NeatReceipts helps you organize receipts and business cards

— -- When traveling for business, you no longer have to stuff receipts and business cards into wallets, purses and folders, and then retrieve and organize the unwieldy paper trail once you get home.

The Neat Company of Philadelphia offers a NeatReceipts portable scanner and software system that enable you to scan those taxi, restaurant and hotel receipts, as well as business cards and other documents, and then organize them for company expense reports, taxes or just archival purposes.

And, with the April 17 federal tax deadline approaching, this is an optimal time to consider an electronic way to better handle the reams of paper receipts and related documents for tax-filing purposes and throughout the year.

The portable scanner weighs less than a pound, easily fits into most laptop cases and hooks up to your computer with a USB connection. It retails for about $200, which seems a bit pricey, and comes bundled with the software.

The software lets you organize the receipts and drag them into folders on your desktop. It lets you easily view, categorize and edit your notations about the receipts. And it lets you save the items, convert them into PDFs, run customized reports, e-mail them and export them into Quicken.

You also can feed business cards into the scanner and sync the particulars with Outlook, Plaxo or Mac Address Book.

I found the scanner and software fairly easy to use, although there were glitches. I tried the scanner and software at home, but could easily see breaking out the scanner in a hotel room and quickly feeding the day's receipts and business cards into it. Scanning receipts generally was easy, although occasionally I had to give a very thin receipt an extra nudge because the scanner didn't recognize there was an item ready for scanning. One crinkled receipt scanned as a blurry, illegible mess.

The software melted down at one point and appeared to endlessly scan one receipt. But it happened when I, perhaps unfairly, fed a 34-inch supermarket receipt into the scanner.

Using optical character recognition and parsing technology, the scanner and software are geared to recognize whether the item is a receipt, a contact or another document. The scanner and software readily recognized business cards as "contacts" and generally understood receipts were "receipts," although there were mistakes.

It instantly recognized that a taxi receipt indeed was a receipt and categorized it as "transportation." However, it didn't recognize an airport shuttle receipt as being for transportation. And it categorized a receipt for camera supplies as a "document" rather than a receipt.

Most of the glitches were easily fixable because the receipts, business cards and other documents, once scanned, open for viewing in a Neat Library on your computer. There, you can manually recategorize them and indicate, for example, the tax category they fall under or whether they are reimbursable or already paid.

If you want a system that requires no manual intervention, then you won't find NeatReceipts helpful or worth the price. But if you're like me and don't mind a little manual tweaking, then NeatReceipts can be a handy and practical tool.

When the scanning, categorization and editing process is complete, the Neat system tallies how many receipts you've scanned, the total dollar amount and sales tax, as well as the number of business cards and other documents.

From there, you can run diverse reports about the receipts, choosing various date ranges or selected items, for instance.

The NeatReceipts system, which the company says has been used by more than 1 million people since its founding 10 years ago, isn't foolproof. But it provides a handy and portable way to get a handle on your paper documents and to digitally store them for easy retrieval.

For now, you are stuck buying the scanner if you want to use the system in most cases.

Only Mac users can purchase Neat software ($79.95) separately and use it with certain scanners from Canon, Hewlett-Packard and Fujitsu, the company says.

Missing in the equation, especially for a scanning and digital storage system that touts its portability, is a mobile app. The company says that's coming soon.

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