Atul Patel’s Blog

Now that I’m reading The Four Hour Work Week, I’ve been in the mode of increasing the efficiency of my day-to-day life. My current focus is managing receipts.  While shopping this weekend, I asked cashiers at various retailers, such as Macy’s and Barnes & Nobles, if they would accept a receipt that was printed after being scanned, for a return and such.  While their only concern was that they couldn’t scan the bar-code of the receipt, they did not have any issues with the idea.

I also checked with the IRS to see if they would be okay with receipts that were electronically stored.  Luckily, based on Rev Proc 97-22, I can store an electronic copy of the receipt and it even “permits the destruction of the original hard copy books”.

I went on to purchase a NeatReceipts Receipts Scanner from Costco which allows you to scan receipts, business cards and other document.  Although the hardware is most of what you see, the product’s main pitch is its software that can parse through a scanned receipt and gather the merchant, category of purchase, sales tax, total, and payment method.  I think it worked great, but I was hoping it would parse through individual transactions.

I decided to search for a simple portable scanner, and guess what I found out?  Genius sells the same scanner as NeatReceipts.  At $80 (at Buy.com), the Genius SF600 scanner has all the components I unpacked from the NeatReceipts box.  I imagine that Genius is the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) of the NeatReceipts scanner.

So, basically, NeatReceipts values its software at roughly $100 — its retail price of $179.99 less the scanner’s OEM retail price of $79.99.  Of course, NeatReceipts purchased the scanners at a massive volume rate.  If, let’s say, the volume rate is $40/scanner, NeatReceipts values their software at $140!  Although it is brilliant marketing, I wouldn’t say the same about the software.  The software is a heavy load on my computer, has a rather ugly UI, difficult UX, and has a wannabe integration into Quicken.  You can’t sync transactions between Quicken and NeatReceipts, making it difficult to reconcile the receipts with the Quicken transactions automatically downloaded from the credit card’s web sites.  It has business card OCR, which is a great bonus, but I’ll just find something else for that.  Finally, it’s a bit strange that Genius claims that the scanner is only USB 1.1, while NeatReceipts states USB 2.0 compatibility.  Hmmm.

That said, I’m returning my NeatReceipts, buying the OEM’s scanner, and simply using Quicken — my personal finance software — to scan the receipt for the respective transactions.  Who cares that I don’t get a separate sales tax entry?  I already get the merchant, date, category, total, and credit card.

It’s not that large of a saving between NeatReceipts and the scanner, but I just don’t feel the value of the software is at the price it is being sold.  However, I would recommend giving NeatReceipts a shot.  I’m obviously over-thinking it.

UPDATE 7/15/2008 - I received my new Genius scanner from Buy.com and I’m up and running! Scanning directly into Quicken works like a charm.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 1:50 am and is filed under Opinion, Productivity, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.