Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I really wanted to like this product and give it the best possible chance of being successful. I have a consulting business which means I'm on the road a lot. In a perfect world, it would make things much easier if I can automatically generate my expense reports as I go rather than digging through a pile of receipts and scanning them in over the weekend. Computer Knowledge: Expert - Certified Microsoft Professional Computer: Dell Latitude w/ Intel i7, 8GB RAM and a solid state drive Internet Connection: Google Fiber 1GB Let's start with _how_ this product actually works. In order for it to actually do 95% of the features it claims to have, it MUST be able to access the Internet. After your image is scanned in, it sends it out to "the cloud" for processing and then sends a processed image back. Does it crop out all of the negative space around your receipt? Nope. Does it accurately recognize all the fields in the receipt? Nope. Sure, you can manually enter in all the data, but then what's the point of the product? Can you still scan in a receipt w/o an Internet connection? Sure, but the software won't be able to process it. What really kills this product is how slow the software is. That may be a subjective statement, but let me put it into perspective. I can manually scan in a receipt with my 8 year old HP scanner, crop out all the negative space and enter the data into Excel in LESS time than it takes the Neat scanner/software to process an image... again... so what's the point of keeping the product? I did have to call their technical support line because my registration process was failing due to an earlier attempt at using their software with my HP scanner (which I found out wasn't supported), before I actually purchased Neat's scanner combo. It's nearly impossible to actually reach a human, but after 20-30 minutes of being "on hold" I reached someone and they were able to eventually get things corrected on the back end. As a warning to others, YOU CAN'T USE THIS PRODUCT AT ALL UNLESS YOU REGISTER IT!!!! This requires an Internet connection, so if you're out on the road and for whatever reason don't have Internet access, you're in trouble. Ultimately, I ended up returning the scanner as it really didn't live up to the hype... or my expectations. I'm giving this product 2 starts, because it does "sorta" work... it just doesn't work very well. If you're a power user you're better off to buy a Fujitsu portable scanner and using it with Adobe Acrobat... if you really MUST scan everything in. Sure, it's more expensive, but time is money. For me, I ended up using Shoeboxed to take pictures of my receipts. They take care of all the manual data entry. The reports aren't as robust as I'd like, but it's 100x more functional than the Neat solution. I've made this review as objective as possible, hopefully someone else will find it useful. The Neat product may have value to someone, but it didn't add any business value for what I needed.