Hasta La Ideas

Thanks to Bill Hanff for this guest blog post!

After going through the pains of doing my 2008 taxes, I needed to find a way of organizing myself better. So on the advice of Andy Ihnatko in a podcast, I got the Neat Receipts for Mac. At $170, it seemed a bit pricey for a low res-scaner, but I thought I would give it a try, and after spending just an hour with it, it is completely worth the money. Here’s why:

Organization. It does a great job with receipts–it reads the receipt’s total, date, and even separates out the sales tax. It also determines whether the receipt is for a meal, transportation, or general retail, making organizing the receipts fast and easy. It even does a pretty good job with taxi receipts, which are usually the worst printouts. Going through the first three months of receipts for this year took about an hour–including clean-up and review of the receipts to make sure everything was read correctly.

Design. The device is very “mac-like,” with simple, clean lines and looks pretty attractive on the desk. It’s a small and lightweight feed-style scanner, and is easily portable; I can toss it in my shoulderbag without a problem.

Features. I have not yet tried all of the features, but on top of doing receipts, the device also scans business cards and documents–exporting to excel and vcf files for the business cards.

Security. I have multiple backups of my hard drive, and feel much more secure having the digital copy of my receipts than hard-copies.

On the downside, the software for the scanner is great, but still feels very first-generation. I’ve had it crash on me twice so far, and there are a couple of things that could work a little better. Overall a good investment though, and just in time for April 15th!

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