reciept scanner

[Jamie Elis]

NeatReciept is a little scanner that takes vatrious sizes of receipts and will sort out the info and expoert it to a financial program for you. I am thinking about getting this. Anyone have experience with it. I am worried that it might be more trouble than it is worth.

 

[CosmoGTD]

How could it possible scan receipts, that are so different, faded, etc?
You would be spending more time correcting than anything. I can't believe it would work, as OCR with plain text is bad enough.

I just weekly add-up my receipts manually. Put them in category stacks take 30 secs, add them up in my head takes a minute, and put them in Quicken. Its super-fast.

 

[Elena]

I've been reading about this on their website.

Seems to me that if you want to try this out because it is difficult for you to keep track of receipts, then it's still going to be difficult for you to keep track of receipts for inputting into the scanner if you don't have the habit of going thru them regularly anyway.

If it's for the automated expense reporting and syncing with tax forms, then as long as it's 100% accurate (do you want to risk anything less with the IRS?), and requires no MORE of your time than putting the receipts in Quicken, or downloading your credit card statements into it, then it might be worth as much money as the cost of Quicken(or other systems).

I have my doubts as to the time effectiveness, simply because as someone else pointed out, receipts vary widely. If you have to scan the receipts, verify the results and correct them, then what advantage is it to you?

I'm not saying it might be just the thing for someone. But it's going to require the same committment and habit as any other system out there.

Just my thoughts, good luck with your decision.
Elena

 

[RustyC]

Unless you have a bunch of receipts every day, seems like this would be overkill. But if you only do it every few months (surely not!), then maybe not.

I use a Strobe Pro scanner by Visioneer to scan and store receipts. The Strobe series is great for archiving receipts, copies, etc. because it is small (sits between my monitor and keyboard), self-starting (just stick the item in the slot), creates a PDF file, and has a nifty file management front-end. Highly recommended.

 

[hibbard67]

I bought Neat Receipts last year and returned it. The product did exactly what it says it will do. It will scan the receipt and make a PDF out of it. It uses its own account register. The OCR did well. So why did I return it....

It puts all your credit card transactions in one register, even if they are different cards. Then when you export to Quicken (via the QIF) format, you commingle the transactions under one account.

If you use one credit card and have to save the receipts for corporate or taxes.... Neat Receipt is great. If you use different cards and want to export the OCR entries into Quicken…this will drive you nuts.

The documentation stated they would pay you for overseas receipts. Guess they are adapting for even more formats.

Great concept but did not work for me.

Hope this helps.

Hope this helps.