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.

Do not buy this product if you value your time. Brilliant concept poorly executed. Too much attention to cool appearance, too little attention to resilient programming. I purchased the hardware and software in 2009. I gave up on the hardware last year for three reasons: 1) It's slow. 2) It's glitchy. Too often the hardware loses its connection with the software. You have to quit the software, turn off the hardware, wait five seconds, then restart in proper sequence. Doesn't always work. On more than one occasion, I had to go through this routine several times before I could get hardware and software to communicate. 3) You can't do double-sided scanning. Software is especially troublesome: 1) Beware the sync error, usually caused by an unexpected shutdown. You will get an error message that tells you to call Customer Support. When you call Customer Support, you'll be told to go to their website where you will be required to submit a written request for customer service. If you submit on Friday, don't expect a call back until Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week. You'll probably be talking to someone in the Philippines who has a less than comprehendible grasp of the English language. They will tell you to send them a zip version of the console log. If the console log doesn't contain any information, you can expect the technician to spend a day or so fiddling with the Console application trying to figure out why it's not reporting Neat events. When the tech finally gives up on the Console app, he'll create an all new library for you and then start rebuilding it one folder at a time. If you're lucky, the tech will rebuild your entire library while you go on about your business. If you are not lucky, the tech will show how to drag and drop the contents of each of your folders into the new library and then hit the sync button to find out if the damaged file is in that batch. If you get a sync error, then you have the pleasure of doing a binary search through the folder contents trying to isolate the damaged file. Be sure to have back ups to replace the damaged file when finally do isolate it. Most recently, I lost almost three entire working days shadowing a Neat tech as he laborious worked his way through my data through a remote connection. I finally took over after losing patience with the delay. The tech was not punctual and obviously overworked, trying to multitask among clients. I've had to go through the above process three, maybe four, times since I purchased this product in 2009. I tossed the scanner last year and replaced it with an Epson DS-560, which runs beautifully using Wi-Fi to my iPad. Epson has an excellent app named DocumentScan. It lacks Neat's database management capability. The Epson needs to be supplemented by other apps like Adobe Acrobat. iAnnotate PDF, PDF Compressor, PDF to JPEG, and, unfortunately, Neat, depending on what you're doing. So far, I've found nothing on the market to replace the database management capabilities of Neatworks. When I do, I'll be migrating as fast as I can away from Neat products, unless there's a dramatic rework in the product line. One other improvement that needs to be made is that users need to be able to do a lossless compress on pdf files to save on storage and processing. Final impression: my guess is that this company was started by some brilliant technical minds and was then hijacked by marketing people who were more interested in driving hot BMWs than understanding the value of resilient programming and a design process that's closely integrated with the customer support operation and which does more than clean up messes that the marketing people aren't equipped to understand or correct themselves.

Tried using this and had good videos to watch, however, after a couple scans with my laptop wouldn't scan. Attached to desktop and scans were all black stripes and poor image. Return was approved initially, but I kept it as I really wanted this to work [my partner has one and its great] Contact with seller has not had a reply since I could not get it working to scan clear, not happy for the $500. ish price!