NeatReceipts Scanalizer Problem Resolution With Windows

UPDATE February 2008  see my article about organizing financial records and information, scanning systems, and doing your taxes using tax software.

See my Recommended Neat & Simple Financial Organizing Products

HOW WE RESOLVED OUR ISSUES WITH NEAT RECEIPTS

I spoke to NeatReceipts today 12/7/06.  Our problem was due to a rare Windows issue!  We tried again with help from their tech support. I'll let you know how it goes!  p.s. Their service seems to be excellent!  We just have to get another one...since we already returned our previous one.

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I tried the NeatReceipts Scanalizer system and sad to say, I was very disappointed. I had very high hopes for being able to rid my clients (and myself) of the need to keep business receipts.

Alan & I spent a day working with it and tried every kind of receipt we have including Staples, Target, Home Depot, Linens & Things, Office Depot & more. We even tried Supermarket receipts! Not a single receipt scanned in and populated the Scanalizer fields. Every entry on the receipt had to be entered by hand. Even the name of the Store. It recognized nothing. All it did was scan it in like any graphical scanner would do. To me the power of scanning is in the OCR capability - (recognizing the text and entering it as text for you into their database).

I think it's a better investment to go with a more powerful scanner.  Haven't found the right one yet...would love to hear if anyone out there has found a powerful quality OCR scanner that easily integrates with a database, is reasonably portable and costs under $500.

Comments

[Kelli]

I am curious what version you used because I can't believe the Scanalizer did not recognize one single receipt. I have used the NeatReceipts Scanalizer for over a year now (now on version 2.5) and it is almost perfect -- I don't mind a few minor corrections here and there -- it is still much easier than keeping track of all my receipts on my own -- plus having a scanned copy at the touch of a button should I need to reference the receipt later is priceless.

[Michael]

If this happened to you the Scanner and software were not properly calibrated. Another possibility is that the Smartscan feature was clicked off

[Mike Landis (NeatReceipts Employee)]

Hi, Ariane

A customer pointed this review out to me, since he was curious why you'd had such an unusual experience with NeatReceipts.

Assuming that the images you saw were clear, the OCR failure may well have been caused by the DEP security feature in Windows XP SP2. DEP causes one step in the OCR routine to fail, where the 'zones' on the image are passed to the character recognition process. There's a pretty quick way to test this - if you scanned an image in sideways, was it automatically rotated?

If not, take a look at Control Panel -> System -> Advanced. Click the button labeled 'Settings' in the Performance area, then click on the 'Data Execution Prevention' tab. If you've chosen the second option (DEP for all programs, rather than system processes) please add NeatReceipts.exe to your list of exempt applications.

If you have a question regarding this process, please don't hesitate to get in touch. You can reach us by phone at (215) 382 3300. Try extension 104 if you'd like to speak to me directly.

Regards,

Mike Landis
NeatReceipts

[Maryam in Marrakesh]

I really need this item!