Neat Company's NeatDesk tidies up desk with a neat solution

In June 2006, I wrote about a novel idea for road warriors to get their expense reports organized faster and more cleanly than stapling crumpled receipts to a handwritten expense form. We reviewed NeatReceipts, the first product from a company now called The Neat Company.

You can see the review and listen to a podcast interview with Rafi Spero, the company's CEO, at our CompuSchmooze blog (http://is.gd/22tuK).

The biggest obstacle to success for NeatReceipts was the need to scan each receipt manually in a single-item, singlesided scanner. It led to a very time-consuming record-keeping process that produced really orderly and organized expense reports, but which took a lot longer to produce than most people were willing to allow.

This shortcoming has been pretty much solved in NeatDesk, the newest product from The Neat Company (http://is.gd/22tKp). The Philadelphia-based company has produced a software environment that integrates document, receipt, and business card scanning into a single process, making it much easier for small businesses to set up a workflow to scan all of their paper into an imagebased management system.

The new NeatWorks software that comes with NeatDesk is designed so that you can scan batches of documents in a fairly swift operation, and then put the paper aside and focus on indexing and converting the image data in a single process, rather than handling each document separately.

NeatDesk comes with a special document scanner that has a three-slot paper feed compartment, each one labeled for either business cards, receipts, or standard sized documents. You can actually load all three slots simultaneously and then click the scan button in the software or on the scanner, and the device feeds paper from each slot in sequence. Then the software goes to work.

All of the documents you scan are sorted into the three categories, and you work with images of the documents on the computer screen. You can tag the documents, enter titles, keywords, and assign them to folders.

NeatDesk uses optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert the printed text on business cards into editable text in a database so that the contact information you collect at networking events, trade shows and conferences can be added to your online address book. Its accuracy is as good as the industry leader, Corex's CardScan, so it's a very reasonable alternative, especially since CardScan uses a line of dedicated business card scanners that can't be used for anything else.

NeatDesk also does a fine job of scanning ordinary lettersized documents. It will also scan documents of less than letter size but there are no adjustable paper guides in the document slot on the scanner, so you have to make sure a document that isn't full-sized feeds properly and doesn't jam or turn sideways in the scanner.

Where NeatDesk really shines is in the receipts module. Its OCR software is specially adapted to recognize common formats used by receipts from thousands of merchants. In most cases, it will recognize the name of the merchant and populate that into the appropriate field in a database. Images of receipts are linked to database images, just like in the predecessor product NeatReceipts, and you can generate a wide range of printed reports or print to a PDF file and email the report, with sharp, clean images of the receipts attached for documentation purposes.

As a test, I used the product to generate a report for my wife's healthcare spending account, and had no problem submitting the report, with receipts subtotaled by the software into appropriate categories, and images attached.

Unfortunately, the software does not work with other scanners yet. You have to buy the NeatDesk dedicated scanner with the software, even if you already have a multiple sheetfeed desktop scanner.

The NeatDesk system is $399.95 on the company's website. You can also buy a mobile version, and NeatReceipts continues to be available for $199.95.

Watch a video podcast demonstration of NeatDesk on the CompuSchmooze blog at www.compuschmooze.com. steve@compuschmooze.com