The Neat Company NeatDesk Desktop Scanner and Digital Filing System, Home Office Edition, 2005410

After reading many of the reviews I was afraid this product would not do what I expected it to do, which was scan in documents and read the pertinent information I use for my taxes. The review left me feeling that there was only a 50% chance that I would like it or that it would even function. I am happy to report that it does that and more.I first want to state that I have a photo quality scanner so what caught my attention was the actual system the Neatdesk used for scanning, reading and organizing data. I am self employed and have many receipts that I have to organize so I can give to my accountant. In the past I would take all of my receipts for the year and painstakingly type in all the information to excel and organize it by expense type, date, store, what was bought, the total and mileage associated with each receipt. On average this is about 400 documents and took most of a weekend. All this data would then be sorted and totaled for each expense type and then the whole document was given to my accountant so he could do my taxes.I was able to install the software with no problems. I received the version 5 software with my package. The software did search and find updated software Version 5 (SP3) and downloaded it then installed that version. I installed onto a 1 ½ year old dual core computer running XP Professional.Some of the older posts stated that there needed to be a support for longer documents waiting to be scanned and that there was either no tray to catch the scanned documents or that it was not attached. The designers must have been paying attention because my scanner has an integrated extendable support built into the design and an equally adequate attached tray to catch the scanned documents.The documentation that was supplied was very basic and did not explain all the functions of the software. That being said I was able to figure out how to create files and sub files and named them as I would for my tax expenses with no problem. It took a little playing with the program to figure out how to arrange the data the way I wanted it to appear on the data entry screen and then again once I had the documents scanned in so I could do a report. I was a little dismayed that I after I finished scanning all 414 of my receipts and documents that I was unable to sort by the files I had created. You can only sort by document type, date, store, cost and others that are already in the system. I was able to deal with this by using the names of my files in the document type field. Once I did this sorting was great. You can also add data without receipts manually so all my expenses could be kept in a neatly organized fashion.The scanner was extremely fast. It could take a stack of different sized documents and scan with no problem 99% of the time. Plus it could scan both sides at the same time and keep multiple pages together if you specified this in the program before hand which was easy to change. There was an occassional jam but not too bad. It took a little while for the software to read and collect all the data maybe 30 seconds each. It uses a cue format so all the documents sit there while the OCR program is working. I was very impressed with how accurate the software was in recognizing the data on the receipts and documents. It was able to accurately pull the date, store name and total about 90% of the time with no errors. I scanned in a stack of receipts then made sure the scan was readable and the data was pulled correctly. On those receipts where the program was unable to recognize the store name, total or date I found that after I corrected the data the next time I had a receipt from that store the program was able to recognize these differences and collect the correct data. You might be able to find another scanner that scans but there is nothing else that can read the receipts and collect the data like this program can.When it came time to make a report I first tried to export to Excel. That worked however I was not able to export the comment fields. I made a report in the Neatdesk program and was able to manipulate it so I could sort by the document type (my file names) and then by the dates so that my data was all nicely organized the way I wanted it. You are given the option if you want a cover page which gives the totals of all the receipt types, the document information including page numbers, the image of the receipts and an image caption. I played with each of these and found I could get just the data done the way I wanted it. I could then save it in any format I wanted, one of those being Excel. This time the comments field was exported to excel. Since there was no area where I could enter mileage into the neat program, I created another column in Excel for mileage.When I printed the reports with the image and image captions I was very impressed. Each of the data entry lines are numbered in the order they were sorted. When the receipts printed they had a caption that included the corresponding number do the data entry line which makes it very easy to find the receipt again. Very impressive! No other program I'm aware of can do this!All in all I give this about 4.5 stars. The deduction is for the lack of documentation explaining how to organize the data and set up the fields. By the way what normally took me two full days to do only took one. Now I just have to do this monthly rather than at the end of the year and tax time would be so much easier.

There is only one thing that it does halfway decent and that is the business cards. There are other products that do just business cards and probably do it better. I scanned 60 business cards and 90% of them needed something fixed in the manual review. That process is totally left out of the advertising. They show this thing on TV spitting out paper as fast as you can feed it in and then the next shot is showing a totally organized electronic filing system. First of all everything goes into an inbox and you have to review it all. I spent several hours just trying to get several IRS forms and 60 business cards input. I had to delete and start over a few times.It's not like I don't know what I am doing. I used OCR (Optical Character Recognition) hardware and software when I was in the Navy in Washington DC between 72 and 76 and I have been programming computers since 1971. This system is a step in the right direction, but it is NOT at all as smart as they say it is. For all that it doesn't do and for all that it does wrong you may be better off using a regular scanner and OCR software and filing your documents the traditional way. Certainly don't throw out the originals once you scan them into here because you may never see them again.On the business cards they say they can handle 15 at a time but I found it doesn't always work if you load more than 12. Once you scan those, it won't scan any more unless you turn it off and back on. Some of my business cards have print on both sides, so I set it to do both sides but turning it off and back on causes the software to reset your settings which I didn't notice right away so I had to rescan all those with two sides.The software will not allow you to customize the fields you want to capture such as adding URL or country. Many business cards these days have a web address and you have to type it into the "Other" box as there is no way to have the Neat software feed you the text it didn't use elsewhere. The data in the database is either the few fields it can recognize or the text you laboriously type in their limited uncustomizable form.The scan button on the front will use whatever settings you last set in the software so if you set it for business cards and then forget that you had switched it from documents and later put in a document and hit scan it will scan the whole page but it will file it with business cards and try to fit the text into the business card fields. If you set the type to "Auto detect" the document type it will often make mistakes. When I scanned some IRS transcript records it saved some of them as "receipts" even though they were nearly identical in format (only dollar amounts and dates changed) from others it saved as documents.When I scanned documents it didn't automatically fill in any of the fields for the document form, so I had to review and type in all the fields for the document form. I am going to go back to writing my own desktop organizer and use industry standard database and more user friendly interface options.The hardware for this system does not work as well as it could with a few simple adjustments. As it is now, if I put in two sheets of standard letter size paper the first sheets comes out fine, but the second sheet pushes the first sheet up and over the hump, but in the process it does start to ride up over the first sheet, so when it is finished feeding the second sheet more than half of the first sheet is up and over the tray lip. The weight of that page then starts pulling the second page with it and both end up on the floor. I guess to counter the video on TV about all the things it is supposed to do so well I should make a video of all the things it does so wrong. To do all the things it doesn't do well you need to buy the regular scanner and software anyway so don't waste you money on this (unless you want to buy mine)!