Neat Desk Scanner - Anyone have one

Since I don't know where to find real world opinions of this thing, I was wondering if anyone had/used the Neat Desk scanner and what your thoughts are. Does it work? Does it help keep things organized?

Do you know of something better?

Do any of you use "ShoeBoxed" or similar services? I hate keeping track of and tallying receipts, but it has to be done.

What software package do you use to keep track of your business?

I use and excel spreadsheet and an accountant She told me quick-books would be a waste of money for me.

Thats what I've done so far. I still scan my receipts so that I have digital copies of the thermal ones that fade like Lowes.

I figured since I scan them anyway, if the neat desk software worked in a way I could populate my excel spreadsheet, I might look into it.

Our business is not photography based but it is a home based business. We use QuickBooks Pro for all accounting needs and have been since we started in 2003 and really like it.

Three years ago we had to go to electronic filing because we had four file cabinets full and no more room. We started using a Xerox Documate 515 for scanning and upgraded to a Xerox Documate 632 a couple of years ago for increased scanning speed.

We use FileCenter as the manager for our electronic files and backup immediately to the cloud with SugarSync. One of the suprise useful features of SugarSync is the ability to sync files from PC to PC through the cloud. Where I have had difficulty networking different operating systems together, I can save and excel sheet on one PC, walk into our laser engraver room and load the file into the engraving software. SugarSync syncs the file before I can move to the next workstation and actually deposits it on that PC's hard drive.

QuicBooks does a backup at 1:00AM each morning and that file is then immediately backed up by SugarSync.

We've been using SugarSync for about three years or so now and Have experienced three complete PC failures without ever loosing a data file.

My wife bought one, Neat, thinking it would help with the bill clutter.
It sits pretty much unused under the office desk in a box.

That answer your question?

Neat desk is buggy with the research I have gathered. The best affordable solution out there in terms of quality and speed is the fujitsu scansnap 1500. It is just over $400 usually on newegg.com and it comes with acrobat standard X. Acrobat is in my opinoin one of the best PDF softwares available. I plan on getting the fujitsu for xmas.

Definitely back up your folder where your files are saved. I use synctoy and back my folder up to my extra hard drive, and to my dropbox with the push of a button.

Scanning isn't really my issue. I liked the idea of the software OCR and data extraction into usable fields.

V4her - curious if she had a real REASON to use it like organizing receipts for a home based business? I'm just curious, as I can see anyone looking to "simplify" as using it a week then saying, blah, I'm done with it. I will use it a few times a year once receipts pile up because my "I'm really going to stay organized this year" energy has worn off...

Buchinger wrote in post #15240876
Scanning isn't really my issue. I liked the idea of the software OCR and data extraction into usable fields.

V4her - curious if she had a real REASON to use it like organizing receipts for a home based business? I'm just curious, as I can see anyone looking to "simplify" as using it a week then saying, blah, I'm done with it. I will use it a few times a year once receipts pile up because my "I'm really going to stay organized this year" energy has worn off...

The Neat organizer was pretty poor in my opinion. Lousy work-flow.

I've used a spreadsheet for years, but been told by who does my taxes (more like begged) to get QuickBooks to speed things up, which recently did and trying to figure out. NeatDesk do use but only to scan receipts and everything and know there's a digital copy somewhere - but do not use the program that comes with it, tried at first but too many times it could not read what I was putting in. So basically take the entire years receipts, scan them into one big folder and done - good system, no, but works.

I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner and its a beast in the office. If you are on a Mac, pairing this scanner with DevonThink Pro Office will be a huge productivity boost for you.

I've been looking for something like that to help me scan in the hundreds of model releases and other documents i would like digital backgrounds...

I don't know about the neat desk scanner but instead i have been looking at the doxie one,

http://www.getdoxie.co​m/product/one/index.ht​ml

Worth checking out, maybe an option for you as well? Certainly cheaper.

We looked into it, read a bunch of reviews online, and decided against it.