Neatreceipts 5 Scanner and Software

[Guest Taxed]

Anyone use Neatreceipts 5 scanner and software to scan receipts and organize it into tax expense categories. I saw a sale for $150!

According to the demo video it will scan any receipt and allows you to organize the item into tax categories of your choice and then export the report in excel, pdf or quickbooks etc.

If the error rate is less than 10%, it is still workable?

If this works I could save some time and effort with those "shoebox" clients?

[ILLMAS]

Scanner sucks, go with for the Fujitsu s1500, always gets good reviews.

[Lion EA]

For a personal scanner, it might not matter. But, for the heavier use of business, Fujitsu scanners are the workhorses.

[Guest Taxed]

From what I can tell from the website the scanning of receipts works only with the Neat scanners (the personal one or the desk model).

Has anyone used it with a non neat scanner? If yes how?

[kcjenkins]

From a Kim Komando column, a good review of the Neat products:

QUESTION

I am thinking about buying a NeatDesk scanner and would like your advice. Should I?

- Charlene,

ANSWER

I love your question, Charlene. You go straight to the point. So, I'll be direct right back: No, you shouldn't buy a NeatDesk. Surprised?

For those who don't know, the NeatDesk is a personal document scanner. Document scanners are generally advertised to people who want a paperless office. You can scan multiple document types - including receipts and business cards - to keep your home or office less cluttered.

NeatDesk supports two-sided scanning and optical character recognition for converting images into text documents. It can handle multiple documents unattended and scans 20 or more pages per minute. Sounds great! So why am I not a fan of the NeatDesk?

The least expensive NeatDesk costs $200. Models with even more features can cost up to $400. That's a substantial chunk of change. To be clear, I don't have any complaints about the NeatDesk's hardware. However, I'm not such a fan of the software.

The NeatDesk comes with a proprietary program, Neat, to organize your documents. Unfortunately, Neat works well only with the NeatDesk scanner. If at some point in the future you switch scanners, you'll need a new program. That means all your organization efforts will be wasted. Of course, you could use Neat to save your scans as universal PDF files and organize them yourself to avoid that hassle. But, you can do that with any scanner.

If you really need a super-powered document scanner, I would look into the Fujitsu ScanSnap models. They equal NeatDesk scanners in features and price, and most are packaged with a full version of Adobe Acrobat - a powerful PDF editor that sells for $199 on its own.

[Guest Taxed]

Thank you KC. That's what i thought too that it works only with Neat scanners to scan the receipts.

It would have been nice if it worked with other scanners.

I like the fact that it has an option to map all Sch C expense line# to the receipt being scanned. So if you have a shoebox full of say meals and entertainment receipts you could scan it and assign the correct line#. It also totals it for you by category.

[kcjenkins]

Well, while I would never advise it as a tax professional's only scanner, if you have a lot of that sort of client, it might be money well spent to buy one for that purpose. Depending on the price, of course. After all, we often have duplicate tools that each perform well for a specific use, like multiple staplers, for example, a big one for those extra large files. Just depends if you have enough use of it to justify the cost in terms of time saved.

[Guest Taxed]

It is on my wish list. May be Santa will bring me one this year!!