The Paperless Office—Really?

A handy scanning system brings order to piles of different-size paper records Neat's scanner handles business cards, receipts, and standard-size documents Of all the promises of information technology, none has proved more elusive than the paperless office. Although electronic communication has replaced much of the paper in my life, a lot of the most important information—financial and legal documents, expense report receipts, business cards—stubbornly remains on paper.

Scanners were designed to solve this problem by transporting such documents into a computer. This saves on storage space, but in most cases it's a very limited solution. You end up with an electronic image of the paper, rather than an interactive digital document that takes full advantage of a computer's ability to classify, sort, and search.

The aptly named Neat Co. has a new product that many folks, particularly those who run small businesses or need to maintain detailed tax records, will find attractive. The $499 NeatDesk combines a specialized scanner with some clever software that lets you digitize and organize those messy, easily lost, or misfiled paper documents.

The sheet-fed scanner has three slots: one for business cards, one for cash register tapes or credit-card receipts, and one for sheets up to standard business size. You can put as many as 10 documents in any of the slots at once. Hit the scan button, and the documents shoot through the system and are parsed by the NeatReceipts software, which runs on Microsoft Windows and on the Mac OS.

It will even handle Cash-register receipt tapes, generally produced by low-quality thermal printers and can be quite difficult to read, even for humans. The software tries to figure out the vendor, the date, the total purchase price, and the sales tax. If it can't read the vendor's name, you can type it in by hand, and chances are good the system will recognize the name the next time it appears on a receipt. The software also excelled at reading larger receipts, such as hotel bills, fed through the document slot.

NeatDesk is hardly the first system to convert the contents of scanned material to computer-readable and searchable text. Like most other scanning systems, it uses technology called optical character recognition to carry out the conversion, and the results can be edited in Word or other programs. Or you can save those same scans as PDF files, which can't be edited but preserve all formatting and images. The real usefulness of NeatDesk's software-hardware combination, though, comes from its ability to classify the items you have scanned in the system's own database and feed the information to other programs.

For example, once you have scanned in a batch of receipts, you can file them in folders, then send the contents to small-business accounting software such as QuickBooks and Peachtree. NeatReceipts' folder system is also compatible with personal-finance programs including Quicken and Microsoft Money. In addition, you can report business expenses and perform some other tasks using features that are built into NeatReceipts.

NeatDesk efficiently reads business cards to figure out what bits of information should be placed in which data fields—name, address, title, and so on. You can use the NeatReceipts contact list, or, as most people will probably prefer, sync the scanned data with Outlook or the Plaxo online contact service. Small business is a major segment that's often neglected by tech companies focused on consumers and big corporations. Packages such as NeatDesk fill an important need.

For more information about how to integrate a solution like this into your small business, contact The Technology Coahc today!