NEATConnect: Cloud Scanner + Digital Filing System (review)

Photo credit: Alan Wallace

Need an ultimate organizer? Alan Wallace reviews NEATConnect, a handy portable scanner that knows the difference between business cards, receipts and docs.

Photo credit: Alan Wallace

aNewDomain.net -Some companies introduce great products yet they never find a way to make the products better or to keep them up-to-date. Others get better in ways that you never imagined. That’s what I see from tech innovator The NEAT Company in its NEATConnect cloud scanner and digital filing system.

The NEAT Company first caught my eye in airport kiosks years ago. The company started with a handy portable NEAT Receipts scanner that you could take with you on the road. It got better when the company released its desktop scanner, a nice-looking, powerful compact scanner on my desk that knew the difference between business cards, receipts and docs. And it could extract and map the data where it needed to go. In fact, I have never been so organized on my expense reports since I started using this.

Editor: Scroll below the fold to see aNewDomain’s deep dive into NEAT tech from CES 2014.

With NEATConnect, NEAT takes it up one notch since it can be completely wireless and also looks great right next to the pile of mail stacked in my living room. Being able to take the scanner to the work instead of the work to the scanner is a really nice feature.

This compact ADF scanner lets you scan in color, grayscale or black and white. You can also scan two-sided documents in one pass. Options include selecting to separate or combine pages, scanning 15 business cards, 15 receipts and 15 documents before exceeding capacity. Need to scan up to 50 pages at one time? Remove the top separator from the front of the scanner and you are good to go.

Photo credit: Alan Wallace

Scanning on NEATConnect sends data straight to the cloud, or your computer via USB, or directly to its SD card slot. You can store data directly and access it anywhere with NEAT Cloud as well as Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote, email or FTP.

When scanning documents, you will see images displayed on the front of the scanner as images are processed. Wrinkled and misaligned documents process cleanly. Reports are easy to use and customize. The NEAT software will also import other NEAT cabinets, PDFs, images, VCards and Quicken accounts.

Additional support comes from the NEAT Mobile App (available in the Google Play and iOS App Stores). The software has intelligent text recognition and will separate contact data as well as receipt data such as totals and taxes. One cool feature is being able to store key words for easy search. I have one item for the wishlist: that the system can read the text in PDF files and extend this function even more.

Other features I would like to see include:

Personalizing contacts such as being able to use predefined contact maps to scan cards mapped for Exchange/Outlook, Apple Address Book, or Google Address Book.
Integrating auto upload of these contacts to your Apple or Google Address book would also be a very-helpful feature.
As I would like more ways of getting data into my NEATCloud, including the ability to scan document sets greater than 50 pages, I would like an additional app for the HPConnected printers where I am currently limited to competing solutions from Shoeboxed.

But these ideas do not lessen my interest or preference for this tool in any way. I just have a lot of paperwork and anything that makes my day easier interests me. To date, I have not found anything I like better or use more than the organization solutions from NEAT.

Here is my colleague, Todd Townsend, at the NEAT booth at ShowStoppers, the premier media event at CES 2014 this year.

For aNewDomain.net, I’m Alan Wallace.

Based in Seattle, Alan Wallace is a senior contributor and on our security team here at aNewDomain.net. He previously has worked as a London-based foreign correspondent for UPI. He also founded InterActive Agency, the first Internet-focused ad agency. Alan later joined Live365, where he served as a vice-president and oversaw its rise to the №1 Internet radio network spot. He has been a judge for the Codie Awards for nearly a decade. Got a question, comment or story idea for Alan? Email him at AWALL@anewdomain.net, or contact him at +Alan Wallace.