I’m a closet neat freak. I secretly aspire to have an obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Not the real OCD–that’s a serious condition that I wouldn’t trivialize. I mean more of the television variety like Monk, the Defective Detective, who plays a former police detective with OCD.  I like things all in a row, straight, orderly–ask my kids why we clean–they’ll roll their eyes and say in unison, “Because God is a God of order.” Thankfully He’s a God of laughter, too, but that’s another column.

    I recently found an OCD-friendly piece of hardware that I love. It’s been around for awhile and it’s only gotten better and easier to use. I see commercials for it from time to time as you probably have. The product is NeatReceipts from the Neat Company. Neat name. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

    They offer two products NeatDesk, a desktop scanner and software filing system, and NeatReceipts, a smaller portable scanner designed to scan receipts (though you can scan a letter-sized document also).

    NeatReceipts (www.neatco.com) retails for $150-$200, depending on from where you buy it, rebates, etc. It’s a scanner about the size of the cardboard cylinder that’s left after you finish using all the paper towels. (There had to be a better example, but I couldn’t think of it.) It connects to your computer via USB for communication and power. You feed receipts, business cards and documents into it (up to eight and a half inches wide) and the item is stored graphically on your computer in your NeatWorks Inbox and then OCR’d (scanned using optical character recognition) to determine the payee, the total amount, sales tax, business card name, address, phone, etc. You generally don’t have to type anything to identify the receipt or business card. It does it for you. Then process your inbox by placing receipts into folders and categories. You do the same with business cards.

    NeatReceipts is easy to set up and use. Follow the simple setup directions and you’re scanning in no time. It works well–NeatReceipts is surprisingly accurate converting text into your computer. Nearly every business card with a rational format is scanned correctly. NeatReceipts will even synchronize the contact information it obtains with Microsoft Outlook–no copying or pasting–and if you correct a business card later in NeatReceipts, it can update the contact in Outlook automatically.

    But perhaps the greatest reason to buy NeatReceipts is that, for most people, it will pay for itself simply by organizing your receipts. I figure I’ve lost thousands of dollars over the years simply because of lost cash expense receipts or to bill my clients for incidental items for which I had, but lost, a receipt. No more, they’re all stored. And we haven’t even discussed how NeatReceipts benefits you for taxes.

    Don’t misunderstand me, there’s still much work involved to review, file and categorize receipts correctly, but the process is much less painful than dealing with paper.

    As you would expect and hope–this financial information automatically pulled from receipts can be exported to Quicken and QuickBooks, though it’s a little cumbersome. I’d rather Neatworks grab my existing categories and chart of accounts from Quicken/QuickBooks, but it doesn’t, you’ll have to carefully specify that in NeatWorks. But once that’s done, it’s a huge time-saver to just scan, review and reconcile. You can finally track where all your cash goes.

    I’m a little closer to my dream of light OCD-ness. Now, to clean out my garage–if there’s a USB device for that, please send me an email.

Greg’s professional experience includes consulting for Price Waterhouse, working as a

Program Manager for Microsoft Corporation, and serving as Chief Technology Officer for several companies. He has a Masters in Software Engineering from the University of Texas and has presented at technical conferences across the world. Bott Technology Solutions helps small to midsize businesses with computer

technology needs. Greg may be reached via e-mail at gregbott@bottinc.com or at

601-207-0509.