After reviewing the NeatDesk paperless office solution for Windows yesterday, we thought we'd take a look at NeatReceipts for Mac, a portable USB-powered scanner and software solution to help on-the-go Mac users keep track of their receipts and business cards for $199. There is also a NeatReceipts for Windows users, priced the same and including the same scanner, but bundled with NeatWorks 4.0 for Windows, which is the same version of the software we tried out in our NeatDesk review. We only reviewed the Mac version of NeatReceipts, which comes bundled with NeatWorks 2.0 for Mac. Keep reading below to discover how this new Mac version of the software and the portable scanner compared to its Windows-only big-brother, the NeatDesk.

The Build

We took a quick first look at the NeatReceipts for Mac in Friday's Daily Obsession, embedded below:

The scanner is small and light, so that it can easily be thrown into a laptop bag or backpack, and, thanks to being USB-powered, the NeatReceipts scanner only requires one cable to be carried along with it for connecting it to your Mac. It also comes with a fabric sleeve with drawstrings at one end for keeping the device scratch free tossed in your bag with all your other assorted gadgets.

As with the NeatDesk, the NeatReceipts scanner has two simple buttons: one that scans directly to PDF and one that scans into the NeatWorks 2.0 for Mac software and database. Unlike the NeatDesk, you cannot stick a stack of papers in the NeatReceipts scanner and have them scan in one by one. Nor can you scan both sides of a two-sided document simultaneously, as this scanner only supports single-sided scanning. Instead, you have to place each document individually face down in the front of the device until the document catches, at which point it feeds itself through.

NeatWorks 2.0 for Mac software

NeatWorks 2.0 for Mac is a thin cousin of the more robust NeatWorks 4.0 for Windows. The software is clearly geared, as the name of the product it is bundled with implies, towards receipts. Scanning in receipts works rather nicely, provides a digital copy of your receipts and data fields that can be filled in next to the receipts, so that you can build entire expense reports out of the multiple receipts scanned into the software. This is definitely handy and is the strongest feature of NeatReceipts. If you're a Mac user on the go, looking to go paperless with your expense reports (or as paperless as your employer will allow), and you're looking for a portable solution, then NeatReceipts may prove a good choice for you.

NeatWorks 2.0 also supports business card scanning and syncing of business card scans with your Address Book contacts on OS X. Although the NeatReceipts scanner supposedly offers the same 600dpi maximum resolution that is offered by the Neat ADF scanner that comes with NeatDesk, NeatReceipts failed to recognize as many of the same stack of business cards that I fed through it as were recognized by NeatDesk. However, some of the OCR (optical character recognition) did occur and NeatReceipts was simply unsure of which bit of information went where. A highlighted field around the recognized text allows you to easily drag the text into the corresponding field on the right, as pictured below. If a scan doesn't appear to have properly recognized any of the text, you can try clicking the reanalyze button to reinitiate the OCR without rescanning the card.

Unfortunately, abnormal or very colorful business cards (such as my blogcard pictured below) tend to fail OCR no matter how many times the card is rescanned or reanalyzed. My name was rendered as "Ssion Blogger" and my email was only partially captured as "ck@Sampletheweb.T."

Scanning normal documents works well, although there is no real support for multipage documents. You can fake multipage scan support by feeding one sheet immediately after another in a document that you're scanning either to NeatReceipts or straight to PDF. The result is not a multipage document, but rather one very long page. Discussing this with some of the other Obsessable writers and editors we briefly contemplated constructing a Mobius strip to be constructed in and scanned into the NeatReceipts scanner as a long format test to see how long a document could become before the scanner or the software gave out. That test seemed a bit too far in absurd test land, so instead, we simply tried scanning items like photographs and money to see how NeatReceipts dealt with them.

The picture and money test

Note that Obsessable does not approve or condone illegal activities like scanning, copying, and printing your own counterfeit money.

Scanning documents that aren't normal documents into NeatReceipts has a few odd results. First, the image quality is darker than it should be and there are very small lines throughout the scanned images. So unlike the NeatDesk scanner, which produced highly-detailed color copies with some distortion for longer documents, the NeatReceipts scanner only really is useful for scanning items for information (like text documents, receipts, and business cards). None of the money or pictures that we scanned looked good enough to print out ever again, and oddly instead of identifying all of these items as documents, NeatWorks 2.0 for Mac assigned them to either contacts or receipts based on whether the items were fed in in landscape or profile (see the picture below; Red = contacts and blue = receipts).

Overall Performance

Unfortunately, due to the three crashes I experienced while testing the software, I cannot say the performance of NeatReceipts for Mac is stellar. That being said, one of the times it crashed was when I unplugged the device while the software was still running, and I didn't lose any data in any of the crashes. Even without the crashing, the software isn't as polished as NeatWorks 4.0 for Windows. The Coverflow view option failed to work whenever I tried to click on it. It would load as in the picture above, but I could not navigate through the files listed.

Out of the box usefulness

Out of the box you can plug in the scanner, load the NeatWorks for Mac software and start scanning away.

What's missing?

After using NeatWorks 4.0 for Windows and seeing that the non-Mac NeatReceipts comes with that more robust software for the same price as NeatReceipts for Mac, we cannot help but feel that the Mac version of the NeatWorks software is in some dire need of an upgrade to meet the performance and features of NeatWorks 4.0 for Windows.

What we hope to see in future models

Better software and / or a TWAIN driver to support using the scanner with other applications. The ability to scan front and back of a document simultaneously.

Obsessable recommendation

As we stated above, if you're a Mac user on the go, looking to go paperless with your expense reports (or as paperless as your employer will allow), and you're looking for a portable solution, then NeatReceipts may prove a good choice for you. Not all the items scanned are immediately recognized by the OCR, but the side by side view of the image scanned and the form for building the data needed for the receipt and your reports is definitely useful. Alternately if you're looking for a way to scan in all your receipts to keep paperless records for tax season, NeatReceipts should work nicely for that purpose. If you have both a Windows and a Mac machine, we'd recommend the Windows NeatReceipts or even the NeatDesk over NeatReceipts for Mac, as the NeatWorks 2.0 software for Mac hasn't quite reached the full paperless database status of its Windows counterpart.

Obsessable rating: 6 out of 10