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Provides: Electronic document backup
Format: Box
Developer: NeatCo
Minimum System Requirements: 512MB RAM, Mac OS X v10.4.11, USB port
Processor Compatibility: Universal
Price: 229.95
Availability: Now
Version Reviewed: 2.0.4

Until the day when all transactions and receipts are electronic, you might want to consider a method other than physical files and folders for your receipts and important documents. That is exactly what NeatReceipts is for. It will scan your receipts, business cards and other important documents, making electronic copies. It will even extract data from these—such as names, numbers, addresses totals, etc. And best of all, you can recycle your receipts after they have been scanned in.

The NeatReceipts package contains the two things you really need: a scanner (though you can purchase the software separately if you have a supported scanner already) and the software, called NeatWorks. The scanner is very small and portable. It works by feeding paper over its sensor, which allows you to have a much smaller device than a regular bed-style scanner. You do sacrifice a bit of image quality for this, but you should know that this is for documents and the like, not high quality scannings. If this isn’t good enough for you, they have a much bigger scanner coming soon that auto feeds documents, perfect for book pirates (I’m kidding).

That said, it actually does a very good job scanning.  All you have to do is insert the paper that you want to scan (scanside down) into the scanner’s feeding slot.  It knows when there’s something there, so it will actually grab the paper.  Then just hit scan on the scanner, in the program, or with the shortcut keys.  It scans at about the same speed as a regular desktop scanner; nothing amazing, but it’s not slow, either.  Now, it will do its OCR (Optical Character Recognition) thing, and, a majority of the time, will populate most of the pertinent fields with accurate information.  It recognizes and records items such as name, company, phone numbers (sorted by type), email addresses, physical addresses, totals, taxes, tips etc.

[Side Note. You don’t actually have to scan a document to get it into NeatWorks. You can also import PDFs and images, or export from any other application from the print dialogue. Just click the Export to PDF drop down box in the bottom left and select one of the NeatWorks options.]

Now, you have a record of whatever it is that you scanned in. But before you toss that original, you’ll want to check a few things.  First, double click the record to open the inpector.  This is where you can edit the scanned image and correct any errors in information.  The image can be rotated by increments of 90 degrees, cropped, and/or converted to black and white (if you scanned it in with full color).  You can even hover your mouse over the image to see highlighted areas that correspond to recognized text.  You’ll notice that it doesn’t get every line of text, nor does it recognize everything 100% of the time.  I’d say it’s closer to 75% of the time, which is a good place to start.

Documents can be filed into Collections and Smart Collections.  Smart Collections are just like Smart Playlists in iTunes, while Collections are just folders.  It would probably be a good idea to develop a good sorting method with numerous folders.  Sadly, you can’t yet make collections inside of other collections, so they don’t function exactly like folders.  I’d really like to see this change, since it makes sense to sort all receipts by year and month.  To remedy this, you can edit a single Smart Collection for a specific month every time you want to look up that month.  It’s not the most elegant solution, but it works.

Documents can be exported into PDFs, CSVs or Quicken files very quickly.  This means you can track personal expenses with Quicken or make expense reports for a business trip easily with a PDF.

If the document you scanned is actually a business card, then you have one extra feature.  After you’ve finished cleaning up the record in NeatReceipts, you can drag it to a special folder on the sidebar called Address Book. I bet you can’t guess what this does.  Yup, it exports the data as an entry in your Address Book, complete with the image(s).  I wish there was a more automated process for doing this.  The reason I say this is because contacts are not automatically synced with the Address Book, which sometimes makes sense.  But there currently isn’t a way to update a field in NeatWorks and have those changes applied to the Address Book, nor the other way around.  I imagine this will be fixed in a later update to NeatWorks.

The only real features missing in NeatWorks are what I’m going to call next step features.  It already scans and keeps records of your documents phenomenally.  What the software needs is the next step.  You can tell they are already thinking about this since it has Address Book and export features built in.  I’d like to see not only my previous syncing idea, but more features related to budgeting.  If you’re going to scan all of your receipts into this, then why not have them sorted and totaled by month?  It doesn’t have to be the most sophisticated piece of budgeting software, but basic functionality would be awesome.

You probably can’t go completely paperless with your life just yet, but NeatReceipts can at least help. It’s a great product for keeping digital records of all documents, both physical and digital. The software could use some updates, but it’s far from crippled. It does exactly what it’s supposed to: keep records of your documents. The improvements I’d like to see deal with the next step (what you do with those records?), and I have faith they won’t leave their users hanging.  They have a PC version as well, which has more features than the Mac version, so don’t be surprised if the Mac version continues to see updates.