NeatDesk?

shewholaughs

I'm considering purchasing a NeatDesk scanner to track receipts and what not from the biz. My main goal is to get rid of the filing cabinet and also be able to easily attribute costs to jobs. I am a mainly wedding/event photog and it would be nice to be able to tell exactly how much cost is/was in a particular shoot.

I run Mac and don't have specific accounting software.

Anyone out there own one of these scanners? Good? Bad? Indifferent?

jbakerphoto

Not sure it is as good a solution but my mom got me a pandigital wand scanner for Christmas. Its pretty cool actually and will store the images in the device till you want to download them. It also has wifi so you can connect to it and download what you need. so for the organizing and storage part I have been playing with evernote. The key with using it is to tag it with good key words. Its super cheap and easy so thought I would share.

jarboedoggart

I scanning app for my iphone, that you can export to evernote, dropbox, google docs, email. works well. The one I use is Rioch ScanPages, free in the app store.

WillCAD

I have a similar scanner from another company, Fujitsu:
http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/peripherals/scanners/scansnap/scansnap-s1500.html

I've had it about two years and use it to scan just about everything. I take the simple route and just put everything in PDF files and store them chronologically, so it's not difficult to find something even though I don't use any fancy keyword searching and indexing software.

Scanners like this really come into their own when you have bulk scan jobs. I typically put my bills into an organizer all year, and after the first of the year I scan them all and file them away in a binder (I keep four years of the paper copies and shred the 5th year each January when I add a new binder to the shelf). I can very quickly put 12 Verizon bills into the scanner and have them scanned, two-sided and in full color, in a single pass, in about 15 seconds. It literally takes me longer to type in the file name than it does for the scanner to run through them.

Dan7312

Interestingly enough I just tried a NeadDesk out. The scanner itself seems to be really good, even faded register receipts and crummy oil delivery carbons on yellow paper got read correctly.

I didn't like the software all that much. To me it seems like it would take a lot of effort to set things up, and I did have some minor installation problems. I think it works with Evernote, which could be a good way to go.

I wanted to use it's cloud option. It turns out, at least for the way I want to do things, the cloud options is $16 a month.

I ended up returning it, I just didn't feel it was worth the price. There are a number of cloud services that do this, and can use a printers' scanner. I haven't zeroed yet on which to use.

In any case it's worth a try, you can always return it. YMMV. I picked mine up at Best Buy... it turned out to be less expensive than Amazon.

Dan

shewholaughs wrote: »

I'm considering purchasing a NeatDesk scanner to track receipts and what not from the biz. My main goal is to get rid of the filing cabinet and also be able to easily attribute costs to jobs. I am a mainly wedding/event photog and it would be nice to be able to tell exactly how much cost is/was in a particular shoot.

I run Mac and don't have specific accounting software.

Anyone out there own one of these scanners? Good? Bad? Indifferent?

BradfordBenn

I had NeatReceipts for a few years before I updated to Windows 7. Then there was a software up charge and I found out the surprising fact that the scanner only works with their software. I asked about it on the Mac and they said the same thing. I decided not to purchase the update as for the price of the update I could get a scanner that was compatible with Windows directly or Mac directly. While the features are pretty cool with being able to read text off the page and it is pretty good about it I did not use those features enough to pay the extra. So I am TurboScan on my iPhone and it does really well for a hand scanner and then a HP multifunction scanner and printer with auto document feeder and are happy with it for speed. Plus I can use it for things like printing "proof" prints.

So in a nutshell I recommend against NeatDesk or Neat Receipts as their product only works with their software.

Seamus

I've had a fuji scan snap s510m for the last few years. The software that comes with it allows you to make searchable pdf's from the scans. Imo, that is crucial to finding a specific document. I have a ton of scanned bills, receipts, documents, etc and can search for them using spotlight on a mac.

I use yep to catalog and add keywords after scanning but it isn't essential. preview on a mac is fine for viewing scanned documents.