with customer support they finally said that "this feature is not supported" for non-neatworks scanners.

Hmmm. So it worked for months and then suddenly was "not supported".

As others have noted, this is not a company that supports it's products. Don't buy it.

I'm using this a NeatDesk scanner, and the color scans on a Mac are nearly too dark to read. I spoke with Neat Co technical support who said this was a "known issue" with the Mac software drivers and they were working on a resolution, but they couldn't give an ETA. They said my options were to wait for a fix or return my scanner.

I can't believe they're selling "Mac specific" software that doesn't work on a Mac. Don't buy this software until they remedy this problem. The current version I have (with the problem) is version 2.1.6 (216014).

This software has proven to have a very limited library size. The company tells me the total library cannot exceed one Gigabyte in size.
The company has been unresponsive to my requests for support and also for my request for refund.
My opinion is this software is UNSTABLE and LIMITED in functionality for all except a user with minimal needs.
I recommend against purchasing htis product.
Mariner Software has a document management system which works better for larger needs..

I've used the Windows version of NeatWorks for several years and I love it. However, the Mac version is a mess! I use NeatWorks with a Neat Receipts scanner. The recognition engine makes multiple mistakes per receipt and gives me a recognition error message on about every third receipt. As others have pointed out, it's also missing key features that make the Windows version useful, such as credit card recognition from last four numbers, exporting data and receipts to Excel, capturing submission date, etc. I'm going back to the Windows version will wait for a major update.

I would double check the scanner compatibility list very carefully before buying. Doesn't work with most models of HP scanners. I bought this in the Apple store, I asked the assistant, will this work with my HP5370C, Oh he said, you have an HP, it works with most HP models. Usually he is right about that. When I got home I went to their website, wrong! It works with very few. Thought I might even replace my scanner, like to get a laser ALL-IN-ONE but unfortunately it doesn't even support anything I would buy. Software NEVER got used. And yes it I am sure it works with their own $400-500 specialized scanner. Who wants TWO scanners taking up desktop space.