Product Review: NeatReceipts

For years I doubted a product sold at Airport kiosks was worth my money.  I have been proved wrong twice.  Once with Rosetta Stone, and twice with NeatReceipts.  It is just that I didn’t acquired either at the airport (the former can be bought used and the later can be bought ‘refurbished’ for $99 vs the normal $250 airport kiosk price - at least for now).

I used to work for a Software company and I used to travel 75% of my time.  You might imagine how dreadful was the expense reporting time.  I had to tape each receipts in a letter-sized paper, taping the four corners very carefully so that they could scan it for long-term record keeping.  Then I had to enter it on a spreadsheet and send it to them.  I always kept a photocopy of my receipts, since they had a bad habit of displacing them.  All of that tedious problem is gone now.

When I went on my own I found myself doing it all over again (companies for which I contract still require it, and all of the other receipts may be of interest to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)).  Freeing myself from the corporate world didn’t meant I had freed myself from a society that enjoys keeping records as much as performing the work represented on them.

This product sucks in the receipts, stores them, performs the Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and at a simple request prepares an expense report for you with list of receipts, totals by category, and letter-sized pages with your receipts in full size (a simulation of the taping and scanning process).  Presto!  Ready to send to big-company or to keep for the IRS.

For personal use is also great.  We buy so many trinkets.  (A problem we should accept.  Fifty years ago people didn’t bought big ticket items on a monthly basis).  Many things do have warranties.  Others are valuable and we might want to keep a record in the case of an insurance claim.  Due to space and time limitations we tend to destroy/trash the receipts.  With this machine, it is so convenient that we do not have to.  We scan them, and may use them for reference purposes later.  Yesterday, for example, the little sister-in-law needed a copy of the ipod receipt for warranty purposes.  There it was, scanned and ready to go.  If they fix her ipod, the machine pays for itself.

At $99 USD refurbished is a good price (not sure about the full price).  The software works with any scanner or receipts comming from PDF.  I wish they sold the software alone.  I am loving this machine.