The Neat Company Forums

I have been using Neatworks for Windows for several months inside my Fusion VM for XP on my Mac. I decided I wanted a more seamless integration into my Mac so I decided to purchase the Mac version. I've got to say I'm fairly disappointed in the experience thus far, below are my reasons and requests:

1) Why pay for Mac version without a trade-in program or at least a TRIAL Version?!??!?

2) OCR performance on the Mac version seems to be significantly different and of less quality than the OCR on the windows version using the same NeatReceipts scanner.

3) It's not obvious why when I scan to my Inbox it can't figure out the different between a business card and a document. I can't seem to set it manually either!??!

4) The Review+File feature on the windows version is very nice in how it automatically helps you move from one new scanned item to the next. Why isn't there something like this on the Mac version??? The Inspector would be the perfect place for it!

5) When in the Inspector:

- Why can I not keep a default to Auto-Resize the image?

- Why does it not auto-crop all the black space around the image?

- Why can I not get rid of those boxes around the OCR guessed text in favor of selecting my own and then drag/drop to the field appropriate?

- Why can I not adjust the contrast/brightness of the image to help the OCR figure out the values better?

6) When a zipcode is detected, it would be favorable to do a sanity check on if the OCR city/state value matches a DB lookup of real zipcodes and their real city/state values.

7) Being able to associate common values (phone, address, url, fax, etc) with a company name would be a nice addition to do sanity checks against the OCR values for correctness.

I completely agree. My situation is slightly different. I've been using the Windows version for over a year or longer since my primary computers are Windows based.

When I bought my wife a brand new iMac (24 inch, Intel based, etc, etc), she said she would take over putting the receipts in. So, I e-mailed the company to find out if there was anyway I could transfer the license to a Mac version. After several days, I got a response informing me this was not possible and that I would have to purchase NeatWorks (I think it's 4.0, it's close to the newest version). My wife really wanted to do this, so I went ahead and payed the money to buy the NeatWorks software outright, even though I'd already invested a large amount in purchasing the Neatreceipts Software for Windows and the Scanner (in a bundle) when it was first available, so full original retail cost.

After getting the software, it looked nothing like the software I was used to using in Windows, which in a way was good because it was an older version and I had some dislike for the functionality in the older Windows version. Any how, it was expected the UI would be different, so, no big deal, however I couldn't find a simple way to import my data. After some (short) research, I found the utility on their web site to convert data from the Windows version to the Mac version (I don't think this is a 2-way conversion and obviously wouldn't be reliable to keep converting data back and forth anyways). After converting the data and importing it into the Mac version, everything seemed great, thought I was ready to go. Guess again.

 Turns out there are as you said, quite a few differences between the Windows version and the Mac version. I actually bought another Mac (Mac Mini) to be able to use the same software as my wife, along with my Windows machines, and so I ended up taking over the receipt scanning again, and the auto-crop and ocr are awful compared to the Windows version. I really hope they fix this soon. Every single receipt I scan in, I have to manually correct something, and I have to go in and crop it manually.

I really expected more after having to purchase a complete new copy of the software, a supposedly NEWER version that functions with lower standards than the older version I was using.