Desk A Mess? Try Neat Receipts

by Lori Cunningham

While at the Consumer Electronics Show last January, I ran across a company that makes a 8 1/2″ x 1″ portable scanner.  I was intrigued because the thought of taking a scanner on the road with me never entered my mind.  I began thinking about how I would use it.  I could use it to scan in sales materials from tradeshows so I wouldn’t have to lug them back.  Cool.  I could scan in business cards so I wouldn’t lose them in travel or in a drawer at home.  Nice.  But the question was, would I be able to find them on my computer when I needed them?

Enter Neat Receipts.  Neat Receipts is a company that makes scanners JUST for organizing.  They go one step further than scanning– they also use Optimal Character Resolution (OCR) to read the words on scanned documents so you can search for keywords easily later.  Brilliant!

What You Can Scan In:

For Business

• receipts
• invoices
• business cards
• sales documents
• collateral
• meeting minutes
• napkin ideas/drawings from that late dinner
• contracts
• reports

Features

• All scanned items are searchable
• You can create expense reports and print them out complete with copies of receipts
• Helps you to track your expenses for budgets and for tax time
• Data can be exported to PDF, Excel®, Quicken®, QuickBooks®, TurboTax®
• Business card information can be exported to Outlook, Plaxo, or Mac Address book
• You can scan documents into PDF’s

How I’m Organizing

NeatReceipts mobile scanner MRSP is $199 but can be found at Amazon.com for $175.23.

A Mom’s Perspective

There are two types of way people organize their papers:

1.  Pile Style – where you have piles all over your desk

2.  File Style – all of your papers are filed away, neat in their files

I am a Pile Styler and my husband is a Filer Styler.  Needless to say, he can find important information ALOT faster than I.  But, that’s about to change.  No longer will I have piles of business cards to file away.  No longer will I have a mess of a file drawer.  Now in 2012, I will be scanning in all of my business cards and receipts.  It doesn’t take long to do so and it will make it SO much easier to retrieve information within minutes – even seconds – when I need it.

I have piles of things for the kids on my desk – upcoming after school classes, party details, projects, classroom rules,  grade level expectations, the list goes on!  I keep the piles handy so I can get to them when I need them.  NO LONGER.  I will scan the info. into my computer and file under a certain month folder, say “February”, or file under my child’s name – probably in a more detailed folder like “Classroom Activities.”

I’m very excited to start of clean in the New Year with a much more organized, more searchable, more travelable, less visible-data rich office environment.  How about you?  How do you plan to organize your desk in this New Year?

 

* I was provided with a NeatReceipts mobile scanner in exchange for my honest review.  All opinions are my own.  I am using Neat Receipts on a weekly basis.