I've been using Neat for more than 7 years. But support for Mac users of Neat is diminishing, from my perspective. Case in point, Neat has dropped support for newer third party scanners such as the Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500. And they seem to support the Windows version of their 'Neat' software more so than they do the MAC version. For instance, they offer updated 32 and 64 bit drivers for their older 2008 ADF scanners for the PC, but not for the Mac. Granted, 2008 was a long time ago in the world of technology. But my 2008 Neat scanner still works fine on my Mac.
I purchase Neat Desk, now 'Neat' software back in 2008 for the PC, and then I migrated to the Mac. It was a big improvement. The Mac version of NeatDesk was far better than the PC version, in my opinion. But now, because my Neat scanner is an older model, I'm unable to upgrade Neat software (Mac) beyond version 4.1.0.187. So I'm stuck in a software dead-end, using unimproved software unless I buy a new Neat scanner. At the same time, Neat have dropped support for the latest Fujitsu scanners, limiting my upgrade alternatives to Neat hardware (only).
All of this has me wishing for a completely new solution. One huge issue of changing scanning solutions would be data migration. Neat stores all it's scanned documents as PDFs in an Apple 'package' folder. Package folders are a special type of folder on the Mac that hide contents, and abstract complexity by appearing as a single file in Finder. Package files can easily be managed and they make using Dropbox as a Neat storage location very convenient.
But deep within the Neat package folder each file is named with a user unfriendly GUID as the filename. GUIDs are very long strings of unique numbers and letters.
Exporting my Neat document library and importing it into another solution would require individual document exports, renaming, and re-tagging and importing each file into the replacement solution. But I would lose all document comments added via Neat. Neat on the Mac is proprietary insofar as the file storage. There is no bulk export utility. It will be difficult to migrate an existing corpus of documents into another archive. (Unless someone writes an automation program to batch export into Evernote of some other solution).
I'd also like to point out that searches in Neat suffer from one great flaw, at least in the version I'm using. Searches within Neat are case sensitive. So if you label a document 'My File', a search for 'my file' will reveal no search results. Document deskewing and OCR are also severly flawed or do not work at all in the version I am using. I was once a big fan of Neat, but now, not so much. It is seeming more and more that to Neat, Mac users are second class citizens.
I have owned the NeatDesk scanner for the a little more than 2 years. I run a business and scan quite a lot, in fact I pay someone to do most of my scanning. It runs so painfully slow I can hardly stand it.
My bookkeeper purchase a Scansnap at approximately the same time, she loves it. Recently when she (the bookkeeper) needed to scan some additional receipts, it actually stressed her out to use my NeatDesk. This has prompted me to put my Neat up for sale and purchase a ScanSnap.
I figure the endless hours that I save not waiting for the 'Que' of the Neat, will pay for itself in no time and the few hundred dollars that I pay upfront will save me thousands waiting around for the Neat. I'll let you know how I like my ScanSnap when it arrives.. + Sounds like the Neat scanner and software works great for you.
Let me just share my experience I purchased the NeatDesk from Sam's on sale for $319.00. I carefully read all the instructions and tried to setup and install the software. No go, I could not even get through the activation point of the software install.
I kept getting an error message which I later found out was a browser page 'cannot be displayed' error. I searched the Neat knowledge base and followed every article related to this error (only 2) I opened a support ticket and guess what no one followed up. I fixed the problem by disabling the pop-up blocker in Internet Explorer. I don't even use Internet Explorer but apparently the Neat software does. I bought the NeatDesk solely for the 'claim' that you can export into QuickBooks.
Guess what multiple errors trying to do this and followed all support articles and could not solve the error. Neat Support is a joke! They basically force you to chat or email for support. I located a phone number and called, multiple hoops jumped through and I finally get a support agent on the phone.
Their initial suggestions don't fix the errors, they do a remote connection into my computer and after 2 hours they finally fix the errors. Ok, I can now import into Quickbooks, great right? The Quickbooks entry that is created will always be under Accounts Payable. If you enter your transactions directly into your registers like I, and most users do, you will hate this.
You will now have to go and reclassify the entry. It also makes it a Bill Payment transaction. You cannot change any of this! Oh, and every single time you want to export you have to navigate through your PC folders to your QuickBooks file and matchup the Neat category to the QuickBooks category.
Oh, but the category matchup is not even saved afterwards. Finally, no image is even saved in QuickBooks. So why does Neat think people want this? And also, I did get the black areas on the side of the 2 receipts that I scanned even after calibration right out of the box.
The Neat scanner went right back into the box and was promptly returned. I also turned around and ordered the Fujitsu. Thank you for this video review it helped me make an informed decision!.
I've posted a portion of my rebuttal to this video. There is not a single valid or truthful criticism in this video 'review.' The entire black background issue is due to USER error! He scanned the receipt as a document.
All you have to do is make sure to keep the the software setting as 'automatic' if you are going to use the 'scan' button on the machine. (It's right there on the main page of the program). Then it will size the scan based on which feed slot you use.
If you had larger receipts, you set can over-ride the automatic 'slot' settings and tell it the software it is a receipt (with the click of one button). Gosh, if he took the time to see what he was doing wrong, maybe read the directions, he would have saved himself the 8 minutes of the video he spent, blaming NeatDesk for his own mistake! Other misinformation in this video: NeatDesk is NOT Proprietary! It uploads to Evernote, Dropbox, Box, whatever! It exports to Quicken, Quickbooks, Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, and and any contact management software out there. It saves as a PDF with the push of a button, to email or fax the document with EASE. It also has a FREE mobile app.
AND, for God's Sake, stop implying that Evernote is a Fujitsu Product! Evernote is a free 3rd party online service, and everything he shows it doing with the Fujitsu Scans it does just as well with a NEATDESK scan!
I have posted a getting started video, with lots more info, if you would like to know the truth about NeatDesk. This video really should be removed. It's 3 years old, misleading, and truly defamatory. Dude, do your homework before trashing a company or product..
Review Neat Desk And Neatworks For Mac
I've been using neat desk for the past two years. I really have no problems with the scanner, other than it has difficulty starting to feed. It's the software that is annoying, as in annoyingly slow! I love its capabilities for record-keeping and taxes, but I literally spent eight hours totaling up receipts for tax purposes. I could have manually Totaled things up in half that time.
You cannot read receipts without enlarging them either, and all this takes time!!! I'm now looking at snapscan.
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The patented technology identifies and extracts the important information—and automatically organizes it for you. Transform receipts into expense reports, business cards into address book contacts and create searchable PDF files from any document.
Export information to PDF, Excel®, Quicken®, QuickBooks®, TurboTax® and more. Scan three paper types on both sides with one push of a button. NeatDesk is powered by NeatWorks 4.0 software suite for scanning receipts, business cards documents and creating tax reports. NeatDesk Image Scan receipts, business.
If you want to reduce the clutter of keeping track of loose receipts, especially those associated with yearly tax expenses, Neat offers a solution with it's small scanners and associated software. The recently upgraded scanning suite, NeatWorks for Mac 3.0.5, adds U.S. And Canadian tax categories. It adds specific tax categories, with links to tax forms in the program, and subfolder support that allows you to create a folder with taxable receipts only, for instance. Other updates include Quick Look integration and workflow improvements, such as keyboard shortcuts, blank page removal, better speed, and an improved report interface.
Main Window The software seems to be very solid after the latest update. I tested the software with the on Mac OS X 10.6.
During the review period, The Neat Company released a number of software updates, with the fifth released in April. Each update fixes small bugs, two of which fixed crashes I experienced and reported. NeatWorks 3.0 splits scanning receipts, business cards, and documents into different categories, with numerous data fields to append searchable information in each category. The Receipts category includes vendor names, project and client fields, and monetary fields for total cost and sales tax. It also has a field for credit card information that allows you to track the expenses of one specific card. Free office 2010 for mac. There are U.S. And Canadian tax categories with a drop-down menu for numerous specific US tax forms, so that you can specify where a receipt belongs for tax time.
There is also a notes field for annotating a receipt with information that doesn't fit into the other categories. The Contacts category has support for notes along with numerous personal or business contact information, including titles, phone numbers, physical addresses, URLs, and instant message information. NeatWorks syncs contacts easily with your Address Book. Document scans include fields for title, date, author, to and from, received and sent, client, projects, and a notes field. Scanned Receipts You can easily set up reports on tax documents, spending patterns or business contacts and publish them to PDF or a printed page. The new subfolders and search capabilities make creating reports even easier.
NeatWorks 3.0 offers numerous viewing options when working through groups of documents. Quick Look View Scans are quick and efficient with a rare slip that the software can usually recover from and provide skewed but legible scans. The blank page removal works well and you can easily add additional receipt pages and backs of business cards via a Command-K keyboard shortcut. Optical Character Recognition One of the main features of the software is its intelligent Optical Character Recognition, and that is where the performance of NeatWorks gets tricky. The software utilizes OCR to capture scanned information into categories such as Vendor and Amount to make the workflow of digitizing receipts easy, quick, and painless, or so the company claims. Sample Scanned Receipt The reality is not nearly as efficient.
The software consistently misses numerical fields like Amount, and often mistakes the balance due on many receipts for the total, thus giving a total cost result of $0.00, instead of the correct balance, such as Total $17.24, as seen above. It seems that this is something that should be coded into the OCR AI to give proper results most of the time. The software also struggles to recognize sales tax, even when there is a specific line with a tax descriptor. Actual Information Captured From Above Receipt NeatWorks does a better job of recognizing vendors, but even then, it only recognizes about 55% of vendor information. It tends to recognize certain vendors consistently, such as Walmart and Target, yet always miss others, like Sam's Club and World Market. I scanned hundreds of receipts and the software never got all the OCR categories correct, which is far from the goal of getting all the categories correct most of the time.
There were similar problems reading business names on business cards for contact info, though the software did well with phone numbers, names, and email addresses. Information Added Manually The OCR inconsistency creates a bottleneck between fast scanning of raw receipts and business cards and the excellent, flexible database capabilities of the software once it has all the metadata attached to each document. Hopefully, The Neat Company will improve the OCR function, because as it stands the real strength of the software, to organize information, is limited by the time you can spend performing data entry for each document scanned.
The OCR only gets you started on each scan, and requires you to make adjustments to each document, instead of making a correction here or there once every ten or twenty scans. The time toll adds up quickly due to this bottleneck, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of receipts to scan. In practice the best way to scan in raw data is to run numerous scans into the inbox, then, when there's time, go through each scan and fix the OCR mistakes. That workflow is the best available, but far from ideal due to the time consumption on large scanning runs. You can mitigate the problem by starting with new receipts and business cards, because a batch of ten receipts and four or five cards once a week would be more manageable. New receipt scans are more likely to yield correct information than older folded, bent, and crimped ones. Excellent Database The real appeal of the software is to be able to scan vast numbers of receipts, documents, and business cards into the digital realm where the software can track trends, print reports, and group the files intelligently.
Part of the advertising campaign for Neat Software, shows piles of receipts quickly swept up into the computer, which eliminates clutter. It provides you with an excellent database to track spending trends, expenses, and tax preparation, but its not-quite-Intelligent OCR cripples the software. When the OCR makes passing grades, the software will really deliver, because it scans paper files quickly and it can do great things with its database.
Rating the components, the raw scanning capabilities deserve a four out of five stars for good speed and accuracy. The excellent database portion of the software deserves 5 stars. The OCR however slows down the process getting some things wrong, some things right and missing more than it hits. I can't give it more than two stars out of five until it consistently gets all the info presented on easily read receipts. At that point I'd have no problem rating this as five-star software. For now, the software scores a 3.5 out of 5 overall, and for what it is worth, I am going to stick with it despite the frustrating OCR limitations. NeatWorks 3.0 requires Mac OS X 10.5.8 or higher on an Intel Mac and works with NeatDesk or NeatReceipts scanners and other scanners from HP, Canon and Fujitsu.
It is free with the purchase of a Neat scanner and $80 as standalone software. The update is free for users of previous versions, plus a version exists for PC users.
Edited by Ilene Hoffman, Reviews Editor. Cirrus creates Lightning-headphone dev kit Apple supplier Cirrus Logic has introduced a MFi-compliant new development kit for companies interested in using Cirrus' chips to create Lightning-based headphones, which - regardless of whether rumors about Apple dropping the analog headphone jack in its iPhone this fall - can offer advantages to music-loving iOS device users. The kit mentions some of the advantages of an all-digital headset or headphone connector, including higher-bitrate support, a more customizable experience, and support for power and data transfer into headphone hardware. Several companies already make Lightning headphones, and Apple has supported the concept since June 2014. The Apple Store app for iPhone, which periodically rewards users with free app gifts, is now offering the iPhone 'Pocket' version of drawing app Procreate for those who have the free Apple Store app until July 28. Users who have redeemed the offer by navigating to the 'Stores' tab of the app and swiping past the 'iPhone Upgrade Program' banner to the 'Procreate' banner have noted that only the limited Pocket (iPhone) version of the app is available free, even if the Apple Store app is installed and the offer redeemed on an iPad.
The Pocket version currently sells for $3 on the iOS App Store. Porsche adds CarPlay to 2017 Panamera Porsche has added a fifth model of vehicle to its CarPlay-supported lineup, announcing that the 2017 Panamera - which will arrive in the US in January - will include Apple's infotainment technology, and be seen on a giant 12.3-inch touchscreen as part of an all-new Porsche Communication Management system.
The luxury sedan starts at $99,900 for the 4S model, and scales up to the Panamera Turbo, which sells for $146,900. Other vehicles that currently support CarPlay include the 2016 911 and the 2017 models of Macan, 718 Boxster, and 718 Cayman.
The company did not mention support for Google's corresponding Android Auto in its announcement. Apple employees testing wheelchair features New features included in the forthcoming watchOS 3 are being tested by Apple retail store employees, including a new activity-tracking feature that has been designed with wheelchair users in mind. The move is slightly unusual in that, while retail employees have previously been used to test pre-release versions of OS X and iOS, this marks the first time they've been included in the otherwise developer-only watchOS betas.
The company is said to have gone to great lengths to modify the activity tracker for wheelchair users, including changing the 'time to stand' notification to 'time to roll' and including two wheelchair-centric workout apps. Twitter stickers slowly roll out to users Twitter has introduced 'stickers,' allowing users to add extra graphical elements to their photos before uploading them to the micro-blogging service. A library of hundreds of accessories, props, and emoji will be available to use as stickers, which can be resized, rotated, and placed anywhere on the photograph. Images with stickers will also become searchable with viewers able to select a sticker to see how others use the same graphic in their own posts. Twitter advises stickers will be rolling out to users over the next few weeks, and will work on both the mobile apps and through the browser.
Updated: November 2017 Neatdesk Desktop Scanner Reviews: Sometimes it seems like paper is old-fashioned: we email instead of write letters; we get e-statements and e-bills instead of ones sent to us in the mail; and even note-passing kids have upgraded to passing texts on their phones. At the same time, though, there seems to be a never-ending barrage of paperwork to deal with. Where does it come from? And where do you put it? NeatDesk has an answer for you.
The NeatDesk desktop scanner is designed to help you cut that never-ending clutter and to streamline data processing and data retrieval processes. Let's see what the NeatDesk can do for your business or home. NeatDesk's Desktop Scanner: Clutter's Worst Nightmare - There aren't enough filing cabinets in the world to keep up with business: even a small business has customer or client files, business card collections, receipts, invoices, warranties, taxes, and much more that they need to keep track of. We have all known people whose organizational system consisted of a single box or drawer into which everything was crammed in. Not so fun when the IRS wants to audit you or you have to prove to your credit card company that you have already paid your bill. What the NeatDesk scanner does for you is transfer all of that paper into digital files. Say you have a file full of tax records.
You can put up to 50 pages of this at a time in the NeatDesk, and scan it in seconds while you're working on something else on your computer. NeatDesk will automatically file the documents in the appropriate place, i.e., taxes. You can then go in and refine this as you like. Digital filing cabinets are so much nicer for your decor, and for your organization.
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Here are some of the features that you will find useful:.Patented technology identifies and extracts relevant information and organizes it for you.Can handle business cards, receipts, documents, and legal-sized documents.Data export to PDF, Excel, Quicken, QuickBooks, TurboTax, and others.Includes NeatWorks 4.0 software suite. This scans receipts and business cards and can create tax reports.Removable input tray. This allows you to scan both sides of up to 10 documents, 10 business cards, and 10 receipts - at one time. If you take out the document tray, you can scan a 50-page document.Creates searchable PDF files.Software for both PC and Mac.Energy Star qualified so you can have a paperless office and one that is greener. If you are not totally convinced yet that your office or home could benefit from the NeatDesk, watch it in action below, and imagine that never-ending mountain of paperwork getting smaller and smaller, until you have a neat desk. Never thought that could happen, did you?
Review: Neatdesk And Neatworks For Mac Free
RECOMMENDED - You can. What the Experts Say about the NeatDesk Desktop Scanner: Reducing paperwork is a dream come true for any busy person, but how does the NeatDesk rank compared to other? Fujitsu's ScanSnap S1500, for instance, is in the same price range, so how do you choose? You have to look at what you want the document scanner to be able to do and how it accomplishes that. For instance, a review in MacObserver raved about the NeatDesk for Mac users, and the feature that put the NeatDesk desktop scanner at the top of the list is its software. According to MacObserver, this is NeatDesk's 'best and most distinguishing feature.'
Neat calls themselves a software company in disguise, and NeatWorks, their proprietary software, is certainly proof of that. NeatWorks uses advanced optical character recognition (OCR) and parsing technology in order to take the relevant data from business cards, documents, and receipts and turn them into highly workable and much more manageable data. NeatWorks reads the data and can pick out key information, such as dates, vendors, purchase amounts, contact information, and much more. This allows all data to be very searchable.
Another nice feature of NeatWorks for Macs (not Windows, though) is that it can support third party scanners, including the ScanSnap S300M and S510M. This way, you have the freedom of making your existing scanner an even better scanner with NeatWorks software. NeatWorks images can be saved as JPEGs, PDFs, and more, and they can be sent to Excel, World, Outlook, QUicken, TurboTax, QuickBooks, CSV, HTML, and PLAXO. DocumentSnap, your source for everything paper and document, compared it to the SnapScans and found that the NeatDesk had a few features that the Fujitsu didn't: the paper input tray is ideal for keeping different types of paper separate, the included cleaning cloths help you keep the scanner clean and maintain optimal image quality, and 'the tight integration with NeatWorks, which is a great program.' Also mentioned was NeatCo's quickstart guide and Community page, which has support options, tutorials, live chat, forums, and more for NeatDesk users.
The NeatDesk lists for $499, but you can find it on Amazon for $399. A bit on the pricy side, but the long term cost benefit analysis is great. Think of all the time and money you'll free up when you don't have to do all that filing (or pay someone to do it for you), and when you don't have to spend hours looking for something at the bottom of that one drawer. In addition to the NeatDesk for Mac and PC, NeatCo also makes the NeatReceipt, which has very similar functions as the NeatDesk but is in a very compact and portable package.
Neatreceipts For Mac Review
Businesses can scan receipts, documents, and business cards in order to store and use that data easily. The lists for $229, but Amazon has it for $184.
While the NeatReceipt is not as big as the NeatDesk document scanner, it is a great travel scanner and does the job perfectly for smaller batches of documents. You may never get your office completely paperless (you may want to hang on to some of these old-fashioned relics), but NeatDesk can help you move data from paper to much more manageable and accessible digital files. Easy to convert, easy to file, and easy to use.
This is what will make NeatDesk your next employee of the month.
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