User Tips

determine the size of a scan

bryanrank — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 15:27:52 GMT

What is the best way to determine how large a particular scan is?

Thanks

Bryan

Change the date format used by NeatWorks

slessard — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 04:38:35 GMT

I noticed that in version 2.1.1 I can change the date format to something more to my liking. I changed it to display dates in a format similar to 04/01/2009. To do this use this command in Terminal.app

defaults write com.neatreceipts.nrm DateFormat %m/%d/%Y

I only tried this one format, but I suspect the available format options can be found at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/tividd/td/TWS/SC32-1275-02/en_US/HTML/msgmst231.htm

Problems with exports? Reinstall!

hunterhicks — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:38:56 GMT

I had many exporting problems- email, drag and drop, and the Export command.

I uninstalled, and reinstalled the program (does not effect your Library) and everything was fixed.

OCR issues

DrewM — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:36:38 GMT

I just installed NEAT for Mac, and am finding that even with very legible receipts, the "Vendor" field is ALWAYS blank once the scan finishes.

Is there a secret to optimizing the scanner or OCR software so that it can "read" the vendor information?

Finally, scanner calibration perfection

freebrian — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:45:16 GMT

Ok, after a whole lot of playing, I got my scanner calibrated to scan receipts, and have the paper turn out white (not blue gray) and NR more or less properly crops it.

When the scanner is calibrating, it seems to be doing 2 things:

A) figure out what the color white looks like
B) figure out how wide a standard size of paper is.

So, to do a proper calibaration, you have to trick process A and stick to process B exactly.

Instructions:

In a page layout or drawing program, open a new document, and draw a empty rectangle 8.65" tall x 5.125 wide, then add a borderless gray filled rectangle about 9" tall x 1.5" wide and set that rectangle so it overlays your first rectangle. push the top rectangle so there is about .67" of white from the lower rectangle's left side. the gray of the gray rectangle should be 3-10% grey (depends on how much your printer "darkens" colors when printing, you may have to play with this to find the right setting) and print it out using the "photo" setting. This makes smoother very very small dot colors. This should look like a solid color and not a bunch of dots when you print it out. Now use a paper cutter to cut this out. It should be the exact same size as the original calibration sheet. Stack them up to confirm, size is VERY important. Start NR, and calibrate, putting the new calibration sheet with the gray bar face down with the small amount of white and the gray bar in first. That's it. Now your scanner should scan receipts that have *gasp* white paper backgrounds.

Discussion:

NR uses the calibration to figure out what color is "white", if you put in something very light gray, it thinks that is white, so that when you scan in dirty recipts after that, the software thinks that the background is still lighter then what it thinks is white, and washes it all out to white. If you use too dark a shade of gray, your receipt scans will look very odd, almost pure black and white. The size of the sheet is also very important. idk why, but the calibration sheet is 1/8 inch larger then a standard size sheet of paper, and the software KNOWS it. When I tried calibrating with a standard sheet of paper, all of the auto crops would be dismal- large black blocks on the top or bottom of receipts. For whatever the resason, as it turn out _size_does_matter_ thus all the mucking about with a paper cutter matching the size of the caibration sheet.

This most likely will throw off the white point of the scanner and software, so if you are planning on scanning phtographs or other color documents, you should recalibrate with the factory supplied sheet prior to scanning them.

Anyway, now me and NR are much happier about the scan quality. :)

Prining for NR (Mac) not printing all the pages

cfwarde — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 20:53:53 GMT

The print feature seems to only print the first page scaned in. How do you print all the pages for the receipts in the over all print report?

What kinds of collections and libraries do you have?

jpronline — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:46:47 GMT

I'm always interested in hearing how others organize and with NeatReceipts it could really be helpful!

I've just started using this product and set up a Business Library and a Home library. In the home library I've got:

1. New Receipts (Default Receipts folder)

2. House Receipts

3. Baby Receipts

4. Donation Receipts

5. Wife's Receipts

6. My Receipts

I'm sure I'll tweak these as I go, but this is what I thought of off the top of my head when setting it up.

Decreasing File size of Scans

tomkozlek — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:03:26 GMT

When I got my Neat Receipts, I was psyched! I opened it up, installed the software and I was ready to go. I played around with the preferences and cranked up the "Image Optimization" all the way up. After all, I don't want pixelated receipts, right?!? Well, I've noticed that my receipt library is very large – for a color full page scan it can reach up to 20MB! So last week I decided to turn down the "Image Optimization" to half way. The results – B&W full page scans that were around 1-2MB and looked just as good as the much larger ones. Awesome, right?!? Just today, I started thinking, what if I turned it all the way down. I got full page color scans ~700Kb and full page B&W scans ~600KB. Once again, I was amazed at the quality of the scans from the lowest setting. I can zoom just as good as the larger files, so that a few letters takes up most of the screen. I think it would be extremely hard to tell any difference between the scans at the highest quality setting and lowest quality setting (other than the files size themself).

My recommendation to my fellow NR Mac users is to do a couple scans at various setting and see which one meets your level of satisfaction. If you want a time saving tip for doing this – just scan at the highest setting and the lowest setting. You'll be surprised, trust me!

Faster Scanning

Jenn — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:23:27 GMT

1. Select the collection you'd like to add the receipt or document to.

2. Place the paper face down, aligned to the right side of the scanner (picture below).

3. Press 'Scan'.

TIP: If you have a receipt that is shorter than 8.5" long, scan it sideways to save time. NeatReceipts auto-crops and auto-rotates images.