I purchased a NeatDesk scanner awhile ago to answer a growing need at home for more robust scanning. I'm one of those people that needs to have everything neatly filed away even though I will probably never see it again. I also religiously enter all my personal receipts and track my personal finances in detail. This seemed the perfect product to answer both needs.
I was used to the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 that I have at work, but in addition to an arm they also wanted a leg. The price of the NeatDesk is substantially less (about 40% for what I paid), and the promotional material for the scanning software was really sexy. So I clicked buy.
After a few days, my conclusion is that although it could be an outstanding product with a couple of tweaks, it's just not ready for primetime. This may be the case of a small company working on tight margins with a product that got too big too fast. It remains to be seen whether or not they can keep up with their new-found popularity.
Here's the dirt:
Hardware:
Good Stuff
- Attractive design.
- You can click the hardware "Scan" button all day, but you don't have to file your scans until you want to.
Bad Stuff
- No adjustable paper guide. Unless you hold it as it's sucked in, every single document is crooked.
- Not enough paper support. Creased documents (like a bill) flop back and aren't grabbed properly.
- I found the slot for receipts and documents to not match any receipt or document I had... Nice slot for business cards though.
- The output tray is not attached to the scanner body. Huh?
- It came with the grim spectre of having to clean and calibrate your scanner. You don't have to clean or calibrate the ScanSnap, although the ScanSnap does include "consumables", so maybe it's a tie.
Software:
Good Stuff
- Recognizes dates, subtotal, sales tax, and credit card used. This alone almost makes the product an overall winner and definitely put it on top for scanning receipts.
- As mentioned above, you don't have to file away your scans until you want to.
- Extremely fast search.
- It's pretty--yeah, that's important.
Bad Stuff
- Always takes the scan from the front but from the sheet in the back, which may be more intuitive for the beginner, but also means that a stack of double-sided sheets will go into the software backwards (page 2, 1, 4, 3, etc.) so you'll have to sort your document before and after scanning. Maybe I just haven't figured this one out, but it does seem like they emphasis multiple single-page documents vs. one multiple-page document.
* UPDATE: I figured out that you have to put the document in face up and everything is scanned in from the last page to the front. Your physical document will come out sorted, and the software will reverse the order of the scanned pages for you so the electronic document is correct.
- Does not auto-rotate to fix crooked problem caused by not having adjustable paper guides.
- Does not do auto-color detection--it's either all black-and-white or all color and you must choose. Those "Scan" and "PDF" buttons on the front are great, but you have to go into the Quick Scan application to set up how everything will be scanned first, defeating the convenience.
- Viewing the documents that are in the library is difficult. Should have a simple hand-tool for dragging and allow multiple documents to be open at one time.
- Moving data around the library is laborious.
- Software installs SQL Server Express, which takes up system resources and at least for me causes the program to not want to start up (try again message a couple of times before starting). Sure the search results come back very quickly, but at what cost? As a developer, I actually already had SQL Server Express installed, but it went ahead and installed another instance... Not very nice.
- Lots of opportunities to categorize data, but searching for the categories is difficult. For example, to see what you marked for follow up click "Advanced Search", click "Looking at..." and select "Action Type", click "Selected in the List", click and check box that says "Follow Up". It's more work finding out what's marked "follow up" than to actually follow up.
- The heavy emphasis is on recording receipts for expenses that will be reimbursed by your employer or be tax deductible. So what happens when I have a pay stub for consulting work? I have to file it as a document where I can't tag it's dollar amount, can't tag it as 1099 income, and it can't be exported to Quicken. That's one of the main reasons I got the scanner.
- Categories for receipts are very limited. Need a split? You'll have to do it yourself when you get to Quicken if you can remember what the receipt was for. Sales tax is always exported as an over-generalized "State Tax".
How it Could (Easily) be Made Great
- Package in or sell another paper guide that is adjustable. You can use the same snap-in style that is used for the receipt/business card guide.
- Add one inch to the pull-out paper support.
- Update the software to take scans from the face down position first on double-sided scans. Take the scan from the face down position only in single-sided scans.
* UPDATE: Even though this way seems more intuitive to me, the way the software does it is okay (see update above).
- Add in auto-color detection and auto-rotate so that scans always come out right. If Neat Co can do awesome text-detection, they could do this.
Conclusion
Seems to be an innovative company so I'll keep it in anticipation of at least the software updates.
UPDATE After 2 Years: After having owned this product for a good while I have to say it's worked fairly well for what it is. During this time I made the switch to a Mac and the Mac version of the NeatWorks software was a huge improvement. (From what I understand, the PC software seems to have caught up somewhat.) For the most part it has done what I want it to: scan a few receipts for expense reports but mostly documents of 10 pages or less. I tried to scan my mortgage documents of about 60 pages, but it kept grabbing multiple pages. I had to scan in batches and grab a beer (darn).
It still does weird things though. For example, sometimes it will scan and not fully eject the document and after a moment will display blinking red lights. Other times it will whisk the document through and the document ends up with a large black area at the top.
At the end of the day, for the casual home user who doesn't mind taking a little extra time to scan, this is probably a best buy. For the business user who will frequently be scanning large documents, the Fujitsu products will probably be a better fit, especially since their price is now a lot closer to the NeatDesk. NeatDesk Desktop Scanner and Digital Filing System - Scanner - Neat Receipts - Filing - Pdf'
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