Office Simplicity
I’ve always kind of assumed a messy desk is a fact of life.
For some reason, receipts, invoices, post-it notes and scraps of paper seem to gravitate to my desktop with surprising ease. I’ll push different stuff into randomly organized piles until a looming deadline forces me to face the mess head on.
And facing the mess usually takes psychological preparation. I need to set aside some time, I need the right music playing in the background, and a nice fresh coffee. I slide open all the drawers on my ancient file cabinet, and get ready to sort.
Standard operating procedure. Until last week.
The crunch of gravel in the driveway alerted me to the postal van driving up, and five minutes later I had a rather tiny, white sliver of plastic on my desk top which looked like a cross between a bar code reader and a hot dog.
NeatReceipts is available for both Mac and Windows, and you can grab it for just over $200 on Amazon.
Here’s how it works: You feed your receipt into the front of the device, and a screen pops up on your computer which has a scan of the receipt plus the actual information that the program has pulled off your receipt in text format. It actually reads the receipt, finding things like the company, date, amount, and taxes, and putting it into a simple database format. It also scans regular paper of all sorts, similar to any other scanner and converts it to PDF. Its fairly quick, and totally stable on my Mac.
It gets the correct information off of receipts about 85% of the time, in my estimation. The program seems to have difficulty with reading the date on receipts, probably because in Canada many companies use month/day/year instead of day/month/year when numerically recording dates. A quick glance to confirm the data is accurate and you’re off to the next receipt in the pile. You can organize scans into different folders that you can label to keep receipts in separate categories.
On their website, the company who makes this nifty little device states that the IRS accepts scans of receipts as valid for tax purposes. I called my accountant to ask if the same was true in Canada, and the short answer (to her rather long and accountant-like response) was ‘probably.’ I’m taking that as a ‘yes.’
If you’re beleaguered by a messy desk, this little wonder might just be your doorway to an organized, paperless office.
Hi, good post. I have been woondering about this issue,so thanks for posting. I’ll definitely be coming back to your site.