Neat Receipts Business Card Gadgetgirl Review

Organize your paper. Simplify your life. I was asked to review the NeatReceipts Neat Business Cards scanner by a friend Chandler Peterson, with Realty Technology Review. I’ve included a short video for you to see, be sure to check it out. 

I’m thinking Chandler must have known something about my “put off ’til tomorrow’ filing system to ask me to review this scanner.  This little gadget had my name all over it.  I have been collecting business cards for years now, more so since I began my Real Estate career in 2003.  I had always had good intent to index them and put them in my database, however it’s always been a matter of time and kept putting it off!  

For those of you that know me a bit better know that I love gadgets and own a few, OK — maybe a bit more than a few! 

This little beauty is a nifty little gadget and yet a powerful little guy too.  It’s so small and mobile that you can take it on the road with you tucked in the tiniest pocket of your briefcase or suitcase. The whole scanner weighs less than 4 ounces! That’s about a half a sandwich!

It’s the smallest color card scanner on the market.It scans directly into Outlook and ACT, and it’s small enough to not clutter up your desktop and yet small enough to bring along on your business trips.  You can stay organized as you go instead of having to face a stack of business cards or in my case a pile of 1000’s of them when you finally get the time.

Right out of the box, the Neat Business Cards scanner was pretty accurate with a range of business card styles, both scanning the text fields and then assigning them to the corresponding database fields. It even correctly distinguished telephone, fax, and other phone numbers printed in different styles (parens, dashes, periods), and identified with wildly different marks. I had a few fields it seemed confused with, but over the text was recognized and populated the fields pretty well.

Of course, the scanning is not perfect, and you should verify each card for mis-assigned fields (like phone extensions) and incorrect or missing letters or digits (i.e., at the end of a long number).

The software did struggle with some company information and business titles that were not clearly structured on the page — it still scanned the text as additional text, which then needed to be manually moved to the proper field. And there were some odd features that I could work around.

You also can export records from the Neat Business Cards database to RTF (Word), CSV (Excel), PDF, and other formats to print or share. 

I give this little ‘under $100′ gadget a thumbs up and just know it will come in handy to help you scan and organize your contacts and help you simplify your life.

Key Features

• Scan directly in Outlook
• Scan directly in ACT!
• Scan into Neat Business Cards database
• Use vCard, csv or Plaxo to export contact information to smartphones and other email applications
• Highly accurate card reader for US Cards
• Color scanning at 300 dpi
• Free travel case

What’s in the box
Neat Business Cards portable card scanner, software CD, USB cable, scanner travel case, user guide, one piece of calibration paper, one piece of cleaning paper