The slim USB-powered scanner won’t clutter up your desk while it declutters your files.
Whether you itemize your income-tax deductions, prepare expense reports, or just don’t clean out your wallet very often, paper receipts can create clutter, not to mention get lost or fade to near illegibility. If you want the data but not the paper, the Neat Receipts for Mac scanner and software can digitize and organize nearly everything.
After installing the Neat Receipts app, you feed a receipt or other document (up to 8.5 inches wide), printed-side down, into the slim, USB-powered scanner, which measures just 10.8 by 2 by 1.4 inches. Then press Scan on the scanner, or click Scan in the app. That’s it—although, if you want to get fancy, you can choose receipt or document, black-and-white or color, and multiple-page items from the app’s Scan menu.
After the scanner drags your receipt through, the software crops the image around the receipt’s edges, rotates it and straightens it if it’s crooked, and performs optical character recognition, or OCR. After less than a minute, you see an image of the receipt next to automatically populated listings for the vendor, date, amount, payment type, category, and sales tax. You can manually change whatever the software misses or gets wrong, and also add your own notes.
Neat Receipts doesn’t perform the OCR on documents, however, only receipts. (Documents can be anything, so they won’t necessarily have the specific info the software looks for on your receipts.) You can manually tag your documents with a title, author, project, category, and notes, and then sort or search for them according to the tags.
Organization is a snap. Neat Receipts starts you with one library, but you can add others; you can separate business expenses from personal ones, for example. Within a library, you create collections, which are like folders within a filing cabinet. You can also save searches as “smart collections,” which are dynamically created—incredibly useful for pulling together all expenses from a certain month, a specific vendor, all transactions over $100, any credit card purchases, and so on.
With a smart collection, we can keep track of how many cheeseburgers we eat each month—as if we’d want to know.
The app offers a list view where you see a sortable list of what’s in a collection and a preview of each document and its tags in a panel above. The grid view shows a smaller thumbnail of each scan next to bare-bones information, and there’s even a Cover Flow–like view where you can page through the receipts or documents with your arrow keys (but strangely, not with your mouse). The File menu lets you email items or export a collection’s info as a CSV (comma-separated value) file for importing into a spreadsheet or another expense-tracking app. Or just drag and drop individual receipts or documents onto your Desktop to get PDF files. If you press the scanner’s PDF button or select Scan > Scan > Scan To PDF In Color, the app asks for a save location and creates a PDF without even adding it to your library.
You can even add Web receipts or other digital documents to your Neat Receipts library without having to scan them. Say you’ve got an online purchase receipt open in your Web browser—just select File > Print, click the PDF button, and choose Add Receipt To Neat Receipts from the drop-down menu. Presto.
On very small or badly crumpled receipts, the OCR sometimes missed a number or date, but those are easy to fix manually, and most receipt information showed up perfectly. We wish the OCR worked on all documents, especially business cards, which are handled by the Windows version of Neat Receipts. But the Mac app and slim, easy-to-use scanner can tame your wild shoeboxes of receipts.
Slim, USB-powered scanner. Software has OCR for receipt dates, prices, and more. Exports PDFs easily. Scans many sizes. Universal binary.
Scanner is a little on the slow side. OCR doesn’t work on all documents. 
mimi
December 21, 2009 at 10:19pm
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jchoi
September 11, 2008 at 8:38am
Hello,
My name is Jenn and I'm a NeatReceipts employee. I wanted to clarify that documents are OCR'd, however, data from documents, such as Title or Author, are not parsed (automatically entered into corresponding fields) as they are for receipts. However, all text is searchable, so it's easy to locate any document you've scanned or added to NeatReceipts.Thanks,
Jenn
