Neat Receipts: Manage Business Cards and Receipts

Here's a handy little scanner for business cards and receipts, plus some games for your brain.

It happens at every trade show: I say no, but it doesn't matter--everyone I meet sticks a business card in my hand anyway. At this year's CES, I collected over 80.

Coincidentally, every year theNeat ReceiptsPR people pitch me on their little scanner and software that scans, recognizes, and manages business cards.

Each year I find excuses not to try one: I have plenty of things cluttering up my desk already. The device insists on using a USB connection on the back of the PC and I'm running out of free ports. I don't need another contact management application. And evendiscounted, $200 is too expensive for my budget.

Yet I kept looking at stacks of rubber-banded cards--easily the collected works of a half-dozen trade shows. I felt technologically behind the times each time I manually sorted through the cards looking for someone's vitals. And all those receipts! Filling out the pesky expense report for the even peskier PC World bean-counter was going to be a nightmare. So this year I finally decided to give Neat Receipts a try, and I'm sorry that I held out for so long.

I ignored the instructions to crawl under the desk to connect the scanner to a USB port on the back of the PC. Instead, I used a front-of-the-PC USB port and it worked fine. It also worked on a powered USB hub, and that way I kept the scanner on a side table, out of the way.

My other concern--about using the Neat Receipts contact management tools--was baseless. Once the business cards are scanned in, I can export one or all of them to a variety of formats including Word RTF, a PDF, V-card, or a standard, CVS text file. Very civilized.

It takes about 10 seconds to scan a business card and the data optically recognized, then displayed in the Neat Receipts scanner's software.

After each card is individually scanned, it's shown as an image in one panel (great for seeing the notes you might have scribbled), with the contact info in another two areas. I found it amazing how Neat Receipts could extract information on the card and get it into the correct field.

Neat Receipts pulls out the usual stuff--name, address, e-mail, and Web site. If the business card labels the phone numbers, Neat Receipts sticks them in the right fields: phone, mobile, and fax. Anything without a field, say, "Universal Remotes," goes into the Other category. I haven't played with it, but you can add custom fields.

Most of the receipts I end up with each month are from credit card transactions and I have a sophisticated system for dealing with them. First I enter the data in Intuit's QuickBooks; then I paper-clip the stack, put it in a drawer, and wait for the credit card bill. After reconciling the bill, I save the receipts that are for legit business expenses (and probably not-so-legit), using the same paper clip. Then I stash the stack in a portable storage device, an envelope marked "2008 CC Expenses."

To say that Neat Receipts makes handling receipts lots easier is an understatement. Scan them--portrait, landscape, or upside down, it doesn't matter--and the scanner's software optically recognizes the vendor's name, date, type of credit card, expense category, and payment amount--it even breaks out the tax.

Assign a vendor an IRS tax category--in my case, lots of Schedule C stuff--and Neat Receipts organizes the receipts in subsequent scans.