NeatDesk Scanner

NeatDesk Scanner is made to help organize the endless amount of paper in your life by creating folders for different kinds of documents. With fast scans to searchable PDFs, the scanner lived up to its promise of helping to organize receipts, documents, business cards, and much else that was cluttering up my filing cabinet. But it's pricier than the Fujitsu ScanSnap which I thought did a better job on business cards. The bottom line is that if you need help organizing your scans, NeatDesk wins; if you just need to scan and can organize the results yourself, go with the Fujitsu.

Overflowing drawers and file cabinets point to the need for assistance with digitally organizing data, and NeatDesk fills that niche. It's a small scanner with removable paper feeds made to fit documents, business cards, and receipts. Scans are put into separate areas and folders, and can be made into searchable PDFs to help when it's tax time or exported to Quicken, Turbo Tax, and so on. Business-card data can be synced with Outlook contacts or exported to a .csv, so you can easily load it into a smart phone.

Document scanning was fast and efficient. I scanned 28 pages of insurance paperwork which took a mere 1:45; converting the images to searchable PDFs took another five minutes. The results were excellent and there were no difficulties in being able to find looked-for fields on the PDFs.

Once a document, card, or receipt is scanned, it appears in an Inbox where you can alter any of the fields and choose a folder to file the data. Scanning a bunch of different-size receipts from a recent trip overseas went smoothly, with the optical character recognition (OCR) software recognizing dates, totals, and when a credit card was used, though business names were typically not identified (these I added manually before filing).

Business cards provided the only problems I encountered. The software did a poor job at breaking down the cards into correct fields, and I had to manually update almost all of them, even when the cards themselves were fairly clear and uncluttered. One glitch was that international phone numbers were not recognized; after 10 digits, the remaining numbers were automatically given as an extension. The Fujitsu ScanSnap allows changing the recognition language so that these kinds of problems are avoided.