I purchased a NeatDesk scanner awhile ago to answer a growing need at home for more robust scanning. I'm one of those people that needs to have everything neatly filed away even though I will probably never see it again. I also religiously enter all my personal receipts and track my personal finances in detail. This seemed the perfect product to answer both needs.
I was used to the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 that I have at work, but in addition to an arm they also wanted a leg. The price of the NeatDesk is substantially less (about 40% for what I paid), and the promotional material for the scanning software was really sexy. So I clicked buy.
After a few days, my conclusion is that although it could be an outstanding product with a couple of tweaks, it's just not ready for primetime. This may be the case of a small company working on tight margins with a product that got too big too fast. It remains to be seen whether or not they can keep up with their new-found popularity.
Here's the dirt:
Hardware:
Good Stuff
- Attractive design.
- You can click the hardware "Scan" button all day, but you don't have to file your scans until you want to.
Bad Stuff
- No adjustable paper guide. Unless you hold it as it's sucked in, every single document is crooked.
- Not enough paper support. Creased documents (like a bill) flop back and aren't grabbed properly.
- I found the slot for receipts and documents to not match any receipt or document I had... Nice slot for business cards though.
- The output tray is not attached to the scanner body. Huh?
- It came with the grim spectre of having to clean and calibrate your scanner. You don't have to clean or calibrate the ScanSnap, although the ScanSnap does include "consumables", so maybe it's a tie.
Software:
Good Stuff
- Recognizes dates, subtotal, sales tax, and credit card used. This alone almost makes the product an overall winner and definitely put it on top for scanning receipts.
- As mentioned above, you don't have to file away your scans until you want to.
- Extremely fast search.
- It's pretty--yeah, that's important.
Bad Stuff
- Always takes the scan from the front but from the sheet in the back, which may be more intuitive for the beginner, but also means that a stack of double-sided sheets will go into the software backwards (page 2, 1, 4, 3, etc.) so you'll have to sort your document before and after scanning. Maybe I just haven't figured this one out, but it does seem like they emphasis multiple single-page documents vs. one multiple-page document.
* UPDATE: I figured out that you have to put the document in face up and everything is scanned in from the last page to the front. Your physical document will come out sorted, and the software will reverse the order of the scanned pages for you so the electronic document is correct.
- Does not auto-rotate to fix crooked problem caused by not having adjustable paper guides.
- Does not do auto-color detection--it's either all black-and-white or all color and you must choose. Those "Scan" and "PDF" buttons on the front are great, but you have to go into the Quick Scan application to set up how everything will be scanned first, defeating the convenience.
- Viewing the documents that are in the library is difficult. Should have a simple hand-tool for dragging and allow multiple documents to be open at one time.
- Moving data around the library is laborious.
- Software installs SQL Server Express, which takes up system resources and at least for me causes the program to not want to start up (try again message a couple of times before starting). Sure the search results come back very quickly, but at what cost? As a developer, I actually already had SQL Server Express installed, but it went ahead and installed another instance... Not very nice.
- Lots of opportunities to categorize data, but searching for the categories is difficult. For example, to see what you marked for follow up click "Advanced Search", click "Looking at..." and select "Action Type", click "Selected in the List", click and check box that says "Follow Up". It's more work finding out what's marked "follow up" than to actually follow up.
- The heavy emphasis is on recording receipts for expenses that will be reimbursed by your employer or be tax deductible. So what happens when I have a pay stub for consulting work? I have to file it as a document where I can't tag it's dollar amount, can't tag it as 1099 income, and it can't be exported to Quicken. That's one of the main reasons I got the scanner.
- Categories for receipts are very limited. Need a split? You'll have to do it yourself when you get to Quicken if you can remember what the receipt was for. Sales tax is always exported as an over-generalized "State Tax".
How it Could (Easily) be Made Great
- Package in or sell another paper guide that is adjustable. You can use the same snap-in style that is used for the receipt/business card guide.
- Add one inch to the pull-out paper support.
- Update the software to take scans from the face down position first on double-sided scans. Take the scan from the face down position only in single-sided scans.
* UPDATE: Even though this way seems more intuitive to me, the way the software does it is okay (see update above).
- Add in auto-color detection and auto-rotate so that scans always come out right. If Neat Co can do awesome text-detection, they could do this.
Conclusion
Seems to be an innovative company so I'll keep it in anticipation of at least the software updates. NeatDesk Desktop Scanner and Digital Filing System
I went to the store looking for the Neat Receipts scanner, and I came across this new product. I could not be more happy for buying it! I had 4 years worth of credit card and bank statements piled up in boxes, and with this scanner system I was able to scan them and organize them on my computer in less than a day (I'm talking hundreds of pages).
I have absolutely no complaints on this (other than the price, which is high, but it is a new product and it will come down).
The scanner can read 2 sided documents and scan both sides, in color! And it does it fast.
It also reads receipts and business cards and extracts the information from them (such as what store the receipt is from, how much total was, how much tax was, date of transaction, etc...) The best part about this feature is that it lets you edit the information (sometimes necessary if the receipt was very worn or wrinkled.
The software is extremely easy to use and very powerful. A great feature about the scanner/software is that you can load a bunch of pages and start scanning them. While they scan you can work on filing other documents. Once the pages are scanned they go into a sort of "inbox" where they wait for you to look at them and decide where to file them.
The two sided, color scanning is great and very fast. Another convenient feature the program has is the ability to combine several pages into one document. All you do is click on the different pages while holding down control and click combine ... and you have one file for a multi page document!
All the files you scan into the program are searchable, so you can enter a search term and it will bring up all the documents (or receipts or business cards, depending on which section you are searching in). Very handy to search back on when you bought something...
Another great feature for those that do not receive paper statements is the pdf import feature! If you get your statements from online, you can still import the file into the program (as if you had scanned it in yourself) and have the searchable capabilites of the other files.
Keep in mind, this is probably not a good scanner to scan pictures with, but for a document scanner, it is fast, and very good. I just hope it lasts the wear and tear I'm subjecting it to right now. I am very thankful that this product has helped me get rid of all of my paper clutter!!! - Scanner - Neat Receipts - Filing - Pdf'
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